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When faced with termination of patients—thinking about the ending of analyses—clinicians are likely informed by classes, workshops, anecdotes of colleagues, and literature that have addressed the topic. These professional sources contribute to commonly held standards of practice, often referred to as “criteria” for termination, which clinicians rely upon to measure and feel more secure about their work. Judy Leopold Kantrowitz suggests that traditional and widely accepted standards of termination are based upon myths.
In Myths of Termination: What Patients Can Teach Psychoanalysts About Endings, Kantrowitz makes the case that criteria for termination originated out of clinicians’ anecdotal experiences with their own patients that were shared with other professionals and, over time, transformed into idealized clinical goals. The goals have been passed along through generations of psychoanalytic training institutes and other psychodynamic learning venues. However, they did not and have not taken into account the uniquely different experiences of patients when ending their analyses. The focus of Kantrowitz’ book is on the predicament for clinicians and patients in treatment that, while analysts seek to feel more secure about their work and informed in psychoanalytic learning, endings of analyses are not as predictable as traditional theory has ordained.
Kantrowitz conducted a study of phone interviews with 82 former analysands and her book is based upon the participants’ memories of terminations of their analyses as well as their post-analytic experiences. Kantrowitz emphasizes the importance of learning from the patient's experience in light of the fact that psychoanalytic theory has developed primarily out of analysts’ clinical experience. She specifies in her introduction that hers is the only study she knows of that examines the experiences of analysands who are non-clinicians; her participants consisted of 64 clinicians and 18 “lay” analysands. She makes the point t