ABSTRACT
Freud had written some early papers on technique, the question of termination was first raised in a monograph by Ferenczi and Rank, The Development of Psychoanalysis. Hoffman sees ending as 'a matter of reaching a point where it seems desirable to end, to absorb the pain of real loss, in order to get that much better, in order to take what is mutually understood to be that further developmental step'. He also argues the importance of the existential aspect of our own mortality and that avoidance of termination issues is a kind of grandiose maneuver to evade the issue of death-the analyst's or the patient's. Davies believes that the complex intersubjective matrix of loving and hating feelings, of vulnerabilities and anxieties, as well as the analyst's and the patient's defensive positions reemerge during this phase, along with the transformations that the analytic work has fostered.
