ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on psychotherapy research based brief therapies and little to longer-term treatments and the termination. An ending is perforce shaped by what comes before. Therapists and patients approach ending with preconceptions and fantasies what it means to separated. The beginning of the end of a successful therapy marked the establishment of a new relationship, or the renewal of an ailing one. Erikson's model of psychotherapy was of the adolescent 'moratorium', in a young person allows to wander and explore the world, temporarily free from the grip of social obligation. Ending entails a return to the pleasures and duties of social and biological necessity: employment, marriage, parenthood, responsibility. Dickens' first version ends with a fleeting meeting between the narrator-hero Pip and love, the cruel and inaccessible Estella, in the centre of London where Pip is escorting nephew, little Pip. The chapter further presents an attachment-based model of counter-transference in relation to the length of therapy.
