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Endings
Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies

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Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies (CPS) is an international scholarly

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Endings
On Termination in Psychoanalysis
Fausta Ferraro and Alessandro Garella
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover photo: Fedegrafo
Cover Design: Studio Pollmann
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ISBN: 978-90-420-2625-4
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Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Foreword vii
Introduction ix
Part One A Century-Long History
One The Beginnings: Freud, Ferenczi and Analysis Terminable and

Interminable
1. Antecedents 1
2. A Long-Distance Dialogue with Ferenczi 11
Two After Freud: The Theme of Termination in the Mid-1900s

1. The First Reactions:
M. Schmideberg, O. Fenichel and E. Glover 27
2. The Resumption of the Debate in the Postwar Years 31
2.1 The English Panel 32
2.2 The American Panel 38
2.3 The French Symposia 39
Three Theoretical Developments and Modern Orientations

1. European Psychoanalysis 43
2. American Psychoanalysis 50
3. Directions in the Research 62
4. Final Reflections 68
Part Two Process and Event in the Termination of Analysis
Four The Psychoanalytic Process 71
Five The Termination Process 87
Six The Termination of Analysis as a Psychoanalytic Event

1. The Concept of Psychoanalytic Event 95
1.1 Direction 98
1.2 Communication 99
1.3 Temporality 101
2. A Typological Reflection 106
3. Conclusions 115
Part Three A Third Time for Termination: The Liminal
Seven The Liminal

1. Introduction 119
2. The Liminal 122
3. Liminality and Transitionality 131
Eight Forms of Time

1. Nachträglichkeit and Liminality 135
2. The Liminal at Work 142
3. A Final Hurdle: Setting the Date 147
Nine A Map of Termination

1. In Praise of Incompleteness 159
2. Maps for a Geography of Termination 161
2.1 Interrupted Analyses,
or “On Awakening from a Nightmare
and the Impossibility of Dreaming” 165
2.2. Temporality at Work in Intermittent Analyses 169
2.3 Interruption: A Time of Urgency 172
2.4 Interruption as a Figure of Interminability 177
2.5 Impasse: The Negative of Interruption? 182
Ending 187
References 189
Foreword
The hyphen that breaks through and divides the one-word, original
Italian title of this book makes for a wordplay of sorts. For to translate In-fine
into English a person would need to privilege one of at least two readings of
the title. Infine, in point of fact, means both “ultimately” and “in the end”.
The word end, in turn, in English as in the Italian fine, itself evokes two
signifieds: end as aim or goal, and as termination point, or finish line. It
strikes me as curious that where the Italian term is concerned, it's the gender
of the definite article that specifies its meaning: the masculine il fine denoting
orientation of intent, whereas the feminine la fine bears the hallmark of
finality. Woman as omega, and not only alpha. The grave as womb, death as
the ultimate passage.
What's all this have to do with termination in analysis? In their far-

reaching excursus, both historical and philosophical, Ferraro and Garella
introduce and amplify – for the purpose of its integration into the
psychoanalytic literature (and hence, one would hope, into the mindsets of
analysts everywhere) – the anthropological concept of liminality, borrowed
from the century-old researches of Van Gennep later elaborated by Victor
Turner. Aside from contrasting it with the more familiar Winnicottian notions
of transitional and potential space(s), the authors unfold the concept in such a
way as to bring it fruitfully to bear on the multiple dimensions of the time of
termination. Indeed, the margin that marks the event and process that is the
ending of every analysis so reverberates with echoes of myth and history,
with evocations of ritual and narrative, that the life-within-a-life that is every
psychoanalysis gets invariably reconfigured as it expires: not only along
upended axes of space-and-time, but along twirled, novel coordinates of
biography-and-fantasy, soul-and-mind, unconscious-and-memory…
Atop the doorway that marks the passage into my consulting room is a
black-and-white photograph of a footbridge whose wooden slats extend
infinitely across and into what looks like a sea of wheat, under a low horizon
of menacing clouds. It is accompanied by some lines by the famed Spanish
poet Antonio Machado, which read:
In between living and dreaming

there’s a third dimension.
Guess what it is.1
viii ENDINGS: ON TERMINATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
For the longest time, my own association to the image and the caption –
which was also my own way of making sense of the riddle – had to do with
one of my favourite childhood movies, The Wizard of Oz, and the dazzling,
dizzying spaces inhabited by Dorothy and her cohorts: spaces somewhere
along the yellow-brick road, between the twister-threatened fields of Kansas
and the emerald gates and towers of Oz. In preparing to write this little note
to Ferraro and Garella’s wonderful book, I decided to research Machado's
original poem. In so doing, I learned that the poet had penned an earlier
version of the above-cited fragment no. 5 of his 1919 Proverbios y cantares:
In between living and dreaming

comes what's most important.
Not until had I read In-fine did I really get what Machado had intuited,
about that “third dimension”. And now that I have a better sense, I think I
also know why the photograph hangs where it does, marking the exit of every
patient from every session hour spent in my company. Marking the passage
away from the couch. An intimation, ultimately, of the end that's always in
the air.
Anthony Molino
Notes
1
The original Spanish reads:
Entre el vivir y el sonar
hay una tercera cosa.
Adivinala.
Introduction
This book is the point of arrival of a long journey, one filled with
stopovers and vicissitudes that we will seek to trace in its pages. It gives
special emphasis to the perspective that inspired its approach, as if it were a
compass in a voyage that, as it proceeded, saw its destination becoming
increasingly unknown and remote. The writing of this book developed from
an inner necessity to place a momentary end to an investigation which is
virtually infinite; presumably, we will continue to pursue it in the coming
years, but at this point an attempt at systemization and historicizing was
necessary.
For this reason, the first part was conceived as an accurate and detailed
account of the first steps of our route, which started with a reexamination of
the psychoanalytic literature on the theme of termination of analysis. We feel
that this first part can serve a double function by connecting markedly
subjective elements that are nonetheless welded to more objectively-based
themes of interest. Indeed, in its (final) expositive form, this part resembles a
careful bibliographic survey suited to palates that have a taste for
systematizing and potentially exhaustive research, though it in point of fact
this image is not entirely true1. This type of survey runs a high risk of boring
the reader, but for the authors it forms an initial shoal and terra firma that are
necessary and preliminary to venturing out on one’s own route. The
deliberate use of these contrasting images - the obscure depths of the shoal
and the clarity of terra firma - expresses our conviction that, as Winnicott
(1967) states, we innovate in tradition: we latch onto the attempts at thinking
of those who preceded us, and in this journey backwards, paradoxically, we
sometimes find lines and suggestions lying on the bottom of an intricate mass
of elements; they are brought to the surface with a gaze that recognizes them
as preexisting in the very moment it sets about reinventing them, impressing
them with one’s own personal mark.
From the first part’s comprehensive vision we gain a sense of how
complex and articulated the debate has been on this theme, which we
nonetheless continue to think is in some way the object of a peculiar
reluctance. There is probably a gap between the richness and complexity of
experience, preferentially entrusted to oral communication, and its translation
in less informal intentions of systematic reworking and writing. At a meeting
at the Centro Napoletano di Psicoanalisi, Gilda de Simone proposed the
hypothesis that this sort of reluctance might regard the impossibility of
treating this theme without displaying - in a sort of inevitable self-revelation -
one’s own style of work, which at the point of its final precipitation is
necessarily connected to a vision of the psychoanalytic process and its goals.
x ENDINGS: ON TERMINATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
The object of this book is thus marked by an apparent marginality, which it

moreover shares with other aspects of psychoanalysis (Balsamo et al. 1998).
From this point of view, we feel that the theme of the end of analysis
appears to be an elective object of study, in Winnicott’s sense (1990: 175)
that “analytic research is the collective experience of analysts”, an object in
which the clinical accumulation, bolstered and made intelligible by the
theoretical framework, can serve as a broad terrain for logical and stimulating
comparison between different forms of practice. In keeping with this aim, the
second and third parts document the effort to develop conceptual instruments
which seek to sharpen the capacity of detecting what has been defined by
some, if in an excessively drastic manner, as the most important and difficult
act of interpretation in analysis: the opening up of a prospect for termination.
The heart of the second part in particular is the concept of the “termination
event”, proposed as a model of investigation with a dual function: unfolding
heuristic possibilities both in the direction of the process which has taken
place, and in that which will continue to take place – the so-called post-
analysis developments. Finally, the third part follows in the tracks of others
with regard to temporality as a crucial parameter of termination. Here, we
elaborate the hypothesis of a liminal dimension whose centrality, which is
strictly intertwined with Nachträglichkeit (deferred action)2, allows for an
orientation in the dense forest of termination outcomes; this yields
possibilities for penetration which, far from aspiring to definitive status,
unveil the subtle and variegated fabric of scenarios woven by the
inexhaustibility of the unconscious.
Notes
1
A more systematic and complete survey of the literature on the theme of termination
of analysis may be found in two monographic issues of the Rivista di Psicologia
Analitica (1992 and 1999), entitled La conclusione dell’analisi and L’istanza del
finire.
2
(Transl. note) The authors state that they prefer to use the term Nachträglichkeit
throughout the text, as they believe that the common English rendering “deferred
action” does not suitably correspond to the original Freudian term.
Part One – A Century-Long History
One
The Beginnings: Freud, Ferenczi and Analysis Terminable and

Interminable
1. Antecedents
The historical exposition we intend to offer is neither pedantically

meticulous nor objective; it draws its impetus from the desire to understand
the complexity of the roots of our central question - the termination of
analysis - and to locate sources, precursors, frameworks and conflicts over
the issue which precede and support the ideas we intend to express in this
book. The organization of the material collected focuses on two fundamental
points: first, the conviction of the centrality of Analysis Terminable and
Interminable (Freud 1937a, henceforth A.T.I.) in every discussion on the
termination of analysis, hence the decision to mark it as a watershed between
a before and an after in the historical reconstruction. The second point is that
we believe that Freud’s essay itself can be best understood if we
contextualize it in the climate of the period of its writing: in this way, it can
be read as an expression of the intersection of rational factors (the debate
over metapsychology), clinical factors (the question of psychoanalytic
treatment in relation to the growth of clinical experience) and relational
factors (affective relations within the psychoanalytic movement). In
particular we believe that the complex, ambivalent but enduring relationship
between Freud and Ferenczi – who was, according to Freud, the “older
brother” of all of the psychoanalysts of the period, but never a favorite son -
also represented a confrontation between emotional and theoretical positions
as to what psychoanalysis is and should be, and more specifically, over the
possible conceptions of the psychoanalytic process, its aims and its
termination.
A guide for this historical excursus was provided by O. Fenichel
(1941), who states that in the history of psychoanalysis, the debate over
analytical technique and its relation to theory has oscillated continuously
between a sort of Scylla and Charybdis: an excess of words and an excess of
sentiment. The first extreme concisely represents those who in various ways
seek above all to frame psychoanalytic knowledge in theory, systematize it in
technique and transmit it (by training). The opposite extreme represents the
2 ENDINGS: ON TERMINATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
position of those who privilege “lived experience”, the “present”

psychoanalytic context, mistrusting the use of hypotheses and theory in
general, unless it is indirect and guided by clinical experience. In proposing
this dualism, undoubtedly expressed with inappropriate and reductive
terminology, Fenichel surely had in mind the concerns introduced by
Ferenczi. The latter’s efforts were aimed, like those of the entire
psychoanalytic community, at evaluating the impact of the new Freudian
concepts on technique.
With the historical perspective thus framed, we felt it necessary to look
back to the decade preceding the publication of Freud’s article, that is, the
1920s. In effect, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the question
of the termination of analysis was nowhere to be found in theoretical and
clinical reflection, except in an implicit way. Termination was something
which was supposed to arise from the fundamental axioms of psychoanalytic
work as an inevitable consequence. First the recovery of traumatic memories,
with its abreactive meaning, and then the focus on repression and
transference, with the function of inducing topographical-dynamic
modification in the patient: these constituted objectives which in large
measure made the idea of achieving a cure of the neurosis congruent with
that of the termination of analysis.
With the introduction of the second topography in The Ego and the Id
(Freud 1923), the concept of resistance took on greater force; the dynamic
aim of analysis, “to abolish resistances”, required a theoretical and technical
probing of transference and a reevaluation of the analyst’s role in therapy.
The psychoanalytic process began to be investigated in relation to therapeutic
aims and models of the development and normalcy of the ego. The growth of
clinical experience with patients who increasingly presented problems of
personality and psychotic disorders (what we could call today “borderline”),
rather than neurosis, posed questions of how to handle the analytic situation
and prompted the development of additional theoretical frameworks. It was
precisely in this period that Ferenczi’s works on the subject appeared, and at
the same time a broad debate over psychoanalytic technique got underway
regarding the factors and concepts of cure in psychoanalysis, as well as the
relationship between psychoanalytic technique and theory, even in terms of
professional psychoanalytic training. The 1920s witnessed a remarkable and
creative examination of psychoanalytic technique in which the presence of
Ferenczi was fundamental, in terms of both his theoretical proposals and his
influence on other psychoanalysts, disciples and non-disciples alike (from M.
Klein and W. Reich to Balint).
Published in 1924, Ferenczi and Rank’s The Development of
Psychoanalysis sought to gauge the situation, making an appeal to the need
for bringing the medical-therapeutic aspect up to the same level as the
theoretical-scientific one, the former having been the initial, original situation
and the stimulus for the theory as a whole. On the basis of an essay by Freud,
The Beginnings: Freud, Ferenczi and A.T.I 3
Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through (Freud 1914a), the authors

claimed that it is not sufficient to recall or recuperate memories, but it is also
necessary to recuperate, in the form of a current memory, what is repeated or
reproduced. This yielded a certain theoretical legitimacy of the so-called
“active technique” aimed at favoring the triggering of transference by
facilitating the element of repetition. This aspect of active technique led to a
reaffirmation of the importance of transference, and so in this sense it was
strongly Freudian. It also had the objective of increasing inner tensions and
the struggling against “habits”, these being hidden libido discharges, thus
displaying an effort to connect the energetic-dynamic drive discourse to the
topographical one. Ferenczi and Rank provide a list of eight technical
methods they considered incorrect, in that they were superseded or contrasted
with the period’s conceptions regarding psychoanalytic therapy. Among the
most important of these is interpretive fanaticism, defined as the consequence
of a too rigid and literal use of the interpretive instrument, with the
privileging of single associations and their translation according to fixed
rules. This leads the analyst to lose sight of the context of associations and
the sense of the patient’s analytic situation, causing a loss or underestimation
of the analytical “lived experience”. As for the symptoms, the authors note
the importance of “top-down” analysis, that is, one which proceeds with
recuperating memories from the surface to the depths, respecting the patient’s
ego and keeping in mind the resistances it opposes, without trying to
overcome them as in hypnosis. Ferenczi and Rank emphasize the priority of
lived experience as an individual, present and contextual aspect of the
unconscious: in order to be lived affectively in the current psychoanalytic
situation, the past and the repressed must find representation in the present
and in the conscious (preconscious). With regard to therapy’s results, the
authors note that the essential fact of psychoanalytic treatment lies in the
resolution or detachment of infantile libido from its fixation with primitive
objects: the aim of the analytic therapeutic method is to live the Oedipal
relation completely in the analytic relationship in order to lead to a new and
more advantageous situation. Ferenczi and Rank also treat the subject of
termination by proposing to regulate the length of analysis, setting precise
temporal limits in those cases in which a patient expresses a resistance strong
enough to prolong analysis indefinitely.
Freud’s initial reaction was positive: “There are some wonderful
discoveries,” he wrote to Ferenczi on June 1, 1924. But the subsequent
publication of Rank’s book on birth trauma chilled his enthusiasm and
initiated a long phase of conflict which saw Ferenzci against Freud, on the
one hand, and on the other, Ferenczi against other exponents of the
psychoanalytic group, in particular Abraham (Stanton 1990). At the Congress
of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Salzburg, a
symposium was held on the subject of Ferenczi and Rank’s book; among
those participating were Radó (1925), Sachs (1925) and Alexander (1925). A
unifying feature of their papers was the interstructural question, that is, the
relationship between id, ego and superego, with particular attention to the
function of the analyst, especially with regard to the recent publication of The
Ego and the Id. In Alexander’s paper, which later became a classic, the
psychoanalytic process (the “curative process”, in Alexander’s expression)
and the modifications which take place in it are observed by focusing on the
dynamics of the analyst’s role within relations among the agencies and
especially in relation to the superego (Wallerstein 1965). A cure is obtained
by overcoming resistances and the ego’s assumption of the functions of
superego, and the “dissolution of the super-ego is and will continue to be the
task of all future psychoanalytic therapy” (Alexander 1925, p. 32). Some of
the speakers at the Congress, like M. Klein and W. Reich, developed the
discussion of analytical technique further; they made additions to Ferenczi’s
paper, respectively, regarding the proposal to modify psychoanalytical
technique in children and the positive evaluation of active intervention in the
analysis of character.
In 1925, too, Ferenczi addressed the question of the end of analysis -
perhaps for the first time in such a clear way - in his essay Psycho-analysis of
Sexual Habits, in a section entitled “The Process of Weaning from Psycho-
Analysis.” In it, in agreement with Rank, he defines the period of termination
as one of the most important and significant moments of the entire therapy.
With regard to the criterion for deciding the end of therapy on the analyst’s
part, Ferenczi supports Freud’s position in the case of the Wolf Man, but with
a number of specifications which suggest a rather substantial divergence.
Indeed, he claims it is necessary to satisfy a preliminary list of questions:
these regard the general validity of the rule, the existence of precise
indications that dismissing the patient would be appropriate, and the criteria
to be followed if the announcement of termination provokes a worsening of
the patient’s condition. According to Ferenczi, the psychoanalyst must keep
the general situation in mind, never ending the analysis when it is the patient
that asks to do so; if the announcement of the end of analysis turns out to be a
mistake, he must backtrack and admit the error. The Freudian criterion thus
gets quite restricted in its application, and certainly cast in doubt on a
technical level. Ferenczi adopted the criterion of waiting “until the
impossibility of obtaining real gratification through the analytic situation,
together with the attraction of external reality, overcame a transference-
relation the value of which was gradually depreciating” (Ferenczi 1926: 296).
For some cases, Ferenzci proposes a two-stage ending: first, a reference to
the possibility of termination, and then the announcement of a date. He also
alludes to the appearance of dreams and transitory symptoms which can be
interpreted as Rankian birth fantasies; these are not, however, not attributable
to “birth trauma”, but rather to a “…regression in phantasy from the Oedipus-
conflict to the birth-experience; the latter having been already overcome is,
relatively speaking, the less painful of the two” (ibid). In more theoretical
terms, the analyst must not impose his own ideals on the patient: if the
patient’s ego manages to mediate between superego, id and reality, the
analysis can be considered terminated.
The same year, Ferenczi reconfirmed his ideas in Contra-indications to
the “Active” Psycho-Analytical Technique (Ferenczi 1925b), a paper given at
the Ninth International Congress of the IPA at Bad Homburg. Here, though
accepting criticisms of his active technique, he implicitly challenged Freud’s
“heroic” measures, rejecting the idea and practice of the imposition of a
temporal limit on analysis. In 1927, at the Tenth International Congress of
Psychoanalysis in Innsbruck, Ferenczi presented The Problem of the
Termination of the Analysis, the culmination of his reflection on the subject
of therapy and the end of analysis. In this work, Ferenczi claims that the
discovery of fantasy is not sufficient to guarantee a cure, in that it requires “a
reconstruction, in the sense of a rigid separation of reality and fantasy”
(Ferenczi 1955 [1927]: 79), and advances the idea of termination by
“exhaustion”. This idea motivates his conviction that the analysis can be
brought to a “natural” resolution, and therefore not consist of an interminable
process. It also stimulated his attention to dynamics peculiar to the final
phase - the so-called “weaning” phase defined as one of the most important
and significant in the entire treatment. Ferenczi supports his view through a
reconsideration of a series of psychoanalytic (and Freudian) cornerstones. For
example, he describes the need for free association as an ideal: when
completely satisfied, the analysis would be terminated. On the other hand, he
emphasizes the importance of the temporal factor: a complete analysis entails
an infinite period of time. In reality, for Ferenczi the adjective infinite stands
for indeterminate (the patient’s decision to not pay attention to the absolute
duration of the analysis, not interrupting it for the necessary period of time).
The correct termination of analysis is one by “exhaustion”: the patient
detaches himself from the analyst little by little, to the extent that he realizes
that he is actually gaining only satisfaction from it and nothing more, and he
is able to get over the mourning provoked by the comprehension of this fact.
As the termination approaches, a transformation of symptoms takes place.
Ferenczi concludes that the analysis “… is not an endless process, but one
which can be brought to a natural end…” (ibid: 86). The fact that completed
analyses up to that point were still few was an obstacle which for Ferenczi
could be obviated with the improvement of theory and the analyst’s inner
knowledge.
Further, Ferenczi’s interest in the preconditions by which an analysis
could be deemed complete underscores the importance of a wide-ranging
study of character traits which utilizes all of the patient’s expressions, as well
as gesture and postural peculiarities, and it requires the unmasking of hidden
mistrust of the analyst. For Ferenczi, in effect, there is no analysis of the
symptoms which is not also an analysis of character. As a complement to
this, Ferenczi emphasizes the importance of “tact” on the analyst’s part (a
particular attitude of the analyst toward the patient), as the expression of an

