ABSTRACT
The patients’ anger towards the analyst often starts building in late spring. While her or his departure definitely feels like an emotional onslaught, it has the compensation of helping the analyst connect the coming “desertion” with the threats of separation they experienced in early childhood. The ecstatic happiness of early childhood is increasingly shadowed, and sometimes even eclipsed, by the separations and losses that maturation and individuation require, as these losses threaten to leave the patient/child parentless and alone in the universe. During the termination phase of a successful analysis, regressive narcissistic transference burgeons for all patients. In a training analysis, the “success” mainly consists of the analytic candidate’s gaining conviction, through personal experience, about the power and potential effectiveness of the analytic process. Past the middle years, aging means contending with an increasing burden of separations: deaths and other terrible losses of dear friends and relatives, especially of older family members who, psychologically, stand between oneself and death.
