ABSTRACT
In analyses that have been ongoing concerns, initial discussions of termination often stimulate shifts in the patient’s perspectives regarding the therapeutic work and the relationship between patient and analyst. The illusory, more open-ended canvas for expanding curiosity engendered by the analysis will soon be temporally framed, even if patient and analyst know that this ending can always be renegotiated at a later date. The patient’s growth during analysis may also move from foreground to background as the patient’s and analyst’s limitations in promoting growth may move from background to foreground. In this paper, I am most interested in how the process of ending analytical work provides a context for exploring previously unworkedthrough and unexplored parts of interaction and experience.*
Many analyses, including those that are highly productive, end at points at which the patient and analyst have run out of emotional and imaginative resources to take analysis to a further level of understanding. As Ferenczi (1927) put it: “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” (p. 80). Some patients have been able to do enough productive work to place them in good stead in life and others return to us or someone else for more analysis at a later date. For still another group of analytic dyads, the decision to terminate seems to facilitate renewed levels of work and commitment to resolve forms of impasse. In any relationship there are multiple meanings when one person or both say that they are going to end the relationship. In the case of analysis, we hope that this is because the patient feels that he or she has been able to get what he or she wanted, or close enough to what he or she wanted. There are also relationships in which when one person says “let’s stop,” he or she is actually tendering an invitation not to stop but to try to be together in a different way: “Let’s stop if we can’t do something or understand something in a different way.”