attention to counter-transference, and he believes that training analysis must
be a “totally terminated” analysis, deeper than therapeutic analysis.
With regard to the analytic process, Ferenczi highlights the “working-
through” factor as an element of the Freudian triad which did not receive
emphasis previously: working-through takes time, it can produce further
material, and it requires work. Ferenczi then describes the importance of the
analysis of the patient’s fantasies about the analyst, understood as doubts
about the analyst which can stand in the way of the therapy and its
termination. The analyst’s attitude is fundamental, in that only the
maintenance of a certain benevolence and tolerance on his part can allow the
patient to experience the difference between parental images and the
analyst’s figure. This requires the analyst to make an effort that can be
sustained only if he has been sufficiently analyzed. Counter-transference is
thus presented in its relation to the lived experiences of the patient, in relation
to the analytical technique, and in relation to the question of the analyst’s
training. A critique of Ferenczi’s position (Kirshner 1994) focuses precisely
on the danger that the “presence” of the analyst risks conflation with the
“good object” tout court.
Ferenczi’s concept of the “natural resolution” of analysis and its
“termination by exhaustion” refer to a conception of analytical therapy as a
process that assigns the analyst the task of restarting an interrupted or
distorted development, which can resume once the obstacles are removed.
Such a conception suggests a mandatory reference to a theory of
development, and it outlines an analogy between the processes of analysis
and growth. The alterations that have been produced and which must be
removed by the analysis are ascribed to individual and social traumas: the
importance which Ferenczi was gradually led to attribute to exogenous
factors in the etiology of neurosis shifts his focus of attention, compared to
Freud, from fantastic reality to an external one; consequently, it shapes the
therapeutic relationship, whose movements must be carefully followed.
The status of the real regains value, we might say, at both the beginning
and the end of the process; at the beginning because it makes up an essential
determinate, and at the end in that Ferenczi adopts it as a criterion for
termination. Ferenczi’s interest in the influence of external reality,
represented by the first figures of relation, is also expressed in the conception
of trauma he subsequently elaborated (Ferenczi 1933): according to this
conception, trauma is the expression of a disturbance in the communication
between adult and child, “a confusion of tongues” located on a relational
level. Unlike the Freudian conception in which trauma determines the destiny
of the drives, here it modifies the object relation both with the external object
and inner representations. On this basis Ferenczi placed special emphasis on
the role of the object in infantile reality and in therapy. This yields an
accurate reconstruction of historical reality in which the discovery of the
truth depends on the behavior of the analyst, who is thus a full participant. In
this context, there is an appreciation of regressive lived experiences which, as
repetitions of old experiences made possible by peculiarities of technique,
favor the full unfolding of transference. Regression thus appears to be an
essential component of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, even though
Ferenczi seeks to distinguish himself from O. Rank’s perspective, where the
association of regression to a concept of trauma as a single event explaining a
linear causality had given rise to short-circuiting attitudes supported by the
“therapeutic haste” so severely criticized by Freud. Thus we can perceive a
connection between the genetic and curative processes which cannot be
radically distinct, since the etiology of neurosis is attributed to disorders in
growth. The idea of exogenous factors as the basis of neurosis has a central
role in Ferenczi’s thought, and it has a precursor in the statement related by
Cremerius in regard to an article by Ferenczi from 1909, for which “the
dominance of sexuality in the origin of psychic illnesses is largely to be
traced to social causes” (Cremerius 1991, Ital. ed: 141).
In 1932, Ferenczi gave a paper in Wiesbaden entitled Confusion of
Tongues Between Adults and the Child (Ferenczi 1933). The background to
this paper offers a glimpse of the growing tensions provoked by Ferenczi’s
technical experimentations and the rift in his relations with Freud. Indeed,
Freud advised Ferenczi not to present the paper, hinting at his intention of
countering the technical incorrectness of Ferenczi’s results with further work.
Freud nonetheless proposed his disciple for the position of President of the
International Association of Psychoanalysis, partly in order to get him out of
“the island of dreams which you inhabit with your fantasy-children” as he
wrote in a letter of May 12, 1932 (Dupont 1988: xvi). Hurt by Freud’s
assessment, Ferenczi refused the candidacy, but he did present the paper
(which was accepted thanks to Jones’ resolute position, but was not published
in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis). The divide between the two
deepened, and Ferenczi’s death eight months later was followed by an
abandonment of the positions and ideas he expressed (at least according to
Jones). The paper summarizes his theoretical-clinical path of the previous
years: Ferenczi highlights the importance of exogenous factors in the etiology
of neurosis and warns against the danger of an inappropriate use of terms like
“disposition” and “constitution”. By turning to these two concepts, he
conceals his critical attitude toward the excessive value attributed to the
Oedipal situation in Freud’s work. However, at the end of the essay he hints
at the possibility “that we shall have to revise certain chapters of the theory of
sexuality and genitality” (Ferenczi 1949: 16). As Cabrè (1997) has incisively
shown, Freud’s response appeared in Analysis Terminable and Interminable -
proof of the continuity of an internal dialogue which continued after the death
of his interlocutor; in this, as we will demonstrate more carefully below,
Freud responds to such objections by means of the question of trauma.
According to Cabrè, it is precisely from this dialectic confrontation that it is
possible to arrive at a more productive hypothesis of the relation between

drive and object, with the aim of depicting psychic life in an intersubjective
context. Ferenczi’s position as outlined above is found in Balint’s papers at
the Twelfth Congress of the IPA in Wiesbaden in 1932, and even more so in
that of Lucern in 1934. We will examine this author’s own position below in
more detail, but it is important to note that it was during that period that he
elaborated his theory of the “new cycle” relative to the termination of
analysis.
Between 1927 and 1931, various other works followed (Sterba, Reich,
Glover, Sharpe), united by a discourse on resistance and the attempt to
perfect the interpretive technique, with more or less implicit attention to the
theoretical foundations of therapy. In 1927, some of the papers presented at
the Seminar on psychoanalytic therapy held in Vienna appeared in the
Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse; the articles by Sterba and Reich were among
the most important of these. The former attempts to clarify (as he did in later
works) the characteristics of transference and the work of interpretation, the
factors which are efficacious in interpretation, beginning with negative latent
transference. Subsequently, at the Congress of Wiesbaden in 1932, in The
Fate of the Ego in Analytic Therapy (Sterba 1934), Sterba proposed the
concept of the therapeutic dissociation of the ego and describes the
“splitting” of the ego in experiencing and observing parts: this division arises
from positive transference and from identification with the analyst. The latter
in turn makes use of this splitting to point out discrepancies between the
present and the past, thereby inducing the ego to change its defensive
attitude.
Reich’s article focuses on the dynamic as well as economic roles of
resistance. As a result, there is an insistence – excessive in Fenichel’s view –
on the systematicness and coherence of interpretation, to be correlated with a
theoretical hypothesis of a series of strata of the unconscious. The
interpretation of resistance precedes that of the contents; it must begin from
the surface and address in a coherent, systematic and historically accurate
way the defensive force as an analysis of the ego; therefore the analysis can
only be “top-down”. In subsequent years, up until the appearance of his
principal work, Character Analysis (1928), Reich develops these concepts,
forcefully asserting the thesis that the analysis of resistance precedes that of
content, maintaining the proposition that correct psychoanalytical technique
proceeds from the surface to the depths, and underlining the necessity of an
analysis of the ego in order to understand its “defensive force.”
Between 1927 and 1931, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis
published E. Glover’s Lectures on Technique in Psychoanalysis and a series
of lessons by E. Sharpe compiled under the general title The Technique of
Psychoanalysis. In 1932, H. Nunberg’s General Theory of the Neuroses on a
Psycho-Analytic Basis appeared; in the chapter devoted to the theoretical
fundamentals of therapy, he underlines the therapeutic efficacy of two
factors: the “synthetic function of the ego”, that is, the tendency of the ego to
assimilate and order contents in a coherent and finalized manner as they
progressively become accessible; and the “abreaction” or explosive
liberation, in the act of becoming conscious of the energy tied up in conflict.
The following year, T. Reik published New Ways in Psychoanalytic
Technique, in which he dealt with the risk of an “excess of knowledge” with
even greater emphasis than the preceding works. According to Reik, an
excess of reflexive thought can lead the analyst to apply what he has learned
erroneously and block his intuition.
In that period, then, three assumptions emerged which would become
cornerstones of the theory of technique in the coming decades: the analysis
proceeds from the surface to the depths, the analysis of resistance must
precede that of the contents, and the analysis must also address the patient’s
non-symptomatic features - that is, it must also analyze his character.
According to Fenichel, the attention paid to the analysis of resistance, the true
therapeutic agent in therapy, favored the growth of ego psychology’s
importance in subsequent years, with a gradual, concomitant de-emphasis on
the economic-drive element. The latter was, on the other hand, quite present
in paper by Reich, who - as is well known - continued to develop his own
theory which diverged from the classical one.
In 1934, Strachey published the article The Nature of the Therapeutic
Action of Psycho-Analysis, in which he proposed a theory of interpretation
based on considerations from structural theory, distinguishing between
transference interpretations and extra-transference ones. In Strachey’s view,
only the former are truly “mutating”, that is, effective in creating a psychic
change in the psychoanalytic process. With regard to the psychoanalytic
process itself, he elaborates on the new Kleinian theories with older
theorizations related to the role of the analyst in the patient’s interstructural
dynamic. For Strachey, the analyst’s superego substitutes the patient’s, and in
this way the analyst can eliminate or reduce that part of the patient’s
superego which employs pathogenic defenses. Transference is redefined in
the terms of projection on the analyst of archaic images, and the
interpretation’s efficacy is connected to the reality of the moment in which it
is presented. Strachey explores Ferenczi and Rank’s criticism of interpretive
fanaticism, linking such an undesirable occurrence to the predominant or
excessive use of extra-transference interpretations. Moreover, he critiques the
concept of abreaction, making a distinction between emotional discharge,
which is defined as an occasional and even useful addition, and libidinal
gratification, an event which is treacherous if it is not recognized. The effects
of abreaction are permanent only in cases in which the etiological factor is an
external event, as in shell-shock, for example.
At the Four Nations Convention in 1935 (the Viennese Psychoanalytic
Society, the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association, the Prague
Psychoanalytic Society and the new Italian Psychoanalytic Society, which
was not yet affiliated with the IPA [Leupold-Löwenthal 1988]), the
discussion focused on three subjects which would later have increasing
influence on the analytic process in theoretical and clinical terms: the death
drive and its derivatives, psychic trauma, and ego psychology. The discussion
demonstrated the difficulty, if not the out and out refusal, to accept the dual
theory of drives and in particular the destructive drive, despite an
appreciation for the clinical value of Freud’s observations. From the
symposium acts it is possible to ascertain the growing theoretical and
technical weight of ego psychology, which would be dealt with the following
year in A. Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), and
which would be thoroughly developed theoretically in Hartmann’s work.
At the Fourteenth Congress of the IPA in Marienbad in 1936, a
symposium presided by Jones took place on The Theory of Therapeutic
Results. It is interesting to note that the works presented were published
together with Analysis Terminable and Interminable in two subsequent issues
of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. According to Wallerstein
(1965), there was a rather widespread agreement among the participants as to
the fact that the therapeutic aim of analysis consisted in establishing a
harmonious equilibrium among the psychic agencies. Taken as a whole, the
particular points discussed form a mosaic of the state of the art in that period.
Freud seems to have provided a rapid response with A.T.I.; he was not
particularly satisfied with the symposium’s conclusions (Leupold-
Löwentahal 1988), identifying a line of optimism in them regarding the
therapeutic prospects of analysis which was not sufficiently supported by
experience. Fenichel treated the action of therapy from the point of view of
relations between ego and the defenses; Laforgue identified two essential
therapeutic agents: the patient’s trust in the doctor - which coincides with
“suggestion” but is used in the opposite way - and the willingness to engage
in analytic work (anticipating by a few decades the concept of “therapeutic
alliance”); Glover expressed reservations about the possibility of a theory of
therapy; unlike Glover, Bibring supported the necessity of a “theory of
therapeutic procedure”. In particular, it is interesting to note that in
describing the modifications to each of the three psychic agencies which
would establish the success of psychoanalytic therapy, Bibring spoke of the
“demolition of a drive”, the reinforcement of the conscious ego, capable of
extending itself over areas and parts of the id.
In the same year, the British Psycho-Analytical Society organized a
Symposium, Criteria of Success in Treatment, in which Jones, Sharpe,
Brierley and Glover delivered papers. Jones’ presentation established a
distinction between therapeutic and analytical results which in large part
corresponded to the patient’s evaluation of success and that of the analyst. In
the former category, Jones cites the elements of the patient’s subjective sense
of strength, his trust and his well-being, understood as potential capacity for
enjoyment and happiness. On the objective side, there is a free flow of
positive feelings through the ego and the reduction of anxiety. On the other
hand, the elimination of symptoms does not receive any recognition as proof
of therapeutic success. Confirming the value Freud attributed to overcoming
infantile amnesia, Jones added a criterion which goes beyond pathology and
is relative to the understanding of the evolutionary lines of all of the principal
interests in the subject’s life. Sharpe concentrated on the criteria for cure in
adults with an “especially dismal” childhood and proposed to understand
them in terms of a psychic plasticity possible in every case. The criteria of
success in such cases are based on the expansion of the ego and the
mitigation of the severity of the superego, and in particular regard sexuality,
the ability to work and social relations. Glover continued his work of
conceptual and methodological development, proposing an articulated means
of evaluating success by examining various factors, and he declared that he
was convinced of the difficulty of “rendering scientific” the problem of
analytical criteria, given that the analyst’s subjective factors can influence
them. Brierley agreed on this point, and she emphasized the relativity of the
criteria’s reliability and of success itself. In the years that followed, Glover
returned to the papers from this symposium, considering them a mixture of
theoretical and practical criteria that created the urgency for an agreement on
general principals and a theoretical fine-tuning which was still far from being
reached. He clearly felt the need for a conceptual clarification in
psychoanalysis and was the first to pose questions of method with regard to
the psychoanalytic theoretical elaboration and verification of clinical activity.
The spirit of the times regarding the entire question was expressed by
Jones (1936), who was convinced that in the immediate future there would be
a non-revolutionary development in psychoanalytic technique: the objective
would be a constant progress in its development, greater refinement and
accuracy, with the result that there would be much greater assuredness than at
present. From this survey, we have the picture of a psychoanalytical world
which was readily concentrated, among other things, on developing concepts,
methods and analytical techniques in therapy. Nonetheless, as we have
suggested, Freud did not agree with this.
2. A Long-Distance Dialogue with Ferenczi
A.T.I. is unanimously considered the mandatory point of departure for

any discussion of the termination of analysis. It is an essay which is to all
intents and purposes “terminating”, for both the manifest object of its
discourse and the personal and epochal circumstances making up its context.
It is one of Freud’s last works, and together with Moses and Monotheism and
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, it is an integral part of a trilogy which has
been viewed as his scientific testament with a detailed inventory of the
inheritance to be transmitted to his heirs. In any case, it is a concluding
reflection in which Freud looks back, reconsidering the procedure he

invented and considering its achievements. The very writing of A.T.I.,
moreover, took place in the context of the worsening of both Freud’s illness
and the Austrian and European socio-political climate, whose shadow loomed
in all of Freud’s works of the period. Yet these readings, certainly plausible
and even widely accredited, neglect or only touch in passing on a significant
aspect which instead forms our principal point in a reconnaissance of the
piece: we seek here to trace the numerous hints of a long-distance dialogue
with Ferenczi, who above and beyond explicit references, in our opinion,
influenced the entire context of the writing of Freud’s essay. Having died
only a short time before A.T.I. was written, Ferenczi in fact formed the
privileged interlocutor for a rich and complex convergence of factors. First,
we see the objective role assumed by Ferenczi in asserting himself, together
and complementarily with Reich, as the most prominent figure of the most
recent debates within the psychoanalytic community. On the other hand, the
role which Freud probably assigned him in this gestational phase of his
thought was no less important, though more subjective and filled with
personal implications; as Freud had long before recognized and foreseen,
noting the following of his inner posture:
My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an

intimate friend and a hated enemy. I have always been able to
provide myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently
happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been so
completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come together
in a single individual
(Freud 1900, in S.E. vol. 5: 483).
Let us begin with a first consideration which aims at substantiating the

hypothesis that Freud’s choice of a careful investigation of the problem of
termination within a predominantly theoretical framework constitutes a
precise option which takes on particular significance, both in relation to the
final phase of his enterprise and in the animated debate of the prior decade. In
two letters (to Eitingon and to Pfister), Freud announced his engagement in
the writing of this text; but despite his technical mention of it, it is impossible
not to be struck by his substantial wandering: he found himself on an
intricate, winding path, the object of diverging judgments, which at times
emphasized the philosophical and speculative nature, at others pessimism and
technical-theoretical conservativeness. Fenichel (1974), to whom we owe the
first articulated comment on Freud’s essay, notes a marked difference
between this text and the cogent conceptual framework of his first writings
on technique. In a certain sense, Jones’ more diplomatic observation echoes
this, describing A.T.I as an arduous piece, one which makes the reader work
very hard, at the same time withholding the reassuring reward of a stable and
definitive place to land. For authors like Mahony, on the contrary, this feature
is one of the merits of A.T.I., a text which is eminently “dialogic rather than
systematic” (Mahony 1989, Ital. ed: 5), although the interlocutor is
generically identified with the reader and not - as in our reading - with
Ferenczi.
In our view, Freud’s deliberate and insistent reference to the primacy of
theory constitutes a first important differentiation from Ferenczi; in order to
appreciate its most refined articulations, a careful re-examination of various
passages is necessary. The structure of the text may be schematized in this
way: Freud appears to start with a circumscribed question - the duration of
analysis - dedicating the first two sections of A.T.I. to it, but he then moves
concentrically to touch upon the theory of therapeutic process itself; in the
final part, he returns to more precise considerations relative to the problem of
analysis’s terminability or lack thereof. The two initial sections and the two
concluding ones enclose a central part which weaves in, in a sort of
crescendo, the unavoidable use of metapsychology; in this sphere, he restores
an importance to the economic point of view which had up to that point been
neglected. The logical structure of the text is illustrated in the fifth section,
where Freud, returning to the enunciation of the three elements for
determining the outcome of analysis (the influence of traumatic aetiology, the
relative strength of the instincts, alteration of the ego), declares that he will
thoroughly and almost exclusively investigate the second in particular. This
point constitutes the central backbone of the discourse, which unfolds in the
four central sections, from the third to the sixth. We feel that the emphasis
Freud places on the economic point of view must be placed in relation to the
necessity of reasserting the scientific profile of the analytical enterprise: it
has its insuperable limits in its anchoring to the drives’ quantities as final
constituents of psychic life, but at the same time there is the possibility of
avoiding slippery and arbitrary reductions to unstructured, superficial or
purely cosmetic therapeutic practices (“the warmed-up leftovers of
psychotherapy”). The centrality of the economic factor branches out in
several directions and necessarily requires us to highlight some details.
In the first section, Freud establishes the question of the time required
by psychoanalytic therapy, tellingly defined as “the freeing of someone from
his neurotic symptoms, inhibitions and abnormalities of character” (Freud
1937a, p.499, in S.E. 23: 216). This entails long and exhausting work, for
which it is illusory to substitute shortcuts, as in the case of Rank, whose
theoretical foundation - birth trauma - had been carefully critiqued by Freud
in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud 1925). In this respect it must be
observed that Freud’s break with Rank had already taken place at that time of
A.T.I.’s writing; Ferenczi ended up taking the side of his mentor out of
loyalty, distancing himself from the colleague with whom he had co-written
the important essay of 1924. Freud insisted on psychoanalysis as a “scientific
enterprise” rather than a “facile therapeutic operation.” Haynal emphasizes
the role of this dichotomy in the Freud-Ferenczi controversy (Haynal 1987):

he argues that the latter supported the thesis that it is therapeutic progress
which makes theory advance, whereas Freud held that developing theory
would have consequently be advantageous to therapy. In effect, Ferenczi’s
interest for technique - his principal concern or preferred theme, according to
Balint - appeared early on and never ceased: in 1916, he had written to Freud
that he only wanted to “deal with refinements in technique” (letter from
08.14.1916, in S. Freud and S. Ferenczi 1996, Ital. ed.: 152). Freud never
fully agreed on this point, so much so that in his obituary of Ferenczi he
underlined his disciple’s obsession with therapeutic needs. Freud’s “neglect”
of technique in A.T.I. appears most significant if we juxtapose it to Ferenczi’s
systematic engagement with technique.
In the previous section we schematically traced the debate that involved
the psychoanalytic community of the 1930s: in our opinion, it no accident
that Freud relaunches his discussion on predominately theoretical grounds, as
if to mark a dissonance that is at the same time an indication of a wider
perspective, designed for the long term and for posterity. We believe that
among the motives for this option there could have been the undoubted effect
of the question of analytical training and the resulting problem of lay
analysis. Freud always maintained a rather tolerant position regarding
analytical training, with minimum requirements and an opening to non-
medical elements in psychoanalysis, and he expressed reservations about the
medicalization of psychoanalytic training in various places in his work,
specifically in The Question of Lay Analysis (Freud 1926) and in the
postscript a year later.
While Freud quite decisively dismissed Rank’s experimentations,
defining him “a child of its time, conceived under the stress of the contrast
between the post-war misery of Europe and the ‘prosperity’ of America, and
designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life”
(Freud 1937a: 500, in S.E. 23: 216), his tone toward Ferenczi’s work is much
more cautious, presumably recognizing a different status for it. It is quite
possible that despite having expressed criticisms of Ferenczi’s technical
innovations, Freud credited them with the attempt to push the boundaries of
analytical procedure, entering into areas which where hitherto unknown. He
gives signals of this on several occasions, acknowledging an explicit debt of
gratitude toward his disciple. We may further observe how the problem of
trauma appears through the polemic with Rank, though in a tangential way:
this was one of the central arguments of the Freud-Ferenczi controversy and
was intrinsically linked to the aforementioned experimentations. Some, like
Masson (1983), have viewed this to be the real stake of the conflict. For the
moment, we will simply underline how an important connection gets
delineated here, one which should be kept in mind, between the re-emergence
of theory of real trauma as a unique and explanatory of linear causality and
“therapeutic haste” with the further risk, noted by Freud, that the negation of
the centrality of the Oedipus complex can lead to outside of psychoanalysis.
In the second section, the question of trauma is made explicit in the
Freudian statement that of the three factors responsible for the outcome of
analysis (we repeat: the influence of traumatic aetiology, the relative strength
of the instincts, alteration of the ego), the first is the one which most easily
permits a real termination of the analysis. It may be reasonably supposed that
this affirmation demonstrates the influence of Ferenczi’s hypothesis.
Working with regressed patients, Ferenczi was in fact able to gather the
importance of traumas and develop the following considerations: the
necessity of reconsidering the traumatic-hysterical bases of illness; the
greater therapeutic efficacy of cases in which it was possible to ascertain
them; the problematizing of the role of fantasy and the reevaluation of
traumatic reality of pathogenesis; the appreciation of regressive experiences,
which inasmuch as they evoke early experiences, are made possible by the
particularity of technique.
But this is not the only reference to Ferenczi, who is instead quite
present in Freud’s first lines in the discussion of the concept of the “natural
end” (first introduced in his 1927 piece on the termination of analysis), and
subsequently, with regard to clinical examples presented for reflection on two
questions which emerge from practice. The first patient Freud talks about in
the second paragraph of A.T.I. is Ferenczi himself, and this reference contains
some questions which are highly significant. The central point is constituted
by the possibility of understanding the termination of analysis not only as the
elimination of current conflicts, but as a prophylaxis for future ones, to be
pursued through a technical strategy aimed at making them present in the
analytical field if they are latent. Freud considers it doubtful that a theme or
“complex” can be activated by merely mentioning it if it is not already
present in the patient, arguing the impossibility of activating quiescent
conflicts and the inadequacy of employing shortcuts with predominantly
theoretical considerations. Here, he offers an implicit criticism of the so-
called “active technique”, which in Ferenczi’s conceptualization aimed at
encouraging the reactualization of distant experiences in transference. At the
same time, it is as if Freud had made his own the point argued by Ferenczi:
the insufficiency of an intellectualist point of view in conducting an analysis.
Here a dichotomy appears: Freud opts for a coming to awareness – Einsicht -
in the spirit of the Aufklarung, while Ferenczi chooses lived experience,
Erlebnis (cf. Thompson 1994 for a discussion of existential aspects in the
Freudian vision of analysis and its aims).
In this passage, moreover, it is possible to see the conception that Freud
himself had of transference, by way of his refutation of Ferenczi’s criticism:
it is possible to perceive some limits in Freud to the full use of the
transference instrument, due to personal idiosyncrasies (his unease with
maternal transference, expressed on several occasions) as well as to the
exclusion from the transference concept of a certain range of relations

