ABSTRACT

It may seem strange to arrive at this topic close to the end of a book on ending and termination of psychoanalysis. Thus far, my attention has been on the experience of the patient before, during, and after treatment. I have given some attention to why patients come to analysis but none so far to why analysts do. To round out the discussion of termination, which mostly has been about what we hope the patient will get and hold on to from treatment, let us consider now what the analyst gets out of the experience; after all, he repeatedly experiences ending analyses. What are, then, the analyst's rewards from analyzing, and what happens when analyzing is no longer rewarding?