ABSTRACT

The first non-mutual ending reported in the literature was Freud's presenting a termination date to the Wolf man, with the intention that an awareness of the finiteness of time would overcome his resistances and end the stalemate. For many decades, there seemed to be an assumption in the literature that it was the analyst's responsibility to decide when to bring an analysis to a close. Hurn and Brenner believed it was the analyst's job not only to initiate termination but to impose it. And their view seemed to prevail in Firestein's survey on termination, which indicated that a large number of the analysts initiated the ending of treatment. These results are not so remarkable since the analysts in his survey came from the same analytic community as Brenner, who was a central and influential teacher and analyst at the time. Here is evidence of the effect of teaching.