defined as friendship. Ferenczi, on the contrary, was already against a
radicalization of the concept:
…I take Rank’s suggestion regarding the relation of patient

to analyst as the cardinal point of the analytic material and regard
every dream, every gesture, every parapraxis, every aggravation
or improvement in the condition of the patient as above all an
expression of transference and resistance.
(Ferenczi 1925b [1950]: 225).
Such a conception of transference had led Ferenczi to discover the

importance of the notion of “experience”, a discovery which induced him to
speak of an “experiential phase” in the advancement of technique; this
contrasts with the prior theoretical phase, which was marked by the
expectation of obtaining a therapeutic effect from the patient’s reactions to
the explanations given. For Ferenczi, all of the knowledge obtained was to be
placed at the service of treatment, directly “provoking” appropriate lived
experiences and was limited to explaining to the patient only the lived
experience which of course was also directly clear to him.
In the third section, with an increasingly intense theoretical
examination, Freud turns to the drive factor, the only one to be actually
investigated among the three factors introduced as those responsible for
analytic results and influencing terminability. The treatment of the various
aspects of the question circles around a central point, the economic or
quantitative factor, which Freud considered worthy of metapsychological
attention, in that it was penalized in comparison with the dynamic and the
topographical. The definition of the goal of analysis, which was closely
linked to this factor – appearing to be its consequence - was considered to be
the postponed correction of the original process of repression, which ended
the excessive power of the quantitative factor. Freud reproposed the primacy
of theory as the source of surer answers than those of experience: the latter
was weakened to the highest degree by the disconcerting claim that there
might not be so much difference between the processes of spontaneous cure
and those induced by analytical work. Throughout the section there is a
insistent reference to the instability of analytical efficacy which echoes and
elaborates the perplexities about the optimists’ expectations rebutted at the
end of the preceding section, and which were quite present in the
aforementioned Symposium of 1936. For Freud, the instability of results is to
be attributed to the persistence of residual manifestations which render each
gain only half of what it initially appeared, and to the always partial nature of
the transformation, which is not able to affect a part of the older mechanisms.
Once again, Freud takes back up the initial question of the duration of
analytical therapy and its reduction through a reinforcement of the analytical
power coming to the aid of the ego (whose precursor was the hypnotic
technique), and he ends with a critical conclusion in recalling Ferenczi’s
“unfortunately vain attempts.”
The Freudian choice of investigating this original excess, which was in
the end responsible for frequent failures in the action of reining in the drives,
led to a return to the cornerstone of psychoanalysis through the invocation of
the witch metapsychology: the two principles of psychic functioning, with
the dialectic between the primary and secondary processes. The importance
in prior writings of insight and persuasion induced in the analysand recedes
with respect to the consideration of the quantitative factor’s excessive power,
due to its close ties to biology. Perceiving the necessity of offering an
explanatory hypothesis of the very irreducibility of the economic factor,
Freud conceives of it as a historical factor which became dispositional. In this
way, the difference between the congenital and the acquired gives way: the
disposition is the precipitate of a prior lived experience of the species, to
which the more recent lived experience of the individual is added as a sum of
accidental moments. According to Fornari (1976), it is at this point that a
dilemma is established, one which was to become the source of serious future
difficulties: what is in question is the possibility of influencing with psychic
means (the analyst’s interpretations and constructions) that which is
presented as quantitative and, in the final analysis, physical. Fornari further
notes how Freud’s singular and total silence on Reich in A.T.I. – the latter
having sought to overcome the economic factor of libido with the thesis of
energetic stagnation – implies an unequivocal distancing from a position
which, in biologizing the drives, deprives them of the aspect as “psychic
representation” that defines analytic work’s sphere of competence (cf.
Contardi 1997 and Napolitano 1998).
Actually, all of the approaches directly aimed at the quantitative aspects
(and Ferenczi’s attempts, firmly anchored to the economic point of view,
should be included among these) turned out to be fallacious in their pretence
to ignoring drive derivatives, the only ones on which it is truly possible to
act. Moreover, the delay in taking into account the economic point of view,
whose importance was clear to Freud as early as in his Project for a Scientific
Psychology, has to do with the intrinsic difficulties of investigating economic
aspects, because of having to deal with quantities for which there is no means
of measure, and also because the quantitative processes are close to
biological ones, these being border processes whose prototype is the
psychoanalytic notion of drive. Freud sought to break out of this dilemma by
weakening the dichotomy between nature and culture through the concept of
phylogenetic experience found in ontogeny. This implied the introduction of
a cultural dimension in the concept of drive and the transformation of a
traumatic historical event’s significance into a basic feature of a drive
through the tendency to repetition. This Freudian conception of transforming
the trace of what tended to be repetition of the past in the present thus yielded
the postulate relative to the transformation of culture in nature and, even

more decisively, its inverse, establishing the possibility that a psychic factor
can have physical effects. The economic point of view is also present in his
discussion of ego alteration, where Freud writes on a theoretical level as well
as a clinical one: he considers the relationship between psychic agencies and
the question of subtracting increasing portions of the id in favor of
consciousness, and he examines the situation in which ego alteration is
manifested in the difficulty in maintaining the therapeutic alliance.
The theoretical investigation culminates in the part devoted to
explaining the theory of drive dualism he advanced in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. Freud attributes great importance to it because of his concern with
safeguarding the specificity of psychoanalysis and to the need to counter the
excessive emphasis that Ferenczi placed on trauma, giving the last word to
drives as the guarantors of an inexhaustible inclination to conflict. Indeed, the
factor of ego alteration is in some way subordinate to the factor of drive
force, appearing to be a derivation of it.
At the same time, however, precisely because he delineated the
theoretical context for framing the clinical problem of terminability in such
an accurate and unequivocal manner, Freud was able to reserve space for
Ferenczi’s hypothesis on trauma. In Freud’s approach, unanimously
considered pessimistic or at least highly cautious and problematic with regard
to the prospects for analysis, the first factor - traumatic aetiology – is outlined
in a promising manner:
There is no doubt that an aetiology of the traumatic sort

offers by far the more favourable field for analysis. Only when a
case is a predominantly traumatic one will analysis succeed in
doing what it is so superlatively able to do; only then will it,
thanks to having strengthened the patient’s ego, succeed in
replacing by a correct solution the inadequate decision made in
his early life. Only in such cases can one speak of an analysis
having been definitively ended.
(Freud 1937a: 503, in S.E. 23: 220).
As is well known, through time this argument has been the object of
meticulous and critical fine-tuning (Blum 1987, Anzieu 1987). Blum
considers it emblematic of the curious oscillation in A.T.I. between
innovative, profoundly original points of view and residues of outdated and
superceded formulations. In effect, in the context of A.T.I., trauma is treated
as a discrete event, somehow isolated from the conflict which becomes
invariably activated in concomitance with the trauma. Moreover, it appears a
rather generic idea of trauma, despite the fact that Freud had described
specific traumas of the developmental phases, especially in Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety; on the other hand, there do not appear to be any
decisive considerations regarding the organization of personality at the

moment of the trauma. Still, despite the incontrovertibility of such
observations - shared by various commentators – we believe a tenable
hypothesis is that the cryptic Freudian argumentation can be understood
against the background of the inflexibility of instinctual aspects which are
most properly endogenous (cf. Ferraro 1995). We might also even recognize
a typically Freudian way of altering and embracing “hostile” thesis, in this
case coming from Ferenczi and prefiguring the specific contribution of the
Hungarian school.
Finally, the discussion of resistances moves from the heart of the
theoretical discourse to impact the reflection on the vicissitudes of analysis in
an increasingly perspicacious manner. Certainly, the importance of a host of
factors must be recognized, from Freud’s striking propensity to investigate
the nature of the obstacles - with a pitiless scrutiny mistrustful of easy
enthusiasms and even more so of easy victories - to the influence exercised
by the dramatic events in which he was involved. All the same, his precise
reflection on the nature of obstacles can be understood as a peculiar
characteristic of analytical method, chiefly interested in examining and
utilizing the obstructing forces in the same way as the driving ones. In A.T.I.,
Freud lays this out in the following:
In this field the interest of analysts seems to me to be quite

wrongly directed. Instead of an enquiry into how a cure by
analysis comes about (a matter which I think has been sufficiently
elucidated) the question should be asked of what are the obstacles
that stand in the way of such a cure
(Freud 1937a: 504, in S.E. 23: 221).
This methodological hallmark is present and appreciable from the start

of the essay, where Freud reflects on his own experiences, which all share
some degree of failure; then, in the final four sections, he deploys all of his
theoretical acumen. We see it operating, for example, in the claim that the
history of the cure is just as interesting as that of the illness, while
underlining that we never have a path backwards which, in an improbably
symmetry, cancels the alterations produced, despite the fact that we can gain
an accurate understanding of the pathogenesis. Further, his declared interest
in the history of the cure is not only a caution against prognostic deceptions,
but also and above all an invitation to investigate the complex mix of
elements in the patient’s history and dynamics produced by the analytical
relationship in their therapeutic outcomes.
A wide-ranging vision that embraces the final four sections
concentrates on defense mechanisms, resistances, and negative transference
as related features of a single process; on a metapsychological level they are
inflections of repetition-compulsion and an inertia or tenacity of the drives, as
well as evidence of an opposition to change in the course of analysis. At the

most poignant part of his work on this irreducibility, Freud proceeds in two
directions: one aimed at the ultimate components, a sort of essential chemism
rooted in the force of the drives, and the other with regard to clinical
phenomenology.
In the last two sections, centered respectively on counter-transference
as resistance which comes from the analyst and on the resistances connected
to gender identity, Freud expands on the metapsychological discourse
elaborated in the central part and in a certain sense resumes themes present in
the first sections. Here, too, we see the long-distance dialogue with Ferenzci:
Freud appears to want to reflect on Ferenczi’s attention to the position of the
analyst in psychoanalytic technique. Likely stimulated by Ferenczi’s pressing
observations, Freud’s thinking displays a continuity with the 1910 conception
of counter-transference, which as an instrument for receiving the patient’s
unconscious cannot tolerate resistances within itself. The choice of clinical
cases in this regard meaningfully shows how Freud, in reflecting on his own
experience, attributes greater attention to problematic clinical situations. He
uses them to deal with the problem of obstacles arising from the analyst, who
is often firm in his own unchangeability and ready to avoid the incessant
work prescribed to others. According to Freud, the analyst finds himself
exposed both to the influence of his own unconscious, which is always
active, as well as the stimuli which come to him from the dangerous contact –
likened to X-rays - with the patient’s unconscious. He must therefore put up a
double barrier of basic honesty, which comes from his love for the truth and
from his engagement in an infinite analysis that is operatively translated into
his willingness to undergo supplemental periods of analysis. Freud, we
repeat, was actually very skeptical about the function of training analysis and
more generally about the action of training, which was increasingly
institutionalized, as we see from a disconsolate confidence made in 1935 to
L. Salomè: “My one source of satisfaction is Anna. It is remarkable how
much influence and authority she has gained among the general run of
analysts—many of whom, alas, have derived little from analysis as far as
their personal character is concerned” (cited in Leupold-Löwenthal 1988:
267). Here, Freud appeared rather disappointed by the type of people
attracted to psychoanalysis and little inclined to expect a transformation from
their work. Once again, we have a Freud-Ferenczi opposition: for Freud, the
aim of training analysis was the demonstration of the existence of the
unconscious, a somewhat limited objective that was possible in the space of a
brief analysis; Ferenczi instead called for training analysis to be deeper than
therapeutic analysis, with the result that it was a long and complex process
that Balint termed “supertherapy.”
The last section, where Freud deals with the most radical resistances to
change (ones arising from the refusal of femininity in a man and from penis
envy in a woman), contains a dense tangle of problems concentrated in just a
few lines. In examining certain paradoxical resistances to change, vividly

exemplified by negative therapeutic reactions, Freud traces them to inter-
drive conflicts, referring to a sense of blame conceived of as the death drive
in its purest form. Moreover, he cites the definition of bisexuality in a
unisexual direction as a phenomenon produced by the destruction drive and
overwhelming proof of an intrinsic and endless inclination to conflict. The
destructive drive thus somehow gets involved in the repression underlying
the same-sex choice. Some authors (Thompson 1991) have pointed out how
Freud’s concentration on resistances connected to gender identity in the
conclusion of A.T.I. (a conclusion made all the more striking by its placement
as the final section, whereas in the manuscript it was an appendix to the next
to the last one) implies an attenuation of the absolute dominance of the
disintegrative features of the death drive, through an operation of
reconnecting with the more familiar terrain of sexuality and the Oedipal
complex in the form of manifestations of Eros. In reality, in this part of A.T.I,
the passages are probably not even clear to Freud himself. The fact is that we
find a parallelism between Freud’s point of arrival to the final elements in the
fifth section - from which specific resistances of the three psychic agencies
originate - and the description of the bedrock, another insurmountable limit
thought to be of a biological origin, and therefore indicated as a radical
departure from analytical theory and practice. Here, too, we find a specific
reference to Ferenczi, who recognized the importance of the male and female
complexes (Ferenczi 1927) to the extent of indicating that they needed to be
overcome as the condition for terminating analysis.
In line with his attitude throughout the rest of the text, Freud appears
intent on damping the optimistic expectation that overcoming can be a
reliable result of analytical work, contrasting it to an analytical experience of
imposing and disconsolate immovability. Freud places the enigma of the
sexes within the dominant paradigm of castration anxiety and the Oedipal
constellation, and this can make the disconcerting conclusion he reaches
more understandable: everything beyond this is pure biology and ceases to be
of psychological pertinence.
But here the discussion remains to be developed and touches the
complex mind-body relation and the reference to unrepresentable formations,
aspects of bedrock which are inaccessible to analytical investigation and
nonetheless influence the process. Freud’s final discussion in fact lends itself
to developments in two directions: the first is a recognition of a necessity
inherent in any analytical process faced with its defining limit; the second is
the reinterpretation of the clinical phenomenologies in which Freud came up
against “narcissistic resistances”, an extreme defense from recognizing the
dependence which, in a woman, can take on the form of an omnipotent desire
for bisexuality, and in a man, the rejection of a feminine disposition,
disguising the thwarted recognition of its own limit and of receptiveness as a
necessary condition for mental growth.
After having demonstrated, with this brief review of all of the sections
of the text, how the imaginary dialogue with Ferenczi unfolded throughout
the entire work, we would like to clarify the most important features of this
comparison. In our view, these features lie in the differing conceptions of the
analytical process, which are strictly intertwined in their repercussions with
the ways of understanding the termination of analysis. In the previous
section, we summarized Ferenczi’s theses, outlined most fully in his article
from 1927: the analysis ends with natural exhaustion; treatment must be
based on a decisive capacity in the patient to distinguish between reality and
fantasy; the final phase takes on particular importance, from the point of view
from the transference/counter-transference pair as well. In contrast to
Ferenczi, we have seen how in A.T.I. Freud instead privileges reflection on
the intrinsic limits of the analytical enterprise, which are connected to the
bases of psychic life in drives; he glosses over technique, which Ferenczi had
attempted to push further in order to widen the therapeutic resources of
analysis. In A.T.I., a theoretical foundation which renders analysis
interminable is repeated forcefully: the perennial contrast between primary
and secondary processes. We might isolate a dual aspect in this approach, one
of wider importance and the other dealing specifically with clinical work.
The Freudian point of view, usually characterized as pessimistic, can instead
be understood both as an expression of a necessary balancing with respect to
the encouraging ideas coming out of Marienbad and as a reaction to the
development of ego psychology, with its emphasis on the adaptive and
unifying tendencies of the mind. From this perspective, the accentuation of
disintegrative features and the emphasis on the “structure of opposition and
on the tension between opposites” (Thompson 1991), bear an acute
postmodern sensibility. Nonetheless, in our opinion, the sense which was
most congenial to Freud is the one which underlines the dialectical process
between opposite polarities, and not the most extreme version which deals
with the production of a fundamental and irredeemable incoherence, based on
a radical questioning of every unit of interpretation. On the more properly
clinical side, Freud’s focus – full of caution and skepticism – is on the
numerous elements which thwart therapeutic efforts, such as the libido’s
intensity and tenacity, in addition to the ego’s weakness. These elements are
frequently found in uncontrollable and unanalyzable transference
configurations which contradict the Ferenczi’s optimistic requirement of a
complete dissolving of transference and the end of analysis by exhaustion.
According to Kirshner (1993), Freud’s ambiguity towards psychic
reality leads to paradoxes which Ferenczi sought to resolve, or at least found
difficult to accept: in particular, the question of the relationship between the
reconstruction and the nature of the subjective reality that analysis attempts
to reconstruct. According to Kirshner, although Freud and Ferenczi both
pursued an accurate reconstruction of historical reality, they held different
ideas about the nature of that reality. Freud supported an observer-observed
paradigm, in which the analyst plays the role of a neutral scientific

investigator; Ferenczi introduced the bi-personal model in which the
discovery of the truth depends on the behavior of the analyst, who is
therefore a full participant. For both, the analyst’s problem is that of
determining how much of what gets reproduced in analysis is fantasy and
how much is reality, but the paths they follow diverge. For Freud, the notion
of psychic reality is broader and so this question becomes much less
important. Phylogeny fills in the ontogenetic gaps and transforms biological
reality in the bedrock in which psychic reality is grounded. The investigation
of biological reality is not pertinent to analysis, and therefore the search for
historical truth loses its key role. For Ferenczi, to negate the historical reality
of trauma means negating the importance of the subjective and considering
the psychic as merely a superstructure of the physical. Privileging the role of
fantasy, the Freudian position translates into a theory that seeks to “discover”
whenever possible: the patient must bear the responsibility for psychological
truth of his fantasies and accept a final renunciation of it. In contrast,
Ferenczi’s position privileges the actual traumatic event and attempts to
actualize the unconscious traumatic lived experience through technique, with
the aim of allowing the patient to relive the split parts of his early experiences
through “an immersion in the traumatic past” and thereby begin a process of
cure. Some scholars, like Hoffer (1991), identify this divergence between the
two authors as the point in which their conceptual stances branch off, with
one placing the accent on the recovery of traumatic events of childhood as
foundational of psychic reality, and the other on the interpretation of
unconscious fantasies which have structured experience with the aim of
creating psychic reality.
In our view, Kirshner’s reading - and to some extent also Hoffer’s -
excessively simplifies the Freudian position, whose complexity regarding the
problem of reconstruction in analysis can be gleaned from a comparative
reading of Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1934-38) and Constructions in
Analysis (Freud 1937b), two works from the same period as A.T.I. A joint
review of these two texts (Chianese 1997) allows us, on the one hand, to
grasp the complexification of the so-called archaeological metaphor centered
on “excavation” and discovery, and on the other, to find in Freud’s
anxiousness to pursue a historical truth a true gadfly capable of resisting the
undeniable constructivist turns of psychoanalytic method. Leaving aside this
interpretive divergence, however, it is undeniable that Ferenczi’s pioneering
contribution promoted two directions of research in particular: object-
relations theory and a systematic interest in technique as a basic component
of analysis as a profession.
To give greater prominence to the conception of analytic process
emerging from A.T.I, we may also consider Freud’s On Beginning the
Treatment (1913), which tackles the problem of termination; from these two
opposite ends of a path, we may gather the reproposal of an unchanging

definition of the psychoanalytic process:
The analyst is certainly able to do a great deal, but he cannot

determine beforehand exactly what results he will effect. He sets
in motion a process, that of the resolving of existing repressions.
He can supervise this process, further it, remove obstacles in its
way, and he can undoubtedly vitiate much of it. But on the whole,
once begun, it goes its own way and does not allow either the
direction it takes or the order in which it picks up its points to be
prescribed for it. The analyst’s power over the symptoms of the
disease may thus be compared to male sexual potency. A man
can, it is true, beget a whole child, but even the strongest man
cannot create in the female organism a head alone or an arm or a
leg; he cannot even prescribe the child’s sex. He, too, only sets in
motion a highly complicated process, determined by events in the
remote past, which ends with the severance of the child from its
mother
(Freud 1913: 340, in S.E. 12: 130).
This definition emphasizes the unpredictability of the analytic process

and assigns the analyst the task of beginning it without in any way
controlling its direction or sequence. It is a model which places less emphasis
on a description of the interconnection between the analyst’s actions and the
patient’s responses (in Abend’s view, a “manufacturing model” [Abend
1990]), and it favors the idea that the conditions in which analysis takes place
and the nature of the analyst’s activity help facilitate a process within the
patient which is somehow independent and unpredictable. If we substantiate
this conception of the analytical process with Freud’s complex contribution
in A.T.I., we may discern the peculiarity that differentiates it rather radically
from the conception he first espoused. The process coincides with life itself
(thus in a certain sense it also has a naturalness, but is unpredictable just as
within an existence); it is not possible to circumscribe it and pursue well-
defined objectives, established from the start and verifiable along the way.
This conception of the process, as it is became increasingly refined with time,
was based on an idea of temporality which is bound, on the one hand, by
repetition-compulsion, and on the other hand by the temporalizing
mechanism of Nachträglichkeit. Additionally, it privileges the intrapsychic
level of change rather than the interpersonal influence formed by an intricate
network of interactions in continuous flux.
In order to conclude this first investigation, we would like to draw
attention to the theoretical necessity of situating the problem of the
termination of analysis in reference to the idea adopted of process, which
must be defined on two levels: that of the features which characterize it and
that of the instruments or means which make it possible. After seeking in the
long-distance dialogue between Freud and Ferenczi the original foundation of
a debate which is still open today, our next step is the indication of a research
perspective aimed at finding in later psychoanalytic reflection on the subject
the resumption and development of themes which do not lie so much in a
linear warp of monolithic sides – pro-Freud and pro-Ferenczi – as in
articulated and complex operations, which nonetheless form diversified
discursive orientations.
As proof of the heuristic value of this hypothesis, we remind the reader
of Balint’s formulation in the late 1940s of the central point of the question
pertaining to the termination of analysis:
Is the analytical cure a 'natural' or an 'artificial' process? i.e.

