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As a corrective to more prescribed and rigidified traditional notions of termination as a final end, tantamount to the death of a relationship, the contributors to Good Enough Endings present a myriad of illustrations of good-enough endings of analysis. Many such finished treatments depicted in this collection, like certain works of fiction, preserve possibilities for the future resumption of treatment and a variety of other options for post-termination contact. Good Enough Endings is founded on the explicit recognition that the model of mind to which one subscribes will ineluctably yield particular trends in technique and meaning-making.
As one might expect of a volume of relational writing, most of the contributors hail from New York, and many (including the editor Jill Salberg) are affiliated with the William Alanson White Institute and/or the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Several authors from the Boston area, two British analysts, and a Lacanian analyst from California are also included. The colorful authorial tableau invites one to question what specifically comprises a relational perspective. This book emphasizes that it includes a multiple self-state model, enactment, use of analyst self-disclosure, attention to symmetry/asymmetry between patient and analyst, and the assumption of co-constructed experience. More surprising is the refreshing inclusion and integration of other psychoanalytic theoretical viewpoints under the rubric of relational.
Ronald Britton's chapter includes a condensed and selective review of classical literature on termination, as well as a potent and pithy summary of Kleinian and post-Kleinian/Bionian theory. This literary and eloquent chapter is the lone contribution pointedly organized around the Klein–Bion lineage, though several others cite Winnicott at some length. Britton notes Klein's criteria for termination as linked with the achievement of firmly establishing and identifying with th