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In her recently published volume, Forced Endings in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Attachment and Loss in Retirement, Anne Power explores the complex issues which arise when psychodynamic psychotherapists initiate termination of treatment based on their own needs, rather than those of their patients. She believes that psychoanalytic psychotherapies are established on the basis of a contract, whether implicit or explicit, in which the therapist commits to be available as long as the patient needs him. A forced ending, which is by definition based on the therapist's, rather than the patient's needs, is in essence a violation of that contract and thus, on some level, always represents a betrayal of the patient's trust in the therapist (see Dewald, 1965, 1966; Kaplan, Weiss, Harris, & Dick, 1994; Levin, 1998). This has been discussed by others in recent years, who have emphasized not only that forced termination in general constitutes a traumatic assault on the treatment process, but also that a freely chosen decision to retire, when not driven by external circumstances such as death or serious illness, is an even greater betrayal precisely because the therapist is voluntarily choosing to put his or her needs above those of the patient (Martinez, 1989; Siebold, 1991, 2007).
Given the impact of this betrayal of our contract with the patient, Power's research is in essence a response to the challenge of how we can maximize therapeutic growth and minimize the long-term detrimental effects of our retirement on our patients. Given that she has been trained in and practices on the basis of attachment theory, she has developed a longstanding interest in applying the principles of attachment theory to the phenomenon of forced terminations, both those that are temporary, such as therapist illness or pregnancy, and those that are permanent, such as retirement and death. In fact, many of the themes she develops in this book were foreshadowed in an earlier publication, written in