does the analyst's task consist only of removing the obstacles
created by the individual and social traumata—after which the
'natural' processes will take charge of the cure?
(a) If the answer is Yes, we may expect rather uniform
happenings in the end phase; […] or
(b) If the answer is No, we must expect widely varying
experiences in the end phase, dependent on—among other
factors—the degree of the overall maturity reached, on the
problems that happen to be the last ones to be dealt with, on the
personality of the analyst, etc.
Another formulation—using more general concepts—may
ask:
(1) Is health a natural state of equilibrium? i.e. do processes
exist in the mind which—if unhampered and undisturbed—would
lead the development towards that equilibrium? or (2) Is health
the result of a lucky chance, a rare or even an improbable event,
the reason being that its conditions are so stringent and so
numerous that the chances are very heavily weighted against it?
Analysts have not as yet been able to give a satisfactory
answer to these questions. Roughly there are two camps. It is
interesting to note that those who think that mature genitality is
not simply a chance sum total of a motley mixture of component
sexual instincts but a function per se, also think that health is a
'natural' equilibrium and the termination of a psycho-analytic
cure is a 'natural' process. And there is the other camp which
maintains fairly unanimously that health, the termination of an
analysis and mature genitality are similarly the result of the
interplay of so many forces, tendencies and influences that one is
not justified in assuming governing 'natural' processes.
(Balint 1950: 197).
We have quoted Balint at length because we find that the citation

lucidly condenses the essence of the debate dating back twenty years earlier:
the point of departure of numerous derivations of thought which we attempt
to retrace and highlight, exploring the possibility of making geographically
significant conceptual traditions emerge.
Two
After Freud: The Theme of Termination in the Mid-1900s
1. The first reactions: M. Schmideberg, O. Fenichel and E. Glover
If there were any immediate reactions to Freud’s essay, they were

private - for reasons which would be interesting to explore - and the
impending catastrophe of the war must have been a factor. In any case, we
should mention an article by M. Schmideberg (1938) and, especially, a
commentary by O. Fenichel (1974), which was written immediately after
A.T.I. and privately circulated, lost and finally published over thirty-five
years later. In the decade following the publication of A.T.I., the problem of
the termination of analysis reemerged only in the postwar period in the
debate over technique: the uproar caused by the dispute between Freud and
Ferenczi continued, though in a much less visible way and momentarily
obfuscated by new controversies which came to the fore.
Schmideberg’s essay richly describes the idealizations and resistances
hidden in the patient and in the analyst with regard to being “completely
analyzed”. She holds that little use is made of the term “narcissism” in
discussing the evaluation of analysis outcomes, and that there is a difference
between English and “continental” European analysts. The latter privileged
primary narcissism as the source of observed narcissistic manifestations,
neglecting the dynamic forces responsible for the regression to narcissism
itself (extreme ambivalence, paranoid anxieties, excessive demands of the
superego). The former appear to take a diametrically opposed view,
privileging secondary narcissism, mainly in terms of the relationship with
introjected objects and leaving aside the consequences of primary narcissism.
In our view, the interesting feature of this essay lies in a set of critical
considerations which, quite precociously receiving emerging tendencies,
prefigured the orientations and lines of psychoanalytic research in subsequent
decades. These considerations had to do above all with the way in which the
scientific debate over termination took shape. According to Schmideberg,
analysts seem inclined to discuss analytic work and the criteria for the cure in
ideal terms, as the symposia dedicated to the theory and criteria of
therapeutic success demonstrate. On the other hand, there are no data on the
nature and frequency of therapeutic success; the statistics are of little use due
to the scarcity of evaluative criteria and the lack of details; furthermore,
clinical cases are often incomplete. Formulations of the criteria for evaluating
analytical objectives are vague and partial, each privileging one aspect (for
example, reaching genitality or full object-relationship). Schmideberg

likewise criticizes the increasing tendency to prolong treatment and the
presence of preconceived ideas on the course or results of analysis, such as
the opinion that all patients must pass through a period of depression. Such a
period would thus become a sign of a satisfactory or deep analysis, when in
point of fact it might be due to an error in technique. As a result, a depressive
period might be induced during treatment or there might be an increase in the
spontaneous tendency to depression. For Schmideberg, this is an example of
the way in which theoretical expectations can act as counter-transference
features. At the end of her article she reminds us of the risk that analysis
provokes a sense of grandeur present in all analysts; mentioning Freud’s
essay in a note, she praises its moderate stance in recognition of the limits of
analysis.
The commentary by Fenichel was written immediately after A.T.I., but
it had limited and private circulation; it was lost and then was published only
much later. Fenichel holds a position which is respectful of the Freudian
essay but critical on each and every point. The focus of Fenichel’s criticism
concerns the Freudian thesis of the inopportuneness of reawakening silent
and latent conflicts or to act on the ones which are present but marked by an
excessive intensity. In other words, whereas Freud identifies the ego’s
distance from pathogenic situations as an ideal condition for treatment,
Fenichel on the contrary appreciates the ego’s involvement and the need for
eliminating or diminishing the distance often present in rationalizations.
Fenichel argues his critical position through the connection between ego
alterations and instinctual childhood conflicts: ego modifications - ones
which are active only in certain situations (phobic attitudes, for example) as
well as ones which have congealed in attitudes and personality traits - are the
product of the action of defense mechanisms which have prevented the
further development of what the ego has rejected. Here we can clearly
perceive the influence of Anna Freud’s writing on defense mechanisms and
the contemporary analytical tendency to treat ego alterations just like
symptoms. Fenichel is skeptical on two levels of another point in Freud’s
thought: the possibility that ego alterations are difficult to handle in analysis
because of a strong tendency to conflict, due in turn to the existence of the
destructive drive. If on the one hand he appears to doubt the existence of such
a drive, on the other he holds that the greater inclination to conflict exists in
those patients in whom the instinctual conflict simultaneously expresses a
structural conflict. Since persons with greater structural conflicts also have a
greater tendency to use drive-based energies for the suppression of other
drive demands, it is understandable that those who have greater tendency to
conflict also display a greater inclination toward self-destruction. Thus the
quantitative factor is historicized by Fenichel, whereas in Freud’s stance it is
biologized.
After Freud: The Theme of Termination in the Mid-1900s 29
According to Fenichel, the length and termination of analysis -

especially in training - is another subject which Freud’s essay treats too
summarily and skeptically. He believes that for the very reasons cited by
Freud, training analyses must be long and in-depth, though he recognizes that
this has nothing to do with attaining a “didactic normalcy”. Finally, with
regard to the question of bisexuality and the bedrock impeding analysis,
Fenichel calls for conceptual and clinical caution, since before turning to
biology, analytical theory and work must first consider social and
experiential factors. In conclusion, Fenichel positions himself as the
champion of psychoanalytic notions which privilege the analysis of character
and conflicts as the constant reference of analytic work, rejecting biology as a
limit on theory and therapy.
In Fenichel’s doubts and in the alternatives he proposes, we find an
echo – perhaps an unconscious one – of the influence of Ferenczi’s ideas: the
accent placed on historical features as opposed to biological ones in ego
development; the conviction that having lived experience present is more
important than cognitive distancing, which is a source of dangerous
rationalizations; and support for a more articulated and demanding
conception of training analysis. As we have already stated, it was not until
the late 1940s that the debate over the issue resumed, as can be seen through
panels and works by single authors. In particular, Glover’s perspective
appears for various reasons to be a useful guide to the state of the art of the
period. His attempt at a systemization of psychoanalytic technique, as
formulated in the second draft of The Technique of Psychoanalysis (1955),
arises from a study conducted in 1939 to assess the therapeutic practices of
psychoanalysis. This research demonstrates a widespread difference in the
adoption of procedures, thereby offering a complex picture in which growing
divergences over psychoanalytic theory were inscribed. The 1939 study in
turn takes on the role of testing and comparison with the ideas which
emerged in the aforementioned 1936 symposium of the British
Psychoanalytic Society. Glover dedicates an entire chapter to a comparison
between the concepts of active technique and waiting; this makes it clear how
much the problems posed by Ferenczi’s meditations on technique were still
alive and present, but remained largely unresolved. In an careful examination
of the evolution of the active technique, Glover - even as he stands by
transference interpretation as a fundamental technical resource - highlights
the importance of the contribution made by Ferenczi in his constant attention
to details like the enlargement of the limited transference field and the
problems posed by the analytical handling of periods of stagnation, and
“…the part…played by active injunctions in determining whether or not we
have reached the terminal phase” (Glover 1955: 181). It appears clear that he
attempts to keep as much as possible to the principles of abstinence and
analytical neutrality, and all the same, the importance of Ferenczi’s influence
is palpable in the elaboration and refinement of the concept of the terminal
phase and libidinal weaning, attributing to the analyst a more incisive if not
more directly active role.
In Glover’s book, we find another conspicuous trace of the debate
triggered by Ferenczi’s positions under the heading “term” in the
questionnaire prepared by the author. In particular, in discussing the
procedure for setting a term, Glover writes:
Two distinct issues are involved here. The more general

problem of “setting a term” was dragged out of its original context
by the controversy over “active” devices. Setting a period to
analysis and keeping to it were suggested by Ferenczi as
procedures calculated to force unconscious material with
consciousness. In view of the general feeling against “active”
devices…it may be assumed that this “forcing” aspect of term-
setting is no longer important. … But the policy of setting a term
as such still requires discussion. … However this may be, it seems
likely that the real cause of uncertainty as to setting a term lies in
doubt about the criteria of cure
(Glover 1955: 330-331).
Glover’s words point to a connection between three important aspects

of the question of termination: the correlation between the decision to
terminate and the criteria of evaluation, the conception of the terminal phase
as a specific phase in the analytic process, and insufficiently recognized
traces of Ferenczi’s thought.
Since Glover moved in the direction of a theory of technique based on a
binding declaration of the theoretical presuppositions to which he referred, he
appeared to be a guardian of Freudian orthodoxy, and this may have veiled
the influence in his work of intuitions and novelties introduced by Ferenczi.
A dialectic developed whose poles were represented, on the one hand, by
Glover, who was primarily engaged in an operation of consolidating the
theoretical bases of technique, and on the other hand, by Balint, who was
more interested in understanding the evolution of technique from a historical
point of view and exploring aspects which had been neglected up to that time,
such as making the analyst a principal object of observation. As Balint
replied to Glover’s challenge: “As long as we have hardly any well-founded
knowledge of the dynamisms governing the relation of the various technical
approaches to their respective theoretical findings, we have no choice but to
accept most analytic techniques as peers” (Balint 1952: 222).
Once again, we find the consequences of this opposition even in the
way in which the problem of the conclusion of analysis is treated. In the two
paragraphs devoted specifically to the terminal phase, Glover attempts to
furnish a systematic view of the problem. His intention is openly critical of
the tendency to deal with the question in an empirical manner that was
wholly intuitive and exempt from the necessary effort to transform intuitive
evaluations into clinical accounts which could be rendered more objective.
According to Glover, the key criterion to undergo close examination is the
one relative to the limits of analytical influence: the domain in which it is
exercised is transference neurosis, whose manifestations – regression,
fixation, and transference-resistances – if dealt with in analysis, can evolve
toward a modification in the order of identifications, with the analyst serving
as an auxiliary superego. Glover strongly insists on the need for instituting a
crucial test of the analytical process, whose conditions must be satisfied - at
least ideally - before an analysis can actually be considered complete. In his
opinion, however, it is often the case that not entirely reliable criteria prevail
in the decision to terminate, for example a symptomatic improvement,
external motives or a condition of stagnation. In contrast to the unreliability
of these criteria, Glover favors having as much confirming evidence as
possible to serve as an antidote to errors in judgment which can arise from
counter-transference reactions of boredom, impatience and optimism on the
analyst’s part. Among those items which can serve as confirming evidence,
special emphasis is placed on oneiric reactions to treatment (“review dreams”
[Glover 1955], etc.).
From Glover’s presentation we thus get a picture of a clearly delineated
termination phase with particular features -such as a marked regression, an
increase in fantasy and transference fixations, and an exacerbation of
symptoms - which can lend increasing importance to secondary gain, the
second line of defense against analysis. The reasons in favor of the need to
postulate a terminal phase and dedicate careful clinical attention to it seem to
be based on the consideration that the patient’s mind is dealing with a
regression from which he must be enabled to emerge before being dismissed.
As it is articulated, Glover’s position appears similar to Fenichel’s: both start
with the intention of deepening, widening and systematizing Freud’s thought,
only to find themselves at odds with the man who inspired them and
inadvertently close to Ferenczi. But Glover appears more pessimistic than
Fenichel when he concludes his work by recalling Sachs’s provocative
statement that the most complete analysis is little more than a scratch on the
surface of a continent.
2. The Resumption of the Debate in the Postwar Years
As some of the panels in the various psychoanalytic societies at the end

of the 1940s show, simultaneously or within a brief space of time, the theme
of the termination of analysis returned to the center of attention after a decade
of relative disinterest. To get a sense of the significance of the panels, here
are some of the titles: the Joint Meeting of the Psychoanalytical Societies of
Los Angeles and San Francisco and the Meeting of the British Psycho-
Analytic Society were respectively entitled On the Termination of

Psychoanalytic Treatment and Criteria for Termination of Analysis. The
French conferences of 1954-55 were entitled Critères pour la fin du
traitement and Comment terminer le traitement psychanalytique. These titles
indicate a convergence of aims in the attempt to bridge the gap between the
theoretical enunciation of analytic goals and the indiscriminate surveying of
consolidated practices, identifying an intermediate area in the definition of
the criteria and the indicators of the end - one which allows for the isolation
of some procedures and the explanation of their methodological foundation.
Despite this convergence of aims, it is precisely beginning with these panels
that we may start to identify the different conceptual orientations of analysts
from various geographic areas, and these orientations may essentially be
traced to the divergent ideas of process mentioned above.
2.1 The English Panel
The symposium of the British Psycho-Analytic Society was held in

1949, and the most important parts of the acts were published the following
year in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis together with two of the
three principal reports of the American panel held simultaneously. From its
title, cited above, the symposium clearly positioned itself in an ideal
continuity with the 1936 symposium on the criteria for evaluating therapeutic
success. As for the contents, we find a meticulous clarification of the
clinically useful criteria for determining termination, with an attention to
basing clinical judgment on the convergence of evidence as well as to
preserving the specificity of analytic treatment from other types of therapy. In
the panel, through the work on indicators - present above all in the talks by
Hoffer, Rickman and Bridger - we can see the effort to continue what Glover
had brought into view with his research.
Rickman (1950) in particular proposes seven specific criteria that
include various types of capabilities: to move easily from past to present as
an effect of overcoming infantile amnesia and the working-through of the
Oedipus complex; to tolerate libidinal frustrations and deprivations without
turning to regressive defenses; to tolerate aggressive impulses in oneself and
in others; mourning; heterosexual genital satisfaction; to work and even to
bear not working. This last criterion is a model which combines many
factors, each of which may have quantitative variations and a point of
irreversibility.
Hoffer (1950) in turn identifies three criteria for the termination of
treatment, following the method peculiar to psychoanalysis: an increase in
the degree of awareness of unconscious processes, an overcoming of
resistances and a reduction in repetition-compulsion. In his exposition, the
goals of analysis and the criteria for its termination are treated as
interchangeable. Hoffer insists on the need to identify purely psychological

criteria from which more spurious criteria may possibly arise, such as those
regarding the modification of symptoms and of psychosexual and social
relations. He attempts to rearrange the different types of criteria emerging
from Glover’s study, whose results had indicated differences between
intuitive, symptomatic, psychosexual and social parameters. In fact, Hoffer
reformulates the tacit agreement characterizing analytical procedure, which is
based - unlike psychotherapeutic ones - on the distinction between the
unconscious and the conscious and on the foundational constructs of
transference and resistance. The length of treatment and its termination entail
a necessary reference to these two perspectives, and they depend on the
analyst’s ability to treat transference neurosis broadly and deeply. In
examining the fate of transference neurosis in relation to the termination of
analysis, Hoffer stresses not so much the dissolution of the analysis itself, but
rather the patient’s identification with intense analytical activity as a learning
process. This formulation is considered more pertinent than the common one,
which is described as the substitution of the patient’s infantile superego with
the superego of the analyst. For Hoffer the emergence of transference
neurosis, creating an “identification in the ego with the analyst’s functions”,
is another psychological criterion for the termination of therapy.
Bridger (1950) begins by defining the analytical situation as a
“transitional community of two persons” created with the aim of changing
and reintegrating the patient’s object-relations, so as to progressively enable
him to bridge the gap between his own life and the analyst’s. According to
Bridger, placing an end to the existence of the transitional community in the
patient’s social life is dynamically different from terminating the analytical
process, because while the former is an event of the outside world, the latter
is the final result of a interior developmental process. The uniting of inner
and outer connections requires considering different schemes of reference in
the search for criteria to end the analysis. If, then, the forces operating in the
patient’s outer world can be evaluated only in light of the material brought in
all of its various forms, similarly, the exploration of the ways of dealing with
the end of the session cannot be taken as the sole criterion. Bridger proposes
the investigation of two sets of situations: the first includes the brief
interruptions that a patient experiences during analysis in coping between one
session and the next; the second, instead, includes those experiences of the
outside world which entail the end of a relationship, such as a change in work
or residence or events like a divorce, a death and so forth. In both sets it can
be useful to consider the forces at work and the circumstances prevailing at
the time of the separation events. Indeed, for Bridger, in the patient’s inner
world the division of time in intervals is not the same as that of the outside
world: for example, it may be expanded endlessly and coincide with a fantasy
which means “forever”, so that the patient’s capacity to tolerate the
estimation of real time in his inner world takes on great significance. Another
aspect of the question regards the many ways in which separation events take
place, whether they are provoked by the analyst, the patient or agreed upon.
On this basis, due to his specific knowledge acquired in the context of the
analytic situation, the analyst can construct developmental accounts
regarding the preparation of the patient for the ending event.
Alongside this careful and rigorous but not original work of

systematization, new points of view appear in the panel through the reports
given by M. Klein and M. Balint, each in its own way representing the
emergence of an ongoing, fervent and creative debate over object-relations in
English psychoanalysis. Indeed, it must be kept in mind that in England, from
the late 1930s until the end of the 1950s - but especially in the decade
following the war – there was a confrontation of deep and deeply contrasting
psychoanalytic conceptions, ranging from Fairbairn’s ideas on the object
nature of libido to those of Klein on the close connection between the death
instinct and Eros, the work of A. Freud and the Hampstead group on the role
of the ego, and Balint’s notions on the relationship between narcissism and
object-libido. Reflections of such debates on this book’s theme can be seen in
the different ways of conceiving the psychoanalytic process and its aims and
its outcomes, as we will attempt to clarify here below and in subsequent
sections.
The contribution of M. Klein (1950) centers on the enunciation of a
basic criterion which modifies the traditional points of reference in a
naturalistic sense and concerns the re-elaboration of persecutory and
depressive anxieties of the first year of life. However, this is a fundamentally
genetic criterion on which all of those other more well-known criteria are
seen to depend: a stable attainment of sexual potency and heterosexuality, a
consolidation of the ability to love and work, the ego’s acquisition of those
particular qualities which are related to psychic stability and to the use of
appropriate defenses. Klein underlines the significant shift in emphasis
deriving from her framework: she claims that in the evaluation of treatment,
attention is generally given to the two elements of the increase in psychic
stability and the enhanced sense of reality, while the expansion of ego depth
is ignored; this expansion is manifested through a rich fantasy life and an
enhanced capacity to feel even intense affect without reservations or
difficulty. Instead, she believes that the crucial point is precisely the
reduction of maniacal defenses which impede introspection, and the
reduction of splitting processes, insisting on the analysis of negative
transference as the sine qua non condition for an effective termination.
Despite the brevity of her paper (initially presented in 1949 at the IPA
Congress in Zurich and published in an even shorter version), the criterion
proposed by Klein, which assigns a decisive importance to the depressive
position, forms the groundwork for a line of thought which incisively
oriented numerous theorizations of the analytic process. The importance of
the depressive position is connected to the different mental quality of inner

processes, based on integration and on a modulation of annihilation anxieties,
which are in turn seen as an expression of the death drive. In Klein’s position
we see developments which are coherent with the Freudian notion of the
death drive as well as the influence of Ferenczi’s important discoveries
(Bonfiglio 1993). Among these developments, in particular, she offers a
description of splitting processes and an insistence on the necessity of
adequately analyzing negative transference as a fundamental part of the
termination phase, at the risk of keeping positive transference repressed or
favoring the persistence of an idealization which is not only excessive but
also defensive.
The ideas contained in Balint’s presentation (1950b) are just as bold,

despite the effort to link them to the consolidated sphere of classical theory.
Balint’s point of departure is the identification of three groups of criteria: the
first, that of the instinctual goals, implies genital primacy with the connected
ability to achieve full satisfaction; the second group examines the relationship
with instinctual objects; and the third considers the structure of the ego,
whose functions enable the individual to maintain uninterrupted contact with
reality, even under stress. Balint claims that although they are excellent, the
theoretical criteria for deciding whether an analysis has terminated, if tested
in real conditions, turn out to be perfectionist. He therefore proposes an
approach based on the clinical description of what takes place in the actual
analytical relationship during the termination of analysis, and with this intent
he elucidates the process which he describes elsewhere (Balint 1932) as a
“new cycle.” If this process is able to develop without obstacles, a
surprisingly uniform experience dominates the last period of treatment: the
patient feels that he is beginning to undergo a form of rebirth, to enter into a
new life, to have reached the end of a dark tunnel and to see the light after a
long journey; moreover, he experiences a great feeling of freedom. Balint
writes that the general atmosphere is one of taking leave of something very
dear and precious, with the related suffering and mourning which are sincere
and deeply felt, yet mitigated by the sense of security derived from the
recently acquired prospects for true happiness. In Balint’s description, in the
termination of a satisfactory analysis, the patient leaves with tears in his eyes,
provoking similar feelings in the analyst.
In Balint’s paper, we find both the effort to rethink classical objectives
– make the unconscious conscious, overcome resistances and abolish
infantile amnesia – whose full achievement is underlined as impossible,
according to the Freudian conception of analysis as a never-ending task, as
well as in the reception of Ferenczi’s notion of “renewal”. With regard to the
former, Balint had previously written the following: “it is generally known
that even analysed people still dream, and that dream analysis encounters
resistance with them also” (Balint 1936: 208). At the same time, Balint’s
vision of the termination of analysis reflects the general features of his

