ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with two propositions and entangle them with a view to saying something about the vexed question of endings in psychoanalysis, and about what, if anything, the issue of endings in psychoanalysis has to tell us about endings elsewhere. The first proposition is that it is impossible to know the consequences of one’s words—the spoken, the heard, and the overheard. The second proposition is—to adapt Valery’s famous remark about completing a poem—that an analysis is never finished, it is only abandoned. The chapter suggests that what are loosely called endings in analysis should often be called something else, but that a capacity for abandon, and the abandon that is abandonment, could be one of the things we might hope to get from psychoanalysis. Donald Winnicott seems to be saying, very good psychoanalytic stories—oedipal and pre-oedipal—about the hazards of desire, and the consequent necessities of conflict defence and symptomatology.
