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One of the major conceptual barriers to planned follow-up studies in psycho-analysis—and, by extension (though not as strongly), in psychodynamic or psychoanalytic psychotherapies—has been the conception of the centrality to the proper termination process of the most thorough resolution possible of the complexity of transference ties and attachments, in all of their positive and negative affective colorations. It has been an implicit tenet of this perspective that planning in advance for contact after treatment termination could exert a powerful, unconscious delaying current upon the full acceptance of the actuality of the terminating treatment relationship; could impinge upon the proper termination mourning process for the closely intimate relationship being given up; and thus in various ways could delay, distort, or even (in extreme instances) preclude proper treatment termination. It is a reflection of such thinking that some of the earliest and best-known follow-up accounts in the psychoanalytic literature have been either instances where the follow-up data have come out of the continuing therapeutic observation of the same patient by successive analysts, as with Freud's famous Wolf Man (Gardiner, 1971), or happenstance instances of renewed contact with an ex-patient many years after the treatment termination (Deutsch, 1959). This whole issue has already been discussed in more detail in Section II (see Chapter 6, pp. 93-97). Here I want to present our data on two closely related aspects of this issue of both the place and the propriety of formal follow-up study of intensive psychoanalytic treatments. The first is that of the actual impact of such study in relation to possible delaying of psychological closure or “real termination.” The second is that of the deliberate (or unconscious) use of the built-in follow-up inquiry as a face-saving mechanism for getting back into more treatment, or, if not fully that, for explicitly discussing the appropriateness of such