thought, consistently marked by a historical perspective and an interest in the
variable of the analyst. With regard to the importance of the figure of the
analyst, in the preceding decade (M. Balint and A. Balint 1939) he offered
some examples of termination to demonstrate how each analyst has his own
way of proceeding which can be easily generalized as “the right one”,
thereby fostering “the narcissism of small differences.” Balint was instead
interested in developing what risked becoming a sterile debate over the “right
technique” into a theoretical-clinical perspective which established the need
for investigating the analyst’s movements, and he arrived at a psychoanalytic
practice based on the recognition that analysis is much more than a technique
– fully appearing to be a relationship between two persons.
It should once again be recalled that those years were close to the
famous debates between A. Freud and M. Klein, which Balint’s work reflects
without creating two rigid oppositions. Thus he places himself in line with
research by object-relations theorists to arrive at - in disagreement with
Freud’s notion of primary narcissism - the theoretical basis for a
reformulation of the termination of therapy: the hypothesis of primary object
love. Balint describes the following sequence: paranoid attitude, depression
and love for the primary object which indicates in the depression the
necessary precursor for any “new beginning” (Balint 1932, 1950b). It is clear
and moreover explicitly recognized by Balint that this formulation bears the
influence of Klein and D. Lagache, who both contributed to his
understanding of the “new beginning.” Additionally, recalling Freud’s unease
with regressive phenomena, he believes that it was an error to have neglected
them and he reconsiders them in the light of the “new beginning” concept,
which in turn echoes Ferenczi’s concept of renewal. Regression is therefore
assigned a decisive importance for terminating analysis in an appropriate
manner: it is understood to be the necessary passage to reverse the process
and bring it back to starting conditions. In this view, a parallelism is implicit
between the pathogenic process and the course of the therapeutic process,
which is in turn based on a correspondence between the genesis of the
psychic disorder and the journey backwards which utilizes regression as a
therapeutic factor.
Balint links his own way of understanding the intra-analytic relation to
the hypotheses of archaic object relation: in later years this perspective
induced him to further examine the concept of regression, which he placed in
relation to the notion of equilibrium and health. It is precisely in this context
that he discusses the problem of the termination of analysis, through the
reflection cited above regarding analytical treatment as a natural or artificial
process, echoed in another formulation of the same question: Is nature a
natural state of equilibrium or the result of a fortunate chance, a rare and even
improbable event? Here he delineates two positions: for the first, the end of
psychoanalytic treatment is the end of a natural process; whereas the second -
invalidating the notion of a predominance of natural processes –

consequently conceives the end of therapy as a largely unpredictable event.
To Ferenczi’s concept of a natural end, Balint adds that of the “new cycle” in
which various and complex insights converge: the importance of mourning;
the role of regression; primary love as the source and origin of human
libidinal development, whose original goal is the desire to be loved without
reservation and without obligations. An important corollary to this point of
view is the recognition of the importance of the emotional environment from
which the one-time infant and regressed patient in analysis is exceedingly
dependent, and consequently a reevaluation of the external factors in the
constitution of the pathology. In this reappraisal of endogenous factors, we
recognize the weight of Ferenczi’s ideas on trauma and the work examining
regression, which has important implications on the level of interpretive
technique and the understanding of therapeutic agents in the analytical
situation. This route leads to a definition of the analytic process not so much
as a repetition of the past - which would prioritize the necessity of
interpretive work - as instead a creation which requires recognition of what
did not take place. In this way, Balint’s ideas hint at an intrinsic link between
progress and regression which can take on various forms: from the regressive
movements that modulate progressive ones to regression that blocks
development, from regression that becomes more intense in the termination
phase to regression that - as Winnicott would later emphasize - can imply the
possibility of a developmental reactivation of consolidated situations of lack.
In summation, we may certainly claim that the ideas of Klein and Balint
offer a great contribution to the concept of analytic process in terms of the
second of the positions outlined above: through Balint’s theorization of an
experience termed “new cycle”, which is surprisingly uniform in last period
of therapy, and through Klein’s identification of the achievement of the
depressive position as a decisive criterion for termination. These authors’
perspectives have significant points in common, both of them being located
in the theoretical area of object-relations and referring to a theorization of the
analytical process articulated in typical, subsequent sequences. The Freudian
analogy between analytical process and the course of life is, on the one hand,
circumscribed, and on the other, intensified in the direction of a connection
between analytic and growth processes. In subsequent decades, this tendency
resulted in the attempt to make the analogy into an actual isomorphism. In
point of fact, these two authors’ ideas on the termination of analysis turned
out to have rather different fates, because the theoretical elaboration of the
depressive position as a central point in mental development came to prevail
as a real paradigm destined to influence at length the reading of the
developmental directions of the analytical process, while Balint’s ideas,
perhaps because they were more problematic, did not give rise to an actual
school.
2.2 The American Panel
The presentations at the Joint Meeting of the Psychoanalytical Societies

of Los Angeles and San Francisco also attempted to orient the discussion
around a more specific discourse of technique within the wider theoretical
context relative to the goals and aims of the analytic process. The paper by
Buxbaum (1950) starts with a wider discussion of the difference between
therapeutic and analytic results, reaffirming the Freudian formulation that the
task of analysis is to assure the best conditions for ego functioning.
Additionally, Buxbaum’s formulation further extends and expresses Jones’s
in placing an emphasis gaining of greater freedom for the ego and greater
self-control of the whole personality. Only after having defined the basic
criterion serving as a backdrop to the analytic process does Buxbaum takes
on the problem of technique, where she focuses on two aspects in particular:
the features of transference in the terminal phase and the question of timing.
The latter is explored with acute clinical sensitivity through various analytical
experiences which show the analyst’s willingness – through an expert use of
counter-transference - to activate the procedure for ending through the
patient’s core situation and his particular character structure. The most
important lesson to be drawn from this is to recognize a quite significant part
of the analytic work in the complex route of arriving at setting a date for
termination, and this work is often closely related to the subject’s crucial
problem. Indeed, the vicissitudes of termination frequently renew the
traumatic charge of some fundamental experiences, which in these final
delicate moments get relived and worked-through again through a solution
that differs from the original one. An important role is attributed to analytical
interruptions as both indicators of readiness to terminate and preparatory
intervals. Alexander had already suggested working up to suspension with
one or more preparatory intervals which could initially be imposed, with the
plan that after a number of such programmed interventions to reassure the
patient that he could return to analysis, the non-artificial end could become a
“natural” termination.
A. Reich’s presentation (1950) begins with a comparison between
Ferenczi’s and Freud’s texts, highlighting the important points. Of the first,
Reich indicates in particular the preconditions for an analysis to be able to be
considered “complete”, a wide-ranging investigation of character traits
utilizing all of the expressions and peculiarities in gesture and posture, as
well as the analysis of the patient’s hidden mistrust of the analyst. Of Freud’s
skeptical and cautious position, Reich cites attention to elements that frustrate
therapeutic efforts: the intensity and tenaciousness of the libido, together with
the ego’s weakness. These three elements are frequently expressed in
uncontrollable and unanalyzable transference configurations, echoing the
considerations Freud already made in his work on transference love. Reich
concentrates her attention on the problem of the resolution of transference
and expresses motivated reservations regarding Ferenczi’s optimistic claim of

a complete dissolution of transference and the end of analysis by exhaustion.
Although she confirms Ferenczi’s observations about the infantile nature of
the bond with the analyst, she notes that this bond can evolve, giving rise to
outcomes such as the need to maintain in contact with the analyst and
construct a friendly relationship with him. In any case, for Reich this proves
the persistence of transference and the need for evaluating with great caution
the relationships which the patient enters into, often headlong, in
concomitance with the termination of analysis, as a means of overcoming his
disappointment for the loss of the analyst. If, on the one hand, there are
always residues of unresolved transference, on the other hand, the mourning
reaction is not only the repetition of a childhood experience but also the
expression of a specific relationship created in reality, and which has
provided the special gratification of unlimited attention. The reports in this
panel demonstrate in an exemplary fashion how the debate over termination
in analysis continued to gravitate around Freud’s and Ferenczi’s conceptual
elaborations, almost always combining them in multiple combinations.
2.3 The French Symposia
Although they shared their denomination with the English and

American meetings, the symposia of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris -
whose participants included Bouvet (1954, 1955), Nacht (1954, 1955), Held
(1954), and Shentoub – focused on different aspects of the theme of
termination, in this way prefiguring the specificity of French
psychoanalysis’s contribution. These symposia tended to explore the role of
intuition and the dynamics of counter-transference in the end of analysis, thus
embracing one of the most insistent indications of Freud’s text: the
exploration of obstacles. These authors nonetheless maintained a connection
with Ferenczi’s ideas through continuous mention of the analyst’s “presence”
as the representative of outside reality, in addition to citing counter-
transference and the variations in setting and interpretive technique in the
terminating phase.
In his presentation at the second symposium (1955), Nacht dwells in
particular on the problem of ending interminable analysis and attempts to
elaborate explanatory hypotheses of interminability. He concentrates on
disturbances at the level of transference/counter-transference exchanges and
in particular on the irreducibility of transference neurosis when infantile
tendencies expressed in it have ample opportunities for satisfaction in the
analytical situation, even though the analyst follows classical technique
faithfully. On this basis Nacht argues for the necessity of introducing
technical modifications in therapy and abandoning the attitude of benevolent
neutrality of the early phases. In his view, this is necessary because during
some therapies, it happens that the analyst intuits that a patient who appeared
up to a certain moment to be virtually cured tends to be really cured, and
despite this the patient still hesitates to abandon the infantile and fantastic
world which prolongs analysis in order to undertake a direction in his
behavior which would lead him to face the adult world. In this moment of
essential importance, the analyst’s neutrality - up to this point indispensable -
can become an obstacle to carrying out the process, and if interpretive
technique is aiming only for the interpretation of instincts, it can impede the
subject’s real contact with the object. Nacht therefore proposes deliberately
orienting the patient toward reality through interpretations directed to
behavior outside of the analytic relationship and focusing on actual behavior
and the way of reinvesting energies freed up through analysis. This change in
technique must be carefully distinguished from the active attitude adopted by
Ferenczi: Nacht insists on the concept of “presence” with which the patient
may find it useful to clash, oppose or even engage, whereas the classical
attitude of analytic neutrality provides him only with an image constructed
essentially by his subjective projections.
In the 1954 symposium, Bouvet cites Nacht’s ideas, enunciated in
structural terms according to which the reestablishment of proper functioning
of the three agencies - and in particular of the ego’s mastery over drive
activities and over the superego - forms the main criterion for the decision to
end analysis. Since in Nacht this goal is fully meaningful only if the
transference bonds (both positive and negative) are sufficiently loose, we are
actually dealing here with a general theorization of the process of termination
which is not significantly dissimilar from Glover’s. Likewise, in reproposing
the importance of a convergence of signs and, on the contrary, the
uselessness of isolated criteria, Bouvet notes criteria such as the possibility of
actually applying the rule of free associations or a change in the patient’s
object-relations. Nonetheless, despite the apparent harmony of their
perspectives, Bouvet assigns a crucial role to “intuitive perception” of a
certain state of the subject as a real turning point which only in a later
moment will be followed by the search for criteria and their objectivization.
Thus Bouvet, here again following Nacht – who spoke of “global
perception”, just as Fenichel had written of the “click of truth” – suggests that
the criterion of cure be placed within a framework of an intuition of the
whole present in the analyst in a given moment, that the subject has
undertaken a new way of being which will ensure a plausible irreversibility
of his insights and the possibility of maintaining them outside of analytical
control, the transference relationship having become useless. In this view, the
criteria outlined are utilized above all as elements for rectifying an inner
experience which, although it might seem transitory, still remains the key
moment of the decision to conclude. On the contrary, the lack of this so-
called “click of truth” should induce one to be suspicious.
The following year, Bouvet extended the positions expressed in the first
symposium with a paper considering two particularly insidious forms of
counter-transference that can operate in the analytical relation. The entire
paper deals with the dilemma, already described by Freud in A.T.I, as to
whether particularly arduous analyses are to be attributed to id resistances or
to errors in technique. The precise reference to some aspects of the active
technique proposed by Nacht - such as a lack of regularity in sessions, the
interpretation of external behavior and the more summary and infrequent
character of interventions aimed at dissolving the transference bond - does
not, however, establish a motive for aligning Bouvet with Nacht, despite the
fact that they belong to the same theoretical-clinical school. Much more
cautiously, Bouvet declares using a “casual” reduction in the number of
sessions in a pre-terminal phase as a means of testing, likening this
circumstance to the subject’s suffering due to an accidental lack. The use of
prolonged weaning appears feasible to Bouvet if the analysis is sufficiently
advanced, because its consequences can be predicted and tailored
commensurate to the subject; moreover, it can turn out to be useful as an
indicator of the reactions to the frustration which, made evident to the patient,
can clarify the analytical situation and get the end of analysis underway. One
gathers the impression that Bouvet’s paper is an attempt at a uneasy balance
between the flexibility of the procedure for termination to be adapted to
individual and often complex analytical relationships, and the adherence to
some basic, informing principles which lie in a transference attitude of
simultaneous understanding and detachment. The influence of counter-
transference in the decision to terminate and the role of intuition as a reliable
criterion are further examined by Held (1955), who proposes an interesting
typology of patients in relation to the problem of eliminating transference and
its residues.
The talks in these symposia have as a particular connotation the effort
to explore the role of intuition and to examine the dynamic of counter-
transference in the termination of analysis, this latter theme also being
present, though with different aspects, in the late works of both Freud and
Ferenczi. In particular, the authors return to Ferenczi’s theme of “tact” and
the role of the analyst by underlining the analyst’s presence. In Nacht, this
takes place through the technical modifications of therapy aimed at favoring
an object contact in the analytical relationship and through interpretative
activity that privileges external reality (even if Nacht makes a point of
rejecting the Ferenczian sense of the analyst’s activity). In Bouvet, the
analyst’s activity, conceived as the agent of potentially traumatic external
reality, functions as a probe for gauging the patient’s reactions. Thus the
analyst’s activity, here too distinguished from Ferenczi’s position, aims at
reaching an intuitive perception of the patient’s state.
Three
Theoretical Developments and Modern Orientations
After the contributions made in the 1950s, the specific theme of

termination in analysis was dealt with in sporadic writings or expositions
which can be inferred from broader themes regarding psychoanalytic process
and its aims and goals. This was especially true of European psychoanalysis,
of which we will examine two specific treatments related to our central theme
of interest, chosen because they are fully paradigmatic of the emerging
conceptual tendencies. With regard to the first, as in the case of the symposia
just discussed above, we are again dealing with a collective production
deduced from the sole meeting held in France on the subject, entitled En
relisant en 1966 “Analyse terminée et analyse interminable”, whose acts
were published two years later and in which all of the most authoritative
analysts of the period participated. The second position is, instead, that of a
single author, Meltzer. We have chosen Meltzer because he is representative
of the Kleinian model, developed into its most articulated and complex
formulation in his work. The arbitrariness of the comparison of these two
types of contributions is, in our view, to some extent mitigated by their
contemporaneousness.
1. European Psychoanalysis
The conception of process proposed by Meltzer (1967) is based on a

single, rigorously analytic criterion, that of the evolution of transference, and
on the reference to termination as a final phase “in the natural history of the
process.” Quite meaningfully, this phase is termed “weaning” and its features
are identified in a convergence of signs (the structure and typology of
dreams, an increase in collaboration, etc.) which testify to the recognition of
the primacy of psychic reality. According to Meltzer, the patient’s sudden
collaboration and interest in the analytic work and the emergence of a
particular type of dream - called “ricapitulating” or “inspirational” – are
important features. An additional element characterizing the process of
termination is the working-through of mourning. Following Freud’s intuition
regarding the necessity of the patient to renounce his expectations and
recriminations of the object, mourning is further explored and described as
psychic work related to the abandonment of a set of typical infantile
expectations and desires through the experience of the pain of integration.
For Meltzer, these phenomena reflect two fundamental insights of this phase:
the recognition of an introjective infantile dependency on the mother’s breast,
and second, the differentiation of the levels through which the more mature
part of personality begins to develop its own capacities of introspection,
thought and responsibility through introjective identification.
In Meltzer’s conception, process and cure are no longer represented in
exclusively dynamic terms (modification of the defenses), or economic terms
(ability to bear psychic suffering), but also in terms of personality
development, with reference to the structuring and organization of self as
well as to internal objects. Meltzer’s position represents the most fully
developed attempt to establish an isomorphism between analytic process and
psychic development. The Kleinian perspective was later taken back up in the
work of J. Steiner, which will be discussed below.
Let us now briefly review the French papers in the aforementioned
meeting, whose title seems to suggest an attempt to bring A.T.I up to date. J.
Rouart (1968) proposes to place the “heroic” Freudian measure in a counter-
transference framework, emphasizing that this would permit movement from
a resistance “of” transference to a resistance “to” transference. For Rouart,
the discussion over the “natural” end of analysis has evolved in the direction
of an understanding of the meaning and definition of the end of treatment, the
possibility of its existence, and technical questions and difficulties related to
it. As for the question of a complete cure, Rouart mentions that the relativity
of the concept of cure was underlined in the French meeting of 1954,
indicating the idealized and static aspects of the conception of health as
perfect psychic equilibrium. After a meticulous analysis of the factors of
irreducibility in Freud’s essay (repressed male homosexuality, femininity and
penis envy, the role of pregenital elements and ego alterations), Rouart
claims that progress on these fronts must be evaluated on two levels: one of
technical and theoretical clarification, in connection with the possibility of
deepening the analysis and overcoming particularly strong resistances; and
that of considering the positive aspects which are structuring and fruitful for
ego organization and for the therapeutic working-through of repressed
homosexuality, penis envy and narcissism, characterized by Freud solely in
terms of their negative features as obstacles. According to Rouart, the
“residual phenomena” described by Freud are impossible to eliminate and not
very residual, in that the psychic system includes elements and components
of differing complexity and levels of development. The author also recalls the
difference of approach between Freud and Ferenczi, with the latter’s greater
attention to counter-transference and greater faith in the possibility of
overcoming the Freudian bedrock.
J.-A. Gendrot (1968) sees Freud’s essay as a dialectic between the
theoretical necessity of placing an end to the duration of the analytical
therapy and the theoretical desire to analyze the sources of neurosis at their
very roots. Reflecting on the means and results of analysis, Gendrot asks
Theoretical Developments and Modern Orientations 45
whether or not analysis is a treatment and enquires about the goals which it
has for the patient and the analyst. He claims that for Freud the notions of
cure and termination of analysis do not coincide, at least in the deepest
conception of cure (as can be seen by Freud’s writing regarding the Wolf
Man). On this point, Gendrot states, contemporary analysts know perfectly
well that it is possible to be cured in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of
society without ever having completed analysis and vice versa. As for the
aims of analysis, on the one hand these depend on the theoretical assumption
relative to the conditions to be respected to obtain the most definitive
resolution possible of the neurotic conflict (as in the case of Freud’s decision
to establish an end to the analysis of the Wolf Man in the attempt to clarify
his infantile neurosis). On the other hand, there are transference and counter-
transference elements of the analytical relationship that intervene, such as the
analyst’s desire to cure the patient. Gendrot then identifies three different sets
of criteria for the termination of analysis. First, there are ones connected to
scientific research which vary with the state of knowledge, the dominant
tendency, the scientific group, etc., with significant eroticized and idealized
elements. In the second set, Gendrot cites the analysts themselves in their
concrete and individual activity. Here he recalls the varying opinions of
training analysts regarding the degree of depth in training analysis; he
observes that therapeutic analyses, in terms of their success and goals, both
compare and contrast with medicine. Nonetheless, Gendrot feels that we must
ask if the real goal of analysis is the cure of illness, and if not, what it
actually is. Finally, the third type of criteria has to do with the patient’s goals.
Aside from aspiring analysts, for whom the author claims that true analysis is
self-analysis after training, the goals of the patient are interconnected with
those of the analyst: they are all known but difficult to define, especially in
advance. According to the author, the impossibility of speaking of the
analysis in terms of results is definitive: this corresponds to the notion of the
“ego resistance that opposes the discovery of resistances.” However much we
may hope for progress in the power of analysis and in the extension of its
application, an insuperable form of ego resistance remains which is
incessantly renewed and which expresses a human being’s originality. This
makes it necessary for the analyst to keep in mind the influence of normal
ego ideal, which always lies in ambush. Gendrot concludes with the opinion
that the essential part of analysis does not lie in a therapeutic ideal and that
analysis is not a lesson. This is a question that confronts each and every
unconscious, a permanent interrogative and therefore interminable: cure and
its meaning belong to the person who undergoes analysis. The tolerance
inherent in this view is perhaps one of the principle advances made in
psychoanalysis since A.T.I.
R. Diatkine (1968) reverses Gendrot’s framework and claims that
psychoanalysis has overturned the concept of therapy in psychiatry and has
radically transformed the concepts of normality and pathology. He asserts
that the interrelation between clinical work and metapsychology is valid, and
that the definition of outcome in psychoanalysis has followed the
development of theory. Nonetheless, according to Diatkine, the formulations
have preserved their initial value, even if their range has been perhaps greatly
reduced, from the early ones (like “the hysteric suffers from reminiscences”)
to final ones (like “where id was, there ego shall be”). In the former case, the
analytic goal is the recovery of memories, in the latter, the integration of
drive energy and rebalancing of the ego-superego dynamic. The end of
analysis is connected to the ego’s achievement of a level of energetic waste
that is minimal or less than in the past, connected to the conflicts between the
psychic agencies manifested in repetitive behavior, in limitations of
investments or in the level of ego activity. The quality of insight rather than
the quantity of analyzed material informs the work carried out.
S. Lebovici (1968) explores the last part of Freud’s essay in particular
(the rejection of feminine passivity in the male and the lack of renunciation
of the phallic claim in the female). He elaborates his considerations on both
the technical and theoretical levels: Lebovici observes that the concept of
cure in analysis not only differs from the medical-psychiatric one, but it also
possesses a fundamental ambiguity, for which the aim of rendering conscious
the unconscious, for example, takes on a different meaning according to the
theoretical (metapsychological) context chosen. The author then recalls that
negative transference was initially dealt with by French analysts in the form
of negative transference elements to be revealed to the patient as such or in
relation to his aggression. The perspective subsequently changed, drawing
closer to Freud’s position on the uselessness of “unmasking” the patient.
According to Lebovici, the anti-authoritarian attitude which analysts began to
assume in the wake of Freud, with the renunciation of a prescription for the
end of therapy, opened the doors to the search for a natural termination
respectful of the patient’s freedom. Concluding, the author emphasizes how
the question of id resistance has not been dealt with and receives little
attention, whereas he feels that we should better understand the play of drive
mixtures and remixing in the organization of personality as well as their
weight in the indications and contraindications of analysis. In this regard,
Lebovici cites the Freudian oscillation between the historicity and specificity
of individual development and the importance of quantitative, energetic and
economic factors.
M. de M’Uzan (1968) begins with Freud’s ideas regarding traumatic
aetiology – that it is the one which allows for the greatest success in analysis
- and the best results provided by analytic work when pathogenic events
belong to the past. He introduces time as past time and the capacity for
temporizing, claiming that among the events belonging to the past there are
certainly some that can, thanks to transference, be both early and
contemporary. Consequently, it is not surprising that the cases in which
pathogenic events belonging to both the past and the present are the ones
which offer the greatest opportunities for analytic intervention. The author
proposes substituting the terminated/interminable analysis contrast with that
of elimination/non-elimination of transference neurosis and, as a logical
consequence, that of formation/non-formation of the transference neurosis.
This reasoning leads to the following statement: interminable analyses are
those in which a real transference neurosis has not formed; analyses in which
this sort of neurosis has developed and been worked through are the ones
which evolve naturally toward termination. De M’Uzan then links
transference neurosis to what he defines as the category of the past, which he
believes to be inextricably bound to the possibility of a termination of the
analysis. In fact, the possibility of reconstructing and creating the past in
place of an amalgam of lived experiences is indispensable for the
development of such a neurosis and, a fortiori, for its elimination. The author
then deals with the question of ego modification, distinguishing between two
types: in the first, as is commonly known, there are cases in which the
patients are capable of reconstructing the past and creating it in their talk. The
second type, on the contrary, is expressed in a “archipelago personality” in
which the circulation of representations is limited or impossible.
C. David (1968) was also interested in the temporal level; for him, the
questions raised by Freud introduce the problem of time in psychoanalysis, in
the sense of a dialectic of temporality and timelessness. This happens because
Freud invokes the opposition between primary and secondary processes in
the most important moments of his theoretical work in order to better pose
the problem of therapy’s limits and the obstacles to cure. The question of
analyzability is situated according to the coordinates of time and
timelessness, or in other words, according to the whether or not unconscious
psychism can be influenced by the process of psychoanalytic therapy. The
author then points to the connection between temporality and timelessness
and the principle of drive duality, just as with the analyzable/non-analyzable
pair on the clinical level.
After presenting a meticulous list of observational data and techniques
utilized drawn from Freud’s work, M. Bénassy (1968) deals with two
questions: the drives (the quantitative factor) and ego alterations. With
reference to the former, Bénassy claims that the quantitative factor in Freud
is to be understood in a more formal sense rather than a literal one: Freud
would not have thought in terms of literal quantities, but rather in terms of
proportion and relation, thus keeping to a formal, fully scientific level.
Moreover, he considers that in the context of Freud’s work, the drives stand
for the biological and the ego for the psychological, and he attempts to
demonstrate how an erroneous appreciation of Fechner’s law led Freud to
conceive of the quantitative and the relation between drive processes and ego
process according to this mistaken judgment, thus establishing a hypothetical
relationship between biology and phenomenology. Bénassy believes that
Freudian biology is actually philosophical, and that the life and death he
speaks of should be distinguished in biological and phenomenological

