ABSTRACT
A historical survey and statement of the problem In retrospect, we should have been more surprised than we were that Freud’s papers on technique never included one on termination. Had we idealized Freud less, we would have realized earlier that psychoanalytic technique lacks anything like a “royal road” toward termination. In the early days of psychoanalysis, there were only two kinds of terminations. Either the analysand interrupted the course of the analysis on his own – an act usually attributed to the analysand’s resistance – or the analyst at some unspecified date informed the analysand that the analysis was finished or coming to an end. How many analysands never finish their analysis, we do not know, but we do know that Dorothy Burlingham’s (1989) analysis with Sigmund Freud continued for many years, daily, until close to Freud’s death.
