ABSTRACT
I have entitled my paper ‘Sweating it out’ because this patient had had as one of his symptoms profuse and offensively smelling sweating—really smelling of fear—and the last few months of the analysis he again sweated a few times on the couch. And those last months one could say he was really ‘sweating it out’. Freud once observed that at the end of the analysis patients sometimes revert temporarily to the early symptoms. This has not been frequently my experience. More often—and this was markedly the case with that patient—old themes are taken up. Anxieties are reawakened, defences of the past remobilized in sessions, but not necessarily resulting in the re-appearance of symptoms; as in this patient, termination was a time of working-through, sweating it out, at times with a great deal of pain. What he had to work through was the final facing of separateness and separation with all the attendant anxieties and depression. The patient had always been exceedingly sensitive to separation. In the early years of his analysis he was regularly physically ill before or during holidays.