meanings, the latter being the one which found its place in analysis as the
mode of relationship as a couple. His conclusion is that the biological in
analysis is more like a projection of lived experience, a philosophical
biological more than a scientific one. As for the question of ego alterations,
the author argues that here, too, there is a call to the biological, to the extent
that ego is at least in part congenital and inherited. Additionally, Bénassy
claims that Freud confuses the hereditary with the irreversibly acquired, and
he cites Freud’s sympathy for Lamarck’s ideas, by then wholly discredited.
Furthermore, we may reject Freud’s statement that the distinction between
ego and id loses value for analytical research if the properties of the ego can
be inherited as well as acquired with the consideration that the loss of value
regards the biological level of discourse but not the phenomenological one.
This means that the distinction between ego and id has descriptive, not
explanatory, value. The conclusion of the article is that the biological is
somehow modifiable. Failures may be due to counter-transference more than
to the biological, and the latter itself may appear as the fantasy of the distance
between the analyst and patient, between Freud and his patients, unlike what
happened with Ferenczi.
Both R. Barande (1968) and J. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1968) continue to
argue against Freud’s notion of biological limit. Barande criticizes the
Freudian stance on the death instinct and castration as biological facts,
finding contradictions and inconsistencies in A.T.I For him, Freud’s notion
arises from difficulties in counter-transference and is dangerously susceptible
to favoring the interminability of analysis, precisely in that it is an expression
of counter-transference. The paper by Chasseguet-Smirgel focuses on a
criticism of Freud’s conception of the biological limit to analysis as found in
female penis envy. She believes that this envy is not the bedrock and
proposes differentiating an authentic desire from defense, underlining the
importance of the symbolic character of the penis.
The considerations in M. Fain (1968) regard the economic factor and
repetition: an interminable analysis corresponds to a blocked psychoanalytic
process, stiffened by repetition and therefore prematurely terminated, where
at best it might end only with life itself. The patient’s position of neutralizing
the analyst’s interpretations may easily correspond to the analyst’s counter-
transference position of intervening to a degree thought more powerful and
less subtle, as in attempts to shorten the analysis. Within the discussion held
at the Conference, we cite P. Luquet’s (1968) proposal of distinguishing
between a global process - which does not terminate with the end of analysis
and tends to make the communication between the conscious and the
unconscious as free as possible through the mediation of the preconscious -
and a process of cure, which is the transference process. J. Kestenberg’s
(1968) conclusions identify four lines of thought in the symposium:
1. the problem of analyzability, which in turn implies terminability. Here, the

economic aspect is an important one, especially the weight and role for the
subject of whatever will not be placed in motion by the analysis;
2. the Freudian bedrock: if penis envy and passive homosexuality are
recognizable as fantasy more than as real biologically based castration, the
layer is no longer bedrock nor monolithic. Furthermore, it must be
distinguished from authentic desire and defense, the former bearing a
structuring value;
3. the death drive and repetition-compulsion as its manifestation. The former
remains problematic on a clinical level, the latter should be studied further
both on the patient’s and the analyst’s (counter-transference) parts;
4. the theoretical implications of overcoming the bedrock. Kestemberg
believes that the question remains open regarding the self and how to
introduce technical means and important variations when transference
neurosis is not organized, and he considers that the analytic attitude has
changed with increased tolerance. The need for clarification no longer centers
on the level of ego resistance but on that of id resistance, which remains a
complex and insufficiently understood notion.
We have dwelled on this panel at length because it offers a general and

essential profile of the characteristics of French psychoanalysis’s contribution
on the theme of termination. Starting with a critical reflection on the medical-
psychiatric elements of the psychoanalytic model of therapy and cure, the
discussion centers on the fundamental point of the Freudian image of the
“bedrock”, with an investigation moving in two directions. On the one hand,
there is a recognition - expressed in a particularly effective manner by
Gendrot - of the interminable aspects of analysis as a permanent and
inexhaustible questioning of the unconscious, a limit which is therefore
insurmountable; on the other hand, there is in-depth work on the biological
aspects of the bedrock, which have been eroded both in the greater attention
to the relational factors of narcissistic organizations as well as the
investigation of the role of counter-transference as a co-determinant of
interminability. The other theme which appears central to investigation for
the French is that of temporality.
From these specific connotations, moreover, it is possible to perceive
the different framework characterizing the French contributions as compared
with the English psychoanalysts (the Kleinian ones in particular). While the
latter underline the meaning and the role of loss and mourning in the
termination of analysis and propose the working-through and resolution of
persecutory and depressive anxieties as a criterion for evaluating termination,
the former place an emphasis on the role played in favor of analytic success
by anal and homosexual genital structurations, with the possibility of
identification that these allow. Indeed, the French psychoanalytic milieu is
intensely devoted to the Freudian position by way of the privilege given to
instinct theory and metapsychology: The Oedipus complex and pre-Oedipal

stages or situations are seen precisely in terms of drive and not object. If
anything, there is an attempt to widen the Freudian discourse in the direction
of problematizing and overcoming the biological “bedrock”, that is, the limits
set by Freud held to be limits of metapsychological reasoning even more than
evidence of an insuperable exterior.
Additionally, the French writers seem to conceive the analytic process
not in terms of development, but instead according to a Freudian perspective
of deferred action, in which temporality plays a particular, non-progressive
role which remains to be explored. Nachträglichkeit (après-coup) is a
cornerstone of psychoanalysis in the French writers, in that it articulates time
and memory in the metapsychological and clinical understanding of
psychoanalytic processes. For example, in Pontalis (1986), and even more so
in Laplanche (1991), we find an attempt to go beyond the Freudian
archaeological metaphor with its related suggestions of a genetic-
evolutionary linearity, proposing a dynamic vision of the unconscious
processes and of psychoanalytic process itself, seen to be characterized by the
endless production of unconscious contents. In particular, claiming that
psychoanalysis as situation and as therapy cannot be infinite, Laplanche
(1987) argues that termination exists and has to do with the “transference of
transference”, not its dissolution. The difficulty of the task lies in grasping
the key moment in which this transference is possible. He proposes the image
of unlimited, well-defined “temporal windows” during which it is possible to
send an object into orbit around a planet: analogously, there are definite
moments in which the end of analysis can be decided, in the absence of
which the cycle resumes as a sort of spiral.
As mentioned above, the interest in the concept of Nachträglichkeit and
the underlying vision of time in psychism induces French psychoanalytic
thought to privilege topographical and dynamic meaning more than the
genetic and chronological one of the analytic process and regression. In this
perspective, the analogy between psychoanalytic and development processes
is weakened; temporality is led back to the dialect of primary and secondary
process and to Freud’s dual-phase vision of psychic structuring; and finally,
regression is understood as destructuring rather than an accurate return to the
past and resumption of a preceding instinctual stage.
2. American Psychoanalysis
The interest of American analysts in the theme of the termination of

analysis, unlike that of the Europeans, is more systematic and combines a
predominantly theoretical reflection, aimed at updating1 Freud’s essay
through new insights of general psychology and developmental psychology
(as in the panel of the American Psychoanalytic Association of 1962, entitled
Analysis Terminable and Interminable – Twenty-five Years Later), with

exploratory studies in a pragmatic framework directed at describing analytic
practices through investigative techniques such as interviews and
questionnaires (as seen in subsequent panels, such as in 1968, 1974, etc.).
One of the most interesting reports in the 1962 panel (Pfeffer 1963) is
the one by Stein, who traces a parallel between the evolution in the
development of the novel and the transformation of analytic goals and aims.
Stein suggests that during the nineteenth century, literature gradually became
more interested in the study of the characters and their transformation: the
characters mature along with the development of events. The outcomes are
increasingly less predictable, giving way to the tormented inner journeys
which seem to have an affinity with what Freud wrote in Studies in Hysteria
with regard to the transformations induced by the analytic process:
“transforming…hysterical misery into a common unhappiness” (Freud 1892-
95, S.E. 2: 305). Parallel to the changes in the novel, the hopes for analysis
also modified.
Here, it is also worth mentioning Loewenstein’s criticism of Freud’s
hypothesis regarding the excessive power of the quantitative factor and the
concept of ego strength. He draws attention to the fact that some inhibitions
can be traced to a weakening rather than a strengthening of the drives, as in
some cases of impotence or masturbation conflict. Moreover, he points to the
importance of the relationship between phallic and pregenital elements,
which analysis attempts to modify in favor of the former at the expense of the
latter. Finally, Loewenstein underlines how A.T.I. marks the first time Freud
introduces the idea of free intrapsychic aggressiveness and its possible
importance for the intensity of all conflicts. Later developed further by H.
Hartmann, this is an idea which has led to the important concept of
neutralization and has been used for differentiating various defenses
employed.
The subsequent panels of 1968 (Problems of Termination in the
Analysis of Adults, Firestein rep. 1969) and 1974 (Termination: Problems
and Techniques, Robbins rep.1975) relate the effort to identify methods and
questions on the theme to pose to a rather limited sample of analysts (in
Boston, Chicago and New York). Both have the merit of highlighting some
themes and principal points of convergence and divergence. Attention is
focused on two specific questions: What is the relationship of the patient with
the analyst after analysis has terminated? In what way do expectations of
such a future relationship influence the present of the analysis, especially in
the termination phase? The theoretical depth of these questions is evident,
and the alternatives debated in the panels regarding termination technique are
connected to them.
In the first point, we can perceive a trace of the heated debate over the
resolution of transference: once it is eliminated, the analyst should emerge as
a real person. While some consider this to be a gradual and natural
development of the analytic process which per se does not require modified
technical devices, others instead emphasize the necessity of facilitating the
impervious passage from the phantasmatic relationship to a real one, taking
on a more active and self-revealing role in the final rounds of analysis. For
the latter, the final phase of therapy requires a modification to interpretive
technique, which must aim for a greater integration of what has taken place in
analysis, to a direct discussion with the patient of areas insufficiently
explored and the emotional dangers he might encounter with the end of the
analysis. Others - for example Greenson - introduce technical modifications
with an exploratory aim, such as face to face sessions and periodic returns
after termination, which tend to shift the emphasis from being the
psychoanalyst to becoming the listener and witness of the patient’s self-
analysis.
In the 1974 panel in particular, a number of authors (including Ticho) in
our view rightly highlight the risk inherent in modifications of technique in
this phase, as well as the importance of a particular vigilance regarding the
possibility of gratifying the patient’s desires. Modifications can in fact tend to
obscure transference residues and act as powerful reassurance factors, thus
reinforcing denial of the separation. On the other hand, these authors
correctly underline the importance of attentively observing the oscillations
between transference and reality to the very end, while variations introduced
to accelerate the realistic perception of the analyst can interfere with the
analytic work, constraining residual infantile desires and transference
displacements and covertly increasing forms of dependence. Fleming (in
Firestein 1969) discusses the specific procedure for termination, criticizing its
coincidence with the analyst’s official vacation. In his view this deprives the
patient of an important task: that of being able to leave the analyst while he is
still there, and complementarily, recognizing that the analyst can let him go,
thereby giving rise to an integration which is part of the progress from
adolescence to adult life.
Conceptions relative to the connection between the transference and
real relationship inevitably also influence the way of conceiving the essence
of the work of mourning in the final phase. Some authors (such as Bell and
Jacobson, in Robbins 1975) underline the complexity of the abandonment
dynamic, as it consists in giving up the analyst as a real object, and how it is
in effect impossible to carry out this difficult task, though it is generally
presented as worked out by internalization. These authors claim that the
affective complexity present in mourning requires a delicate work of
deciphering, aimed at distinguishing what regards the separation from
neurotic attachments (Numberg and Granatier, in Robbins 1975), from what
regards object loss. Kanzer (ibid) emphasizes the presence of mature
transferences in the analytic process which make new capacities possible for
pleasure, efficiency and investment of external objects, and consequently the
presence in the termination process of positive affect capable of balancing
out the traumatic aspects of separation. As Kanzer demonstrates, the way of

conceiving the work of termination also depends on the changes that have
taken place in psychoanalytic theory and technique, which are, for example,
perceptible in the shift from a model of the end centered on individuation-
separation to a model centered on the alliance in the work, which gives value
to the multiple ties established during the analytic process.
Ekstein (1965) had previously attempted to frame the discussion of the
termination of analysis not in terms of “technical moves” (in reference to
Freud’s chess metaphor), but rather in philosophical terms of the relationship
between termination and the analytical process as a whole. For Ekstein,
termination is a part of the total process, and without it analytic work cannot
be completed. It is the epilogue to the resolution of conflict, no less than the
final adaptive act of mastery, indispensable for future adaptive behavior.
Drawn from theater, the concept of epilogue is used by Ekstein for the
termination of analysis in association with the mother-child interaction
proposed by Freud and Spitz in reference to the development of memories in
the form of acts rather than thoughts. The author emphasizes that the
epilogue becomes a prologue if carried out properly through the analytic
work and subsequent working-through.
According to Ekstein, one of the difficulties in the explanation of
termination lies in the fact that it is usually considered in terms of the goals
of analysis, with the risk that the growing sophistication of theory produces
idealizations like the myth of the perfect Freudian person. Ekstein believes
that mourning at the end of analysis is to be understood not simply as the
reaction to the loss of the analyst as a person, but rather as the patient’s
farewell to his infantile self and to his past transference projections. He then
looks back at an unpublished work by Mahler (Intermittent Analysis, 1962),
where “intermittent analysis” is discussed to indicate the fact that in certain
cases in the treatment of children or adolescents, the analysis must follow the
pace of development and cannot have a continuous rhythm, with the
consequent problem of planning temporal spaces between one period of
analysis and the next. Ekstein wonders if Mahler’s intermittent analysis
should be compared to Freud’s suggestion of re-analysis every five years, and
he also poses the question of the meaning of termination in such cases.
A certain agreement emerges from the two panels as to the criteria for
termination, though they are formulated by some in predominantly
metapsychological terms and by others in clinical terms. The reduction of
transference neurosis remains in any case a leading criterion, and it can be
inferred from numerous details of the analytical relationship and the patient’s
increased spontaneity and independence. Among the other criteria indicated
in the discussion, we find the reduction of infantile amnesia, the degree of
insight and the patient’s reaction to his new knowledge of himself. A widely
held opinion is that the established criteria are satisfied by a minority of
patients: this circumstance might be attributed to the success garnered by the
important distinction proposed in this period by Ticho as an antidote to the

perfectionist expectations and the prolongation of analysis.
Ticho’s most important contribution (1972) regards precisely the
necessity of distinguishing between “treatment goals” and “life goals”, the
latter further differentiated into professional and personal goals. This
distinction is based on the assumption that mental illness is an interruption or
distortion of development processes. Treatment goals therefore regard the
removal of obstacles to the patient’s discovery of his potential. Life goals are,
instead, ones which the patient would attempt to reach if he could use his
potential. The analyst faces several tasks: discussing treatment goals from the
start and always keeping them in mind, comparing them with new goals that
might emerge; making a continuous estimation of the patient’s growth
potential, comparing and distinguishing between his own treatment goals and
those of the patient, with the aim of avoiding the risks of idealization.
Equally, in Ticho’s view, the analyst must pay great attention to life goals, in
order to render explicit elements that prevent reaching them and to
demonstrate their idealized and unreachable nature. Ticho emphasizes that a
treatment goal can be the attainment of a capacity for self-analysis, which
becomes an important element for the identification and achieving life goals
after analysis. This entails the analyst distinguishing the patient’s goals from
his own, unconsciously attributed to the patient, whose lack of achievement
introduces a sense of professional inadequacy and incompleteness of the
psychoanalytic process. A sufficiently long analytic work allows the analyst
to be not only “intuitive”, but also to receive and respond to the patient’s
indications as to the end of the analysis, in particular if constant attention is
given to the patient’s own independent goals.
The growing interest in postanalytic developments in the 1960s and
1970s began to outline a perspective which accentuated the unity of the
termination phase and the one following it – the so-called postanalysis – and
this led to the investigation of the relationship between the prefiguration of
what would happen and the handling of the termination, and the long-term
consequences of these processes on the patient’s internal and relational
orders. The postanalytic phase can be influenced in a significant way by the
opportunity to see the analyst again or the lack of it, the former commonly
being the case with training analysis. The element delineating crucial
differences between therapeutic and training analyses, keenly noted
previously by M. Milner (1949), clearly emerges from Calder’s report
(1968): based on interviews with New York psychoanalysts with a great deal
of experience, it came to privilege the role of analytical goals rather than
therapeutic ones in the decision to terminate.
Finally, we can observe how another theme emerges from these panels
which would gradually attract attention and later get placed explicitly at the
center of Firestein’s inquiry into the legitimacy of identifying a termination
phase with specific features. This appears to be a crucial point at the center of
various problems (the revealing indicators of this phase, the peculiarity of the
emotions stirred, the evaluation of the meaning of the recurrence of
symptoms), with various alternatives taking shape. As an example, let us
consider the latter point dealing with the frequent return of acute symptoms
precisely in the termination phase. Many analysts tend to believe that the
return of the repressed is a preconscious maneuver to force them to prolong
the analysis; on the other hand, this can turn out to be a counter-transference
trap that leads to placing a reductive meaning on a dynamic which is per se
complex. The exacerbation of symptoms might be a reactualization of the
conflict produced by the loss of a significant object. This can thus form a
further organization of termination as a dynamically vital phase in which the
pressure of the end can lead to a refocusing of crucial themes in a way that
was perhaps never so clear previously. Other hypotheses regarding the
reappearance of symptoms center on the peculiarity of the analytical relation
as a valid learning process in the context of a specific object relation in
which, when cast in doubt, a momentary forgetting is produced. In other
words, the disappearance of symptoms takes place in the shelter of analytical
protection. Thus, some ideas interpreted final regression as an event closely
related to the precociously clarified material in analysis, while others instead
traced it to the weakening of restructuring and adaptive processes created in
the course of the analytic process. This recalls the so-called “transference
cure” that analysts like Jones and Ferenczi – following Freud’s lead – warned
against, underlining its unreliability as a criterion for symptomatic
improvement.
Firestein’s book, Termination in Psychoanalysis (1978), not only
deeply probes the termination process in eight analyses, but also furnishes a
wide overview of the problems arising from American psychoanalytic
research with a special focus on methodology. It thus opens up a branch of
research which aims to satisfy expectations of greater sophistication (cf.
Schachter 1990). In the chapter dedicated to methodological aspects,
Firestein identifies a distance of a year and a half in follow-up as the most
suitable period for the observation of results produced by the analysis. The
author also discusses a study carried out by analysts on psychoanalytic
therapies non conducted personally but completed by training analysts, for
the interesting aspect regarding the reproduction of reactions to the
researchers provoked in patients by the end of analysis. This fact appears to
confirm the force and persistence of the transference investments which can
be subject to displacement.
In the beginning of the 1980s, the American journal Psychoanalytic
Inquiry devoted an entire issue to the subject of the termination of analysis.
According to the editor, the unresolved problems taken into consideration in
preparing the issue regarded the criteria-outcome pair in termination, the
disagreement over the definitions of and dynamic formulations of a “phase”
of the analysis with uncertain boundaries, and the exploration of the
subjective response of the analysand and the analyst to termination. The

editor noted the variance between Freud’s chess imagery of the end of
analysis and the complexity of the picture described by the various
contributors to the journal, and he confirmed the specificity of the
termination phase, underscoring the agreement as to the incomplete
resolution of the conflict and transference neurosis and the emergence of the
question of counter-transference responses as a problem which was not
merely technical.
Among the most important articles, we cite the ones by Rangell,
Dewald and Novick; in each of these we can make out a dominant theme
elaborated upon by other writers in the journal. Rangell (1982) outlines the
concept of a “postanalytic phase” as a fundamental and lasting part of the
psychoanalytic process, comparing this extension to the expansion of the
concept of evolutionary process. Adopting a “macroscopic” point of view, he
considers a period of analysis that is much longer than the conventional
period of the end of analysis (six months to one year), and he proposes
charting the progress of the analytic process according to various
possibilities, in connection with the development of insights and their
application and elaboration. In particular, Rangell visualizes the analytic
process as a sinuous or zigzag curve which reaches its peak and then
declines. The ascending part is represented above all by discovery, the
descending part by the absorption of insights. Since the first half of the
analytic process is the improvement of anxiety through insight, the second
part is represented by the patient’s application of the insight gained and by
the relief experienced in his life. In this phase, there is a particularly active
resistance due to repetition-compulsion, which forcefully opposes working-
through. For Rangell, the goals of analysis are still the Freudian ones, with
the addition of more modern conceptions regarding the “search for truth” and
the “destiny of object relations”. His proposal is that of psychic, and in the
end interpersonal, “integrity”. The patient’s state and status of anxiety have
great importance: its intensity, the type of defense, its presence in manifest or
latent form, the type of pathology to which it is connected are all reference
points Rangell cites when he indicates the resolution or relief of anxiety as
one of the principal goals of analysis, beginning with the basic anxieties of
separation and castration. In the terminal phase of the analysis, Rangell
warns, the analyst must be careful not to superimpose or impose his own
preferences on those of the patient. The patient’s autonomy is not an
automatic consequence of the interpretation and the analysis, so that a better
criterion of evaluation for the analyst keeps in mind the patient’s possibilities
for opening and choice, rather than the satisfaction of the desire for the
patient to make a choice or the expectation that he makes an important
decision before terminating. In this way, the analyst can avoid
transference/counter- transference dovetailing capable of paralyzing the
analysis.
Dewald (1982) appears firmly convinced of the importance of the

