ABSTRACT
It is never easy to say good-bye, to end a relationship, or to leave someone you care about and feel connected to.*We start treatment with patients, each of us knowing that at some point this will come to an end. Despite this knowledge, both parties become engaged and, if things go well, deeply attached. What we ask of patients and of ourselves is not easy. The kind of attachment that is needed for the analytic work to be most effective is a thick, saturated kind of attachment with both known and yet to be discovered affective experience. By this I mean a form of loving connection whereby our mutual defenses start to ease away and the unconscious ways in which people engage each other begin to take the foreground. In such a holding type of transitional space, much work can occur. Without it, many ideas can be learned, but the potential for deeper affective experience may not emerge. How do we, patients and analysts, take leave of one another when we have developed such unprecedented closeness and richness of experience? Patients may fear ever replacing this closeness with others in their lives and so the loss feels too great. As analysts,† we too may resist losing the closeness to our patients but additionally we wonder, did we do enough, have things suf‰ciently changed for this person so that they can now carry on the work themselves? This is what Bergmann (1997) refers to as, “[replacing] the analyst by self-analysis and continue [ing] his/[her] inner development after termination” (p. 171). As a consequence, I believe ending treatment can create for many patients and for us a kind of crisisthe crisis of having to end and say good-bye. At that moment, we and the patient may wish for time to stand still, for things to not change while they are changing (Bromberg, 1998).
