ABSTRACT
Termination: What a •at and one-dimensional word to capture such a rich, multidimensional, and deeply dif‰cult process. Termination is the moment at which patient and analyst sit together, poised, holding the disparate threads of a tapestry of meaning they have woven during the course of the treatment. This tapestry tells the story of how one life has engaged another life and how, in so doing, it has explicated its own unique synergy of historical moments, intense affect states, internal systems of meaning construction, and object relatedness. In many cases, the tapestry depicts a rather bold and epic narrative, the heroic story of a journey undertaken by two brave souls: A journey in which battles have been fought, some lost, some won; evil demons and wild beasts have been met and hopefully subdued; love affairs have been imagined, played out, and transformed; and moments of remarkable intimacy and vulnerability hereafter bind the souls of our two courageous travelers. This tapestry, the work of an intensive psychoanalysis, is living testament to what systems theorist Gregory Bateson (1973) described by saying, “It takes two…to know one.” (In essence, he was describing the wisdom that life is a hazardous journey, and, to survive intact and with self-awareness, we must travel together.) We know, as analysts who sit holding the threads of this fabric, that there comes a time when we must somehow ‰nish our tapestry, cutting the threads loose and binding the colors and textures and patterns together in a way that somehow manages to hold them all, preventing the escape of any errant thread that can unravel the whole and destroy what patient and analyst have worked so hard to create.*
It has always been of interest to me that Freud had little to say about the termination of a psychoanalysis. He never wrote a technical paper on the subject, and there are very few technical suggestions sprinkled throughout his other papers, even “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” Ferenczi, always an abundant source of rich and creative (if controversial) technical
clinical advice, did write a paper on termination that he presented to the tenth International Psychoanalytic Congress in 1927. In this paper, he stated simply, “The proper ending of an analysis is when neither the physician nor the patient puts an end to it, but when it dies of exhaustion, so to speak” (p. 85). Written from his particular historical context in the development of psychoanalytic thought, Ferenczi’s advice is predicated on the belief that because transference love is a fantasy, resolution of the transference will obviate the need for and dependency upon the treatment. It was not until 1955 that Edward Glover identi‰ed a “termination phase” of the psychoanalytic treatment and offered some technical recommendations for its handling. Even so, writing on the subject remained sparse until the early 1970s, three quarters of the way through the 100-year history of our ‰eld, a remarkable thing if you think about it.