“terminal phase” of analysis. This begins when the analyst or patient or both
recognize the achievement of important goals of therapy and the nearness of
reaching other aims. Dewald first examines the patient’s reactions: the latter
faces a series of psychological tasks, especially in terms of the reaction to the
separation, in addition to the one of facing the theme of separation from the
temporal point of view (setting the date). Thus, transference reactions are
important as well as extra-transference ones relative to the analyst as a person
The mourning process in the patient requires the analyst’s comprehension,
just as it requires the patient to accept some eventual limitations in the
termination of therapy. Uncertainty or anxiety about the future can reactivate
early experiences of loss and revive earlier modes of psychological conflict;
the patient can compare the elaboration and the experimentation of the new
modes of relating with others, and new possibilities for facing life’s events
can be compared with previous ones, with an initial sense of anxiety, lack or
sorrow. The patient’s progress can be slowed, arrested or altered by the
defenses against separation and by mourning. Among these, Dewald cites
negation, control, avoidance of their expression, the desire to terminate
immediately and the displacement of transference on third parties. In this last
case, differentiating a genuine behavioral change from a defensive one can
become a problem. For the patients, then, the termination phase can represent
the opportunity to intensively express positive and negative transference
elements which have remained latent or insufficiently expressed for a variety
of reasons, among which Dewald cites that of “the last chance”, the security
of being able to let oneself go acquired in the course of therapy, the desire to
pass a final test. The presence of an intense negative transference can be
connected to the idea that the termination and the renouncement are the final
frustration. Thus aggression - up to that point held in to spare the analyst -
gets unleashed, sometimes in association with the desire to frustrate or blame
the analyst for the “failure” of therapy.
Dewald then treats the analyst’s response, which ranges from the lived
experience of loss and separation from the patient to the effect of a
“Pygmalion fantasy” linked to the narcissistic desire of doing a perfect job.
Herein lies the importance of the analysis of counter-transference reactions.
The patient’s transference reactions require particular tolerance on the
analyst’s part and vigilant attention will be necessary to avoid collusions
and/or modifications in behavior or in the analytic situation. From the
technical point of view, Dewald mentions the importance of maintaining the
setting constant, of allowing for sufficient time to carry out the termination
process in its expressive and working through aspects, and of interpreting
manifestations of conflict, reactions and the responses of the patient to the
specific theme of termination, adding to the interpretations already made in
the past. Finally, Dewald proposes an analogy between the termination of
therapy and the process of emancipation in adolescence. Both the adolescent
and his parents are subject to ambivalence in regard to this process: each is
called to deal with the new, to resist the desire to take shelter in the old, to
give up tested relational models and patterns; analogously, the analyst and the
patient have complementary roles in the course of the termination process.
The article by Novick (1982) is of great importance for the breadth of
its themes and their systematic treatment. Basing his work on a survey of the
results of studies on termination, he begins with an exploratory attention to
the various “termination typologies” as essential variants for understanding
the complex dynamic entailed by the termination of an analysis. Novick
differentiates three types of termination: mutually agreed-upon; forced, that
is, imposed by the analyst; and unilateral, on the patient’s initiative and not
agreed upon with the analyst. The latter two are defined as premature
terminations. Following Dewald’s hypothesis that termination conflicts are
analogous to the normal developmental phase of adolescence, Novick
identifies in uninterrupted analyses the reproposing of an adolescent pattern
which, if adequately understood or analyzed, can impede a premature
termination. This hypothesis, drawn from a rich clinical experience with
adolescents, is expanded and deepened in a later article (Novick 1988) that
shows how in interrupted analyses the repetition of an adolescent pattern
implies the regression from a differentiated transference to an externalizing
one. In the latter, it is not the analyst as a real or transference object that gets
left or mourned, but rather a part of the self which gets clearly and guiltily
rejected because it contrasts with the assumption of an adult identity. Another
important feature of this dynamic appears to be the inability to accept the
analyst’s imperfection and the limitedness and to deal with the crucial
experience of disillusion, which is a dynamic that has important points of
contact with the adolescent problematic and the illusion-disillusion dialectic
in regard to the parental figures.
It must nonetheless be noted that while the study of premature
terminations has been careful and precise, the same cannot be said of
interminable analyses, a typology which Novick (1988) deals with in a
subsequent article. In it, along with terminated analyses and prematurely
terminated ones, he considers overdue terminations, which we will examine
further below. The author strongly insists on the importance and difficulty of
an adequate termination and hypothesizes that many of the controversial
questions - for example the reappearance of symptoms and the postanalytic
transformations - can usefully employ a clear distinction between analyses in
which termination is agreed upon and those in which it is not. Another key
point regards the frequent confusion between the criteria for the beginning of
the termination phase and the broader ones for treatment or analytic goals.
This confusion is often responsible for a wearisome prolongation of an
analysis not concluded at the appropriate moment. The lack of this crucial
distinction may render the terminal phase banal, whereas it is instead a
decisive phase for satisfying those criteria of treatment required in advance
for termination. The terminating phase begins after a mutual recognition and
acceptation of an approach to termination based on significant changes in
transference, the therapeutic alliance and counter-transference. According to
Novick, since it begins at the highest point in the development of the
transference of the Oedipus complex, this entails conducting an intense and
important work. In Novick, we find an echo of a classic question: the
relationship between the work alliance and transference, which he prefers to
maintain distinct, at the same time underlining a further assimilation and
fusion of the former with the capacity for self-analysis. However, we do not
think this fusion is wholly successful in clarifying the problem of how to
consider the development of an self-analytic aptitude, if it is to be a condition
for terminating or a meta-goal of therapy.
In addition to the previous contributions cited, we must also mention
those of Gillman (1982) and Firestein (1982), written in the wake of the
results of more recent studies (conducted with questionnaires administered to
analysts who had completed training and training analysts with over thirty
years of experience). These papers converge in outlining a terminal phase of
well-defined temporal contours and recognizable characteristics (dreams,
affect, etc.). In particular, Firestein’s article can be seen as an update of
earlier studies, influenced by the same framework of the 1978 volume, that
is, by the attempt to deal with the theme from three points of view:
theoretical, clinical and pedagogical. Firestein proposes the following
descriptive definition of the termination of the analysis: “Termination is that
phase of analysis in which we seek to determine what this complex enterprise
has meant in the life of the patient, and when and how to conclude the
collaboration” (Firestein 1982: 473). For Firestein, the results of his own
research are connected to those obtained by Glover in his questionnaire in the
1930s: he claims a general tendency to aphorisms which conceals a difficulty
in the clinical application of the guidelines represented by such aphorisms,
and he observes the clear difference between the elegance of
metapsychological formulations and the degree of approximation present in
the efforts to apply them to a clinical setting. In her writing on training,
Firestein complains about the inadequacy of analytical training relative to the
termination of analysis, observing that the difficulties are both on the part of
the candidates (who often conclude their training before concluding their
control analyses), as well as on the part of more expert analysts (who,
according to Firestein, are often reluctant to expose their own experience due
to the emotional intensity of the questions connected to them).
The discussion above outlines the path trod by American

psychoanalytic thought on the theme of the termination of analysis. We now
turn to how this path drew guidance and theoretical inspiration from ego
psychology, thereby distinguishing itself from English psychoanalysis,
particularly the Kleinian strain, despite the shared terminology of the “object
relations theory” denomination. In its American version, object relations are

established by the ego with external reality through the interaction of the
psychic agencies and an economy in which energy is no longer
fundamentally bound in conflict. The aim of analytical therapy, as
summarized by Anna Freud (1968) - whose thought, together with
Hartmann’s, is the basis of ego psychology – is the “therapeutic
normalization of the ego”, unlike (or rather, in contrast with) the Freudian
objective of a “therapeutic alteration of the ego.” For Anna Freud, with the
advent of ego psychology psychoanalysis changed its orientation from the
Freudian “depth psychology” to becoming “total personality analysis”. Ego
psychology’s general theoretical framework of reference centers on the
Freudian structural conception of personality, which because of Hartmann’s
dominant influence developed above all in the direction of a strengthening
and widening of the ego’s field of action. This position, based on the
assumption of the ego’s precocious and direct relation with reality, is
reflected in a conception of analytic therapy which, in an analogy with
development, assigns an important role to external reality and the object, and
coherently promotes a focus on interactive aspects of the analytical
relationship (the manufacturing process in Abend 1990). To the extent that
such an orientation contributed to affirming the paradigm of the analyst-
patient relationship as a working couple, this appears consonant with the
Hungarian school’s pioneering contribution known as “two-body
psychology.” Moreover, it is significant that in such a conceptual milieu we
see a reassessment of traumatic agents as the expression of external reality,
and also that we may identify a revival of Ferenczi’s ideas in this approach.
In the developmental view thus established, the role of the competence-fault
pair took on growing importance because it served as a bridge between
analytical and developmental processes, with a consequent increase in the
study of the process of psychic development, as came about in infant research
in general. It is to this approach, particularly attentive to a solid empirical
foundation, that we owe the development of various directions of
investigation all aimed at creating a conceptual space in “specific phases” of
the termination process. This gave rise to the theoretical-clinical importance
of the termination phase, the emergence (Rangell 1966) of the notion of a
postanalytic phase, and the elaboration of typologies of termination, in which
references analogous to developmental stages are utilized as models for
understanding.
The centrality of concepts like “phase”, the attention to particular
phenomena of termination such as “regression” and “recapitulation”
(Buxbaum 1950, Blum 1989) and the emphasis on the mourning experience
all appear to be cornerstones of the evolutionary and progressive conception
of process adopted by ego psychology. This shares with the Kleinian
approach the reference to a theory of development as a necessary model for
defining the process, but it differs from it due to profoundly divergent
conceptual traditions and perspectives visible in the overall conception of the

process as well as in the single articulations forming it. “Object relations” in
the Kleinian sense has to do with inner reality as an expression and also
sphere of development of psychic processes regulated by the economy of the
fantasy: the object remains internal and the development process is also
marked by inner vicissitudes and much less by those of external reality. We
see two examples of this in the comparison between the concepts of phase
and position and in the way of understanding the processes of mourning
central to both conceptions. Among the Kleinians, the concept of “position” -
understood as the organization of specific anxieties, defense mechanisms and
object relations, together with the emphasis on the incessant fluctuation
between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions - weakens the sequential
representation of development, detaching it from chronological references
and opening it up, in post-Kleinian work and especially in Bion, to possible
redefinitions in the terms of “mental states”. The concept of “stage” in
American circles appears closer to a linear conception, certainly rooted in the
Freudian theory of the stages of libidinal development, but accentuated well
beyond this to the point of taking on a predominantly diachronic dimension.
Similarly, the importance of mourning processes in the experience of
termination is understood quite differently and is explored from divergent
perspectives. In the Americans’ work, these processes are explored with a
view to the renunciation of the analyst and the working-through of this loss
as both a transference-object and a “real” person. The mourning reaction is
not only the repetition of an infantile experience, but also the expression of a
specific relationship which has actually been established and has provided the
particular gratification of unlimited attention. The complexity of affects
present in the work of mourning, debated on several occasions in the
American panels (cf. Robbins 1975), ranges from the recognition that such
affects is not exclusively traceable to a separation from neurotic attachments,
to the inclusion of mature transferences in the process of termination which
allow for new capacities for pleasure, effectiveness and investment in
external objects. Various writers have consequently noted the presence of
positive affects in the termination process, capable of balancing the traumatic
aspects of separation.
In the Kleinian perspective, the mourning process regards above all the
struggle and psychic suffering connected to the work of integrating drive
(love-hate) and object events. There is a wide spectrum of depressive
suffering which must be borne in order for separation to be possible. The
renunciation of possession and omnipotent control of the object, pursued
through violent or immobilizing means, foreshadows a different modality of
relation with the object itself. Through introjection the object becomes
available for identification in having regained its own freedom, as in the
prototypical experience of the breast which lasts for the period of nursing and
then can be left to go its own way. This crucial hinge in the separation
process is conceptualized by Bion (1967) as an experiential moment, whose

essential quality lies in the fullness of the lived experience of the present, not
burdened by the weight of the past or the encumbrances of the future. Meltzer
(1979) keenly observes how Bion does not see this as an introjective process,
but rather as “learning from experience” (Bion 1962), that is, to have the
capacity of living through experiences which can modify the personality.
We believe this constitutes an important turning point: imperceptibly
modifying the conceptualization of the analytical goals, significantly altering
the perspective for viewing the analytic process and weakening the genetic
developmental reference to the point of dissolving it. The emergence of a
synchronic dimension of experience, as in Bion’s case, renders the concept of
process abstract, diluting it in a form of timelessness. In other authors,
instead, the historical dimension of the subject maintains its importance, but
within a reformulation of the repetitive aspects of transference whose
essentialness is no longer identified in regression.
The reading of transference in terms of Nachträglichkeit, understood as
a symbolic actualization of the multiple levels of reality is - as both Modell
(1990) and the Barangers (1969, 1987) propose –an alternative formulation to
the explanation that therapeutic action implies a regression. On the other
hand, the concept of Nachträglichkeit has been ignored by the American
analysts in that, as Modell stresses (1990), it is incoherent with the belief in a
progress-oriented psychic development such as that imagined by ego
psychologists. In the comparison between American and French
psychoanalysis, it is therefore easy to perceive a substantial divergence of
position.
3. Directions in the Research
The current state of psychoanalytic research on the termination of

analysis may be summed up as follows: American psychoanalysis maintains
its clear and recognizable profile, whose fundamental points are the
importance of the concept of treatment, the natural linear process and a
terminal phase with well-defined contours, centered on the developmental
task of individuation-separation. Additionally, systematic studies continue in
a longitudinal perspective, even in terms of follow-up, as for example in
Kantrowitz (Kantrowitz et al., 1990a, 1990b, 1990c), Schachter (1990, 1992),
Wallerstein (1989) and Weber et al. (1985a, 1985b, 1985c, 1985d), which
extend throughout the last decade.
On the other hand, we find significant contributions from Europe and
Latin America that are more difficult to classify and whose importance does
not reflect a univocal conception of psychoanalytic process. Several writers
influenced by Bion - for example De Berenstein and De Fondevila (1989) -
combine the genetic developmental model with the Bionian one in the
attempt to make them coexist, although they contain different vantage points
for examining the problem of termination. These two authors emphasize how
the criteria for termination depend on the therapy goals; if these goals are
exclusively therapeutic, the most common clinical formulations are ego
synthesis, the capacity for sublimation and reparation, or theoretical ones like
“where id was, there ego shall be”. In contrast, consonant with Bleger’s
notion (1973) of “maieutic goals”, the authors place particular emphasis on
the acquisition of the psychoanalytic function of personality which contains a
quality - intuition - defined as the specific capacity to perceive emotional
states.
Grinberg (1980) also looks at the problem of termination through a
questioning of the medical model. He considers termination inevitably
influenced by an emphasis on the cure of the mind, or on the contrary, its
exploration. In this framework, the central aim of psychoanalysis for
Grinberg is the search for truth, and in regard to the psychoanalyst’s identity,
the psychoanalytic function. The latter is characterized by features such as a
particular curiosity in the investigation of humanity, the mind and psychic
reality; a capacity for intuition, introspection and self-analysis; the capacity
to think in adverse situations and a negative capacity to come to terms with
uncertainty, as well as the capacity to bear the feeling of loneliness. In likely
disagreement with the theoreticians of the termination phase, Grinberg
underlines how the search for truth and the emergence of the new can be
obstructed if everything in this phase is filtered through the prism of
termination.
These contributions certainly appear influenced by Bion’s work, which
privileged attention to modes of mental functioning seen in constant
oscillation. In the Bionian psychoanalytic model, there is no space for the
conception of a complete analysis, and there is a prevailing interest in
methodological and cognitive aspects of the analytic experience. The way in
which separation is considered - normally a touchstone for identifying the
strength of subject-object differentiation - is emblematic of this tendency. As
Bion wrote:
The sense of loneliness seems to relate to a feeling, in the

object of scrutiny, that it is being abandoned and, in the
scrutinizing subject, that it is cutting itself off from the source or
base on which it depends for its existence. To summarize:
Detachment can only be achieved at the cost of painful feelings of
loneliness and abandonment experienced (1) by the primitive
animal mental inheritance from which detachment is effected and
(2) by the aspects of the personality that succeed in detaching
themselves from the object of scrutiny which is felt to be
indistinguishable from the source of its viability. The apparently
abandoned object of scrutiny is the primitive mind and the
primitive social capacity of the individual as a political or group

animal. The “detached” personality is in a sense new to its job and
has to turn to tasks which differ from those to which its
components are more usually adapted, namely scrutiny of the
environment excluding the self; part of the price paid is in feelings
of insecurity
(Bion 1963: 15-16).
Separation is understood here as an element of psychoanalysis, and

thus, as Di Chiara (1978) notes, not in terms of the process of separation,
detachment or loss - experiences which can contain the separation element
but do not fully correspond to it. The focus is therefore not so much on
separation as an event or process, as instead on a quality of mental experience
in the very context of the analysis.
Among the French, the problem of the relationship between the medical
model and the psychoanalytic model of treatment and cure - which in point of
fact had never disappeared (cf. the 1966 conference described above) – was
further developed in a collective reflection which appeared in a special issue
of the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse in 1978. On the one hand, the
contributors converged in the attempt to differentiate the concepts of
treatment and cure in psychoanalysis as compared to classical medical
treatment, and on the other hand, they questioned the concept of health and
thus returned to the central point of the criteria and methods for evaluating
the progress of psychoanalytic therapy. In Pontalis (1978), cure is “an
incurable idea”, an idea which can be renounced when the therapy proceeds;
but the more the therapy appears difficult and the patient seems incurable, the
more it is present in the analyst’s mind. For others (Hamayon 1978, Smirnoff
1978), the terms cure, illness, health and therapy in psychoanalysis all
possess a peculiar meaning due to the fact that they take their meaning from
the fundamental assumptions of the life and death drives. In 1995, the
French-language Canadian journal Trans dedicated an issue to the subject in
which it is possible to see the resumption of basic lines of French
psychoanalytic thought. 2
Quinodoz (1991) instead resumes the discourse on the termination of
analysis centered on mourning and separation processes, exploring the
relationship between the end of analysis and separation anxiety. For this
author, too, the work of mourning plays an important role in the final phase
of therapy, influencing its terminability or interminability. A crucial
prerequisite for this process can be identified in the modifications of
separation anxiety which, as other analysts had already noted (Bridger 1950,
Rickman 1950, etc.), can become a guiding criterion par excellence of the
decision to terminate. The modulation of separation anxiety made possible by
the analytic process promotes what the author defines as “buoyancy”, a
particular emotion of the end of analysis:
…buoyancy is the synthesis and culmination of complex

processes of integration, which have worked together to create a
temporo-spatial psychical space of relationship, a space whose
nature is fundamentally different from that in which separation
anxiety rules”
(Quinodoz 1993: 180-181).
In this sense, Quinodoz follows and further explores the Freudian

intuition relative to the role played by the appearance of the notion of time –
an attribute of the sense of reality – as progress in the development of the
ego’s capacity to deal with anxiety.
The analyst-patient separation is read in a totally different manner by
Flournoy (1985), who radicalizes the aspect of discontinuity of the end of
analysis: an act of passage, as opposed to the passage to the act, that marks its
paradoxical aspect of exiting from the analytical framework and theory. In
Flournoy, we clearly see the conception of the act of passage as a limit of
therapy and at the same time, a limit of psychoanalysis. It is not the action
which limits thought in the termination of analysis, but the analysis that in
termination discovers and has the patient discover how thought feeds on
choices and thus actions. This vision of the termination of analysis as a
moment in which opposite and irreducible elements coexist constitutes a
central feature of the ideas and discussion of this volume.
The separation-temporality connection is at the center of the very
perspicacious work on termination by de Simone (1982, 1985, 1990a, 1990b,
1994) which has the merit of noting the importance of the dialectic of
temporality and of mobilizing analytic attention to the emergence of new
perceptions of time over the course of the entire process. For de Simone, it is
not possible to formulate a general theory of termination, but only criteria
which are delineated with regard to each specific analytic relation, within
which there is the problem of unveiling and elaborating the irruption of time,
often camouflaged by fantasies of interruption or interminability. In repeating
that the decision to terminate is a matter of choice rather than of completion,
de Simone seems quite Freudian. This is, moreover, the case with her entire
approach, which argues for the idea of the incompleteness of analysis and
appreciates the tolerance of uncertainty as a specific function promoted by
the analytic work. In this position, we can perceive an explicit unease with
the dictates of a rigid theory and with biological interpretations of Freud’s
thought in reference to the bedrock, the farthest reach of analytical efforts. In
agreement with the French perspective, de Simone proposes rethinking the
question already posed by Barande in the 1966 panel on the Freudian
bedrock: biological law or counter-transference? Additionally, it is important
to note that if there is a risk of normativeness in the model based on a vision
of the hierarchically-oriented process, the same is true for one centered on the
concept of functions. As de Simone (1988) points out, it can lurk in the
prospect of self-analysis as a specific goal, which can at most be valid for

training analyses. Even in their diversity, the work of both Flournoy and de
Simone seems to share a perspective which privileges processional and
circumstantial characteristics rather than developmental ones in the
termination of analysis. On the contrary, in other recent efforts such as
Gaskill (1980) and Pedder (1988), the dominance of the development-
centered view, which marks the aforementioned collection in Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, endows the conceptualization of the end of analysis with the
predominant features of a developmental process.
An overall view of the current psychoanalytic scene reveals a complex
and variegated picture in which the alternatives first debated in the Freud-
Ferenczi dialogue and then taken back up by Balint have been enriched,
strengthened and opened up to further articulations, often quite distant from
the initial line. The original conception of the naturalness of development and
a parallelism between evolutionary process, pathological process and
treatment - which generally characterizes the contributions of American
psychoanalysis - has moved in at least three different directions: 1) the
increase in research on infantile development – infant research – which, with
the adoption of experimental observational methods, claims primacy over
developmental descriptions of a reconstructive type (cf. Emde 1988a, 1988b);
2) a statistical-epidemiological type approach of termination results, criteria
and objectives; 3) in the model of termination, the utilization of a less
stringent reference to development than in infant research, outlined and
organized around central points such as, for example, critical phases like
adolescence.
In this milieu, termination is conceived of as an arduous and necessary
developmental task which has its own specific dynamic and has its fulcrum in
ego expansion and in the reinforcement of the reality principle, whose
epigenesis was identified by Loewald (1960) in the process of separation-
individuation. The termination of analysis thus turns on a conception of
development that, inasmuch as it is based on the genetic perspective, implies
a linear temporality in which there is no place for the concept of deferred
action, that is, Nachträglichkeit. In the other perspective, which has been
developed in French psychoanalysis and in numerous contributions variously
indebted to Bion, the concept of analytic process appears progressively
detached from that of developmental process, though to rather different
degrees. We have repeatedly demonstrated how both in the case of French
psychoanalysis and in large part of Argentine psychoanalysis (M. Baranger
and W. Baranger 1983, Berenstein 1987, Ahumada 1989), the distance
between the two models of process centers on the crucial role attributed to
Nachträglichkeit.
On the whole, these contributions - which attempt to conceptualize as
analytical goals an increase in psychic mobility, an expanded capacity for
moving between diverse mental states, rather than achievements, insights or
stable changes of the intrapsychic organization - can be more in keeping with

