ABSTRACT
"Analysis Terminable and Interminable" is a work which several generations of psychoanalysts have found engrossing, puzzling, rich in ideas as well as disturbing because of its apparent pessimism. The paper was written after Freud had endured decades of suffering with cancer of the jaw and had undergone many operations. He had witnessed the rise of Nazism and was aware of the imminence of world war. He had also experienced the extraordinary success of psychoanalysis as a movement of thought in the Western world, and his ideas had triumphed over those of his detractors and competitors. Freud, however, never acknowledged this victory, maintaining that civilization, by its nature, could not be friendly to him and his ideas. In 1936, as he was being deluged with birthday congratulations and honors on his eightieth birthday, we wrote to Marie Bonaparte, "I am not easily deceived, and I know that the attitude of the world towards me and my work is really no friendlier than twenty years ago. Nor do I any longer wish for any change in it, no 'happy end' as in the cinema" (Jones 1957).
