ABSTRACT
Freud’s last words on the status and ef‰cacy of psychoanalysis in his 1937 seminal paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” still ring true today and raise profound questions with which we continue to struggle. Near the end of his life, Freud was deeply troubled by the turn psychoanalysis had taken among some of its practitioners. On one hand, there were those analysts who-like many patients-complained that psychoanalysis was a “time-consuming business,” and advocated for ways to shorten the duration of analysis. Prominent among those appealing for a shorter “cure” was Otto Rank, who had immigrated to the United States and had suggested that if the primal trauma of the act of birth could be dealt with in a short “subsequent” analysis, “the whole neurosis would be got rid of” (1937, p. 216). Freud did not feel very friendly about suggestions of abbreviating the thorough work of analysis and reasoned that although Rank’s argument was “bold and ingenious,” it was nonetheless the product of its time, “conceived under the stress of the contrast between the postwar misery of Europe and the ‘prosperity’ of America, and designed to adapt to the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life” (p. 216).