the Freudian lesson of analysis as an infinite task, at the same time indirectly
making use of significant changes in perspective in post-Freudian thought.
Pontalis, for example, in commenting Winnicott indicates the considerable
change that takes place in passing from a conception based on structuration
of object relations or the embedding of psychic agencies to a conception
which, on the contrary, places the emphasis on the formation of a psychic
space. This is “the potential space which is neither object nor agency”, since
“the psyche…even prior to being a container of objects is a space…. What is
in question is no longer the incorporation of an object in its excessive
presence, both positive and negative, but rather the progressive constitution
of an absence” (Pontalis 1988 [Ital. ed.]: 183-184). We can add to this
Ogden’s argument:
From this perspective, the termination phase of an analysis

is not simply a phase of resolution of conflicted unconscious
transference meanings. As importantly, it is a period of the
“contraction” of the analytic space such that the patient comes to
experience himself as constituting the space within which he lives
and within which the analytic process continues. If this does not
occur, the prospect of the end of the analysis is experienced as
tantamount to the loss of one’s mind, or the loss of the space in
which one feels alive
(Ogden 1992: 188).
If we have sought up to now to demonstrate above all the various

models of analytic process underlying the conceptualizations of termination,
an aspect which unifies the various approaches can be seen in the necessity
repeated by many writers to place the discussion of the end of analysis more
explicitly within the sphere of the bi-personal paradigm (Ahumada 1989,
Cooper 1991, Kantrowitz 1993, 1995, Kantrowitz et al. 1989, Quinodoz
1991, Schachter 1992, de Simone in the previously cited works). This
unifying feature can be connected to the influence of Ferenczi’s lesson, even
if in reality the very way of conceiving of the analyst-patient interrelation can
in turn display significant conceptual differences, whether it is made to
coincide tout court with the intersubjective relationship of minds or, on the
contrary, with maintaining the gap between relational and intrapsychic
features (Bonaminio 1996). Schachter, for example, notes that despite the
decline of some classic assumptions - like the analyst-mirror, the resolution
of transference neurosis and the conception of analysis as treatment rather
than as an exploration of how the mind works - there has not been a retooling
of the approach to the end of the analysis following the altered bi-personal
paradigm. In his own work, Kantrowitz proposes the hypothesis that the
analytic process and outcome are themselves conditioned by the type of
“patient-analyst match”. This concept of “match” is of an interactional type,

in that it refers to a range of compatibility and incompatibility of the patient
and analyst, which is important for the analytic work and develops in a bi-
personal context. The personal characteristics of the analyst to which the
patient may react cannot be wholly subsumed within the concept of counter-
transference, but on the contrary form a wider set of phenomena, with
reference to which the counter-transference reactions constitute a definite and
limited subgroup. The writer’s attention is thus placed on the role that the so-
called “real” characteristics of the analyst play in the analytic process.
Another unifying aspect which may be identified is a sort of paradox: on the
one hand, the rethinking of the classic criteria for termination seems to have
stimulated a greater awareness of the numerous intrinsic limits to the analytic
enterprise and consequently to have promoted cautious and problematizing
attitudes in evaluating its results: a reevaluation of what Gaskill (1980) calls
“the myth of perfectibility”. At the same time, however, we can argue that the
analytic goals have become more ambitious due both to their broadening
(Grinberg 1980, Bleger 1973, Liberman 1971, Jacques 1981) and to the
uselessness of the definitive criterion of health or normality as the absence of
illness.
4. Final Reflections
In summarizing the development of psychoanalytic thought on the

subject of the termination of the analysis, we must start with the statement
that termination, the outcomes or effects of therapy and the theory of psychic
functioning have been closely connected themes since the beginning of
psychoanalysis. The theme of the termination of analysis, however, has
undergone a long process of development from the 1920s up to the present
day, through which it has acquired growing theoretical-clinical definition
endowing it with a dignity that is no longer subservient to other themes or to
the psychoanalytic process in general. It has come to take on the theoretical
status of “process” within and through which it is possible to observe new
particularities of the analytic relationship, of the transference/counter-
transference pair, and the transformative dynamic inherent in psychoanalytic
therapy. This status makes comparisons possible with the psychoanalytic
process in general in terms of similarities and also differences, of evocation
and emergence (we might say, respectively, of inclusion in conclusion and
exclusion in conclusion3). Because of this, the road has been opened up to an
investigation of the forms and means of such a process, whose legitimate
result has been the hypothesis of a typology of analytic terminations. The
chapters below will deal precisely with such questions.
An additional aspect emerges from the historical account: the
conception of the processional nature of termination supercedes the view of
termination as a purely chronological event, a move in the chess game with

mechanical and predictable features, and suggests a more rigorous terrain for
reflecting on the investigation of the developments of transference with the
approach of the dissolution of the analytic relation and in the post-analytic
future of the analysand. The intrinsic dynamism of the processional
conception thus permits an operation of returning to more general and
fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice: in particular, to
the question of the interconnections between temporality (as lived and as a
parameter) and certain psychoanalytic assumptions and concepts. In our work
we have discovered (in part only rediscovered) a central role of
Nachträglichkeit as both a feature of the termination process as a hinge
between the general conception of psychoanalytic therapy and that of the
termination of analysis.
As we will make more explicit in the chapters that follow, the
relationship between the termination process and event receives an unusual
illumination in adopting a viewpoint based on temporality, or rather, based
on the identification of the fact that the different forms of temporality interact
- in particular in the termination process - and make it possible to perceive
particular and new aspects of this process, among which a form of
temporality itself which we define as “liminal”. The processional quality of
termination in analysis allows for the reconsideration of the very notion of
event, making it into a complex structure where the relational
interconnection, the relationship between communicated and
uncommunicated, act and word, achieve a dynamic quality which greatly
differs from the mechanics of the moves in a chess game.
Notes
1
The most recent critical rereading of Freud’s essay in English has been the one
promoted by the IPA in 1987 (Sandler, ed. 1987), whose particular interest lies in
comparing the perspectives of authors from vastly different backgrounds.
2
In contrast, in a special international issue of the Argentine Revista de Psicoanalisis
(1994) devoted to the theme of the beginning and end of analysis, drawing together
Argentine, European and North American contributions, it is not possible to
extrapolate homogenous and comparable tendencies.
3
[Transl. note] The original Italian plays on the word conclusione, which is the Italian
term for termination.
Part Two – Process and Event in the Termination of Analysis
Four
The Psychoanalytic Process
We are able to speak of a terminating phase of analysis as a process by

virtue of the emergence of the concept of psychoanalytic process (henceforth
abbreviated as PP), a concept which has enjoyed considerable success,
entering into currency and use. It is therefore necessary for us to offer a brief
reconstruction of the debate over this concept as a premise for the study of
the relationship between PP and the process of termination.
In Freud’s work, the expression “psychoanalytic process” appears
rarely and in a generic manner; the literature usually cites the aforementioned
passage from On Beginning the Treatment (Freud 1913). In Vaughan and
Roose’s (1995) discussion of the subject, this essay by Freud characterizes
PP in three ways:
1. as the equivalent of the process of change in the patient;

2. once undertaken, as bearing a course that is independent from the analyst
and to a certain extent from the patient, too;
3. consisting in well-defined elements of resistance, interpretation, free
association and working-through.
In point of fact, the debate over the concept of PP appears closely

linked with the questions – themselves interconnected – of the
conceptualization of the changes that characterize the course of analysis, of
their specific weight in relation to time and psychic organization, and thus
their “therapeutic” quality, as well as the roles played by the members of the
analytic couple. The stimulus for reflecting on process can therefore be traced
back to the desire to clarify the curative effects of therapy, that is, to account
in theory and technique for psychic progress, and secondarily, for progress in
therapy or its absence. The frequent connection and interchangeability of the
terms “process”, “progress”, “change”, “therapy” and “cure” provide an
immediate impression of ambiguity running prominently through the
discussion of PP. The Freudian influence appears in that some writers choose
or underline one or another of the aforementioned factors characterizing
process in Freud’s essay: in particular, resistance, interpretation, and
regression form the fundamentals of some theories of the process presented

in the latter half of the twentieth century.
The term “process” is utilized in a generic way, often as a synonym for
“therapy”, up to the 1950s and 60s, when it began to gain attention and
development. At the Pan-American Congress of Buenos Aires in 1966, it
made its “definitive and glorious entrance on the scene” (de Simone 1994). It
is interesting to note that the period of its affirmation in the analytic limelight
was the same one in which the debate over the aims of analysis and the
means for achieving them began to take hold, at least in North America. In
fact, the concepts of “therapeutic alliance” (Zetzel 1956) and “working
alliance” (Greenson 1965) – expressions of the attempt to clarify “the
essential ingredients of therapeutic change” (Eagle and Wolitzky 1989: 43) –
all date from the 1950s and the subsequent decade. Let us now turn to the
principal points in the debate over PP from that period to the present.
Kris (1956a) defines the process as being characterized by a movement
of progressive development in time in a definite direction, privileging the
meaning of change. Further, he proposes the centrality of the concept of
regression in his vision of therapeutic change through his additional concept
of “regression at the service of the ego”. According to Etchegoyen (1986),
Kris and other North American psychoanalysts influenced by ego psychology
conceived of PP in terms of the “theory of therapeutic regression”, and they
tended to view the end of the PP as the substitution of pathological regression
with a therapeutic one which would be the premise for the development or
acquisition of a greater secondary autonomy on the ego’s part. Greenacre
(1968), too, in arguing that PP essentially involves a developmental
progression, agrees with the privileging of change, but she links it to a vision
of therapy as the resumption of an arrested psychic development, a
perspective which would have a wide following in later decades.
Rangell was the first to dedicate an article specifically to PP, and he has
been among those who through the years have most closely followed the
course of the debate relative to the nature of change in analysis, even in
relation to the more particular theme of the termination process. In the
opening talk at the 1966 Pan-American Congress of Psychoanalysis
dedicated to PP, Rangell provides a first framework: “The psychoanalytic
technique sets up the psychoanalytic situation in which the psychoanalytic
process can take place, by which psychoanalytic goals may be achieved”
(Rangell 1968: 20).
Rangell does not ignore the fact that the conceptual core of the PP
changes through different periods of the development of psychoanalytic
thought. In his opinion, the conceptual foundation of PP lies in the
combination of structural theory (understood in terms of the explanation
given of it in the North American milieu) with Freud’s second theory of
signal anxiety. The PP takes place within the patient and begins when the
patient himself begins to associate freely, with the analyst functioning as a
The Psychoanalytic Process 73
catalyst. Rangell (1969) considers the PP in terms of a macroscopic whole of

microscopic intrapsychic processes, the analytic “microdynamic” in which
anxiety and conflict play a central role. More recently, he adds that “The
psychoanalytic process is a recapitulation of the patient's history of
developmental anxieties. The task for each patient is a reconstruction of the
nature and composition of his individual ‘traumatic state’" (Rangell 1981:
123). Nonetheless, for Rangell (1992), the PP does not coincide with the
process of change, since it is able to exist in its absence, even in an active and
productive way; the process of change constitutes an important
psychoanalytic goal whose vicissitudes (apparitions and disappearances,
types of contents, development times) also depend on additional internal or
causal factors.
In 1974, the American Psychoanalytic Association dedicated one of its
annual meetings to the subject, with the title Current Concepts of the
Psychoanalytic Process (Stein and Morgenstern, rep. 1976). First and
foremost, the reports relate that the original theme regarded the “therapeutic
process” and explain the shift as the expression of greater interest for analytic
work than for the cure. The positions of the principal speakers well illustrate
the range of positions opened up by the discussion on the subject. Schafer
proposes three defining criteria of the PP:
a) the construction of a certain genre of biography (life history);

b) a certain type of current subjective world;
c) the transformation of the terms in which the patient defines and
understands his past and present.
His ideas on the language of action are based on these criteria. Furer
concentrates his report on the conception of the analytic process in
developmental terms, drawing from studies of infant observation and citing
Spitz, Mahler and Winnicott. Calef supports the classical theory of conflict,
as does Lipton, who observes how the biography achievable in
psychoanalysis is a by-product of the analytic process and does not constitute
the entire history of the therapy, which instead includes the vicissitudes of
transference and resistance. Stein likens Lipton’s particular notion of
psychological biography to Kris’s “personal myth”.
In his concluding observations, Stein argues that the theme of PP arises
from a widening of analytic aims, requiring further work on character, and
from the perception of the analyst’s role as someone seeking to understand
psychic processes rather than acting as a therapist. Stein recalls the Congress
of Marienbad in 1937, pointing out how the emphasis then placed on the
therapeutic process had impeded an understanding of the importance of the
development of character analysis as a refinement of the definition of PP.
In 1990, a monographic issue of Psychoanalytic Quarterly presented
the work of the Study Group on Psychoanalytic Process, established by the
American Psychoanalytic Association in 1984. In the introduction, the editor

relates how complex the work of conceptual clarification within the group
turned out to be: it was difficult to come to a consensus even just within the
frame represented by the principal psychoanalytic theory. In effect, a reading
of the works presented by the various members of the group makes explicit a
wide range of positions regarding the breadth and depth of the concept itself.
Many feel the need to turn to language’s general vocabulary, reporting
various dictionary definitions of “process” which refer in general to
sequences of events, but also in particular to organizations and structures of
events: this already demonstrates the difficulty of creating an area of
specificity.
According to Abend (1990), the advantage of considering
psychoanalytic therapy as a process lies in the possibility of clarifying the
differences between authentic psychoanalysis and psychotherapies. This
theme also recurs in other works, and indeed it appears as one of the driving
factors behind the investigation of the PP. The differentiation of
psychoanalysis from psychotherapies, especially ones which sprout from the
psychoanalytic terrain itself, became posed as a theoretical-clinical
controversy parallel to the question of the pluralistic nature of the analytic
field and its formulations. The course of the therapy, its technical
management and its aims began to be increasingly seen as interdependent and
the product of the same basic assumptions. The follow-up studies cited in the
preceding chapter and the very idea of developing methodologies for
evaluating the results of therapy (outcome studies) respond to the need for
specifying these themes, in the sense of removing them from an implicit use
considered anti-scientific.
Abend proposes a list of the qualifying characteristics of the PP and of
the objectives following from them: the reference to unconscious psychism
and its relations to consciousness, with the aim of recognizing the importance
of the unconscious dynamic; resistance and defenses, with the request of
paying attention to them and modifying their patterns; recognition of the
lasting influence of the infantile past on the present, in order to clarify the
action of present psychic functioning; transference, with the objective of
perceiving its presence and dynamic; change in therapy, with the goal of
obtaining stable modifications in the nature of the psychic activities of the
analysand; the set of conditions making up the analytic situation, in order to
create and utilize a frame for therapy that limits the means by which the
analyst seeks to influence the analysand.
Abend also mentions the problems posed by the assumption of the term
“process” according to whatever meaning is chosen, and he dwells in
particular on the definition of “[a] particular method of doing something,
generally involving a number of steps or operations” (Abend 1990: 54).
Understood in this way, the PP tends to resemble an industrial manufacturing
process, characterized by specific and specifiable steps and by a predictable
output that represents the goal. In this meaning, there is not only the idea of a
direction and an end, but also one of necessities and operative constraints
which organize a linear series of progressive changes up to the point of
termination. Abend disputes that this is a valid representation of analysis, and
on the contrary, he reaches the conclusion that the concept of PP is entirely
useless.
In the same vein, Compton’s article seeks greater clarity; he decisively
asserts that the PP does not concern solely concern or take place within the
patient. Compton summarizes four meanings of PP:
1. “The psychoanalytic process consists of the intrapsychic and interpersonal

experiences and their evolutionary elaborations” (Compton 1990: 585)
2 the patient-analyst interaction, as a means for creating changes;
3. Thomä and Kächele’s model of process, that is, “an idea in the mind of a
given analyst of a sequence of expectable events derived from a general
understanding of treatment or of human psychology” (ibid).
4. all of the steps along the road which lead from the beginning of analytic
contact until its termination.
With reference to the meaning of the “model of process”, Compton

identifies two other types of “model of process”:
a) the model of process of natural emergence, in which the process of therapy

is seen as an event which takes place naturally and the role of the
analyst is hardly specified; transference develops and is finally resolved
by the patient with the analyst in the role of a more or less silent
observer-companion. Compton identifies this type with the first of the
four meanings of PP cited above.
b) the model of interactive process, in which the PP is constituted and
developed in an interactive way. He associates this with the second of
the meanings of PP.
For Compton, the so-called “Ulm model of process” - proposed by

Thomä and Kächele (1987: 352) as “a conception of the process as an
ongoing, temporally unlimited focal therapy with qualitatively changing
focus” - presents the lowest degree of organization and therefore constitutes a
more general model than the others, approaching the fourth meaning of PP.
Compton notes the profound differences between the three models and
argues that clinical psychoanalysis is the field in which comparisons between
the different models get played out, more so than in theory. In any case he
realizes that his own thesis runs counter to the variety of opinions regarding
what is understood by psychoanalytic therapy, and consequently, what should
constitute its outcome. Here we have Freud’s dilemma between
psychoanalysis, on the one hand, as a therapy and on the other hand, as
observation and discovery of the truth of the individual unconscious (the

problem of “truth”). Compton can be considered the lucid and motivated
supporter of PP as therapeutic process, within which he distinguishes the
procedure of therapy – the application or administration of the therapeutic
agent – from the actual therapeutic agent which interferes with the
pathological process. Compton also seeks to deal with the question of
substituting the therapeutic model with a more general one of change, but
here he appears more uncertain and undecided.
Compton’s position and the criticisms he makes of other approaches
stimulate a further consideration: with regard to the role of each member of
the analytic couple, the features presented by psychoanalytic therapy are not
indifferent. It is not the same thing to place the process within the patient or
within the analyst or in the interaction between the two, and this refers to the
discussion that in the last two decades has opposed the supporters of
psychoanalysis as “one-body psychology” to supporters of “two-body
psychology”. From a technical point of view, this readily recalls the Freud-
Ferenczi controversy in relation to the analyst’s role in therapy or the thorny
debate over the problem of transference/counter-transference relationships.
Moreover, in the distinctions summarized by Compton, we see the presence
of the debate between the “naturalness” or “artificiality” of transference, even
if it is in the form of questions of PP. Here, we must recall Balint’s
exposition of the problem in the mid-twentieth century, unsurpassed in its
lucidity and conciseness.
Other writers are less critical and privilege one meaning or another of
the term. Weinshel goes so far as to have the idea of PP coincide with “a
special interactive process between two individuals, the analysand and the
analyst. […] The psychoanalytic process requires there to be two people
working together, that there be object relationships, identifications, and
transferences.” (Weinshel 1984: 67). He then adds for precision: “Resistance,
together with its successful negotiation by the analyst (most often by
interpretation), is the clinical unit of the psychoanalytic process” (ibid: 69).
In subsequent work, Weinshel (1990) develops some considerations
regarding the way in which the goals of psychoanalytic therapy are correlated
to process, or rather, to the various conceptions of psychoanalytic “process”.
He believes that his definition is particularly suited to the therapeutic model
based on Brenner’s structural theory. It is interesting to note how, for the
author, the idea of “process” can also serve as an indicator of the
“psychoanalytic” nature of a therapy, that is, for determining whether or not a
patient “is in analysis.”
Another point of debate, at least within American psychoanalysis,
regards the relationship between process and development: in fact, the
developmental question, already posed by ego psychology and in and of itself
of a process-type nature, is a strong candidate for becoming a conceptual
framework of the PP. However, analytic therapy thus appears as a
developmental progression in which the nature of the evolution lends itself to

confusion and undue misrecognitions. As Abrams (1990) rightly points out,
the connotation of “developmental” can be applied to real processes of
psychic development as well as to characteristics of strengthening the psychic
structures found in interpersonal transactions. In the PP, this entails the
necessity of distinguishing the truly developmental from the integrative and
the intrapsychic from the interpersonal.
The growing weight in North American psychoanalysis of
interactionist, intersubjectivist and, in part, constructivist perspectives has
been noted by several writers. Among these, Dewald (1978, 1990) attempts
to identify methodologies for demonstrating the PP as well as develop
correlations between the process itself and the termination of the analysis.
From an earlier interest in structural change (Dewald 1972), the criteria for
its evaluation and its differentiation from other forms of change, Dewald
comes to define the PP in adults as follows:
At present the psychoanalytic process in adults can be

conceptualized as an evolving and progressive interaction
between the two participants, each of whom is acutely sensitive to
the input and responses of the other. This interaction evokes
intrapsychic elaborations in each of the participants, leading to
subsequent interpersonal interactions, all of which occur within
the framework of the relatively circumscribed and defined limits
of the psychoanalytic situation. The analyst serves as a catalyst,
inasmuch as his presence and activity are necessary in order for
the process to occur, but he remains relatively unchanged, while
in successful cases the patient undergoes major psychological
reorganization.
(Dewald 1978: 325).
Like Rangell, Dewald also distinguishes between psychoanalytic

technique and PP: “The psychoanalytic process consists of the intrapsychic
and interpersonal experiences and their evolutionary elaborations” (ibid). The
principal elements of the PP are the same in all analyses, whereas the
analytical instrumentation varies with the patient (age group, type of patient,
each patient’s specific needs). Dewald subsequently presents a further
specification of the PP:
The primary goal is to initiate a progressive series of

changes in the patient which will allow, to the maximum degree
feasible, resumption of previously arrested or incomplete psychic
maturation and development; reduction or relief of significant
levels and forms of internal psychic conflict; establishment of
more consciously derived and determined choices in various

aspects of the individual's behavior; relief of psychic suffering or
distress; enhancement of previously restricted levels and forms of
functioning; and overall achievement of more effective, stable,
and fulfilling forms and levels of adaptation..
(Dewald 1990: 694).
On the European side of the Atlantic, the positions in the debate over
psychoanalytic process bear the same characteristics described above with
reference to the debate over the termination of analysis. Both French and
British psychoanalytic thought keep to a vision of the PP that is coherent with
their fundamental theoretical choices, the latter especially so in among
Kleinians and post-Kleinians.
On the whole, French psychoanalysis has had trouble accepting the
term PP, assigning it a meaning which is strictly bound to Freudian
metapsychology and