Chapter 9 The Termination Phase in Psychoanalysis: A Self Psychology Study

The self psychology view of the termination of analysis, as Kohut articulated (1977), stresses that a recovery of the self, a “functional rehabilitation” in Kohut's terms, comprises that stage when the analyzed self has “become firm, when it has ceased to react to the loss of self objects with fragmentation, serious enfeeblement, or uncontrollable rage” (p. 138). Kohut later added that the endpoint of an analysis was reached when the patient is enabled to seek out and invest in appropriate self-objects for the sustenance–from mature selfobjects–required from time to time of the now-cohesive self (1984).

From the classical psychoanalytic view, there is consensus that although symptom removal is an important criterion of termination-readiness, it is an unreliable criterion as an indicator of genuine intrapsychic change (Firestein, 1973). Most analytic observers agree that for the patient to be considered ready for termination of the analysis, the patient's symptoms of psychic distress be traced to genetic conflicts in which the oedipal neurosis has been identified and the infantile amnesia uncovered. Further changes would indicate that object relations have proceeded to more mature levels along with psychosexual functioning, the latter attaining full genitality. In this same connection, penis envy and castration anxiety are expected to be mastered. The ego changes would include the attainment of maximum secondary autonomy but also the ability to tolerate delay, experience pleasure without guilt, lessen acting out, have an increase in the strength of sublimations, and accomplish the shift from autoplastic to alloplastic conflict solutions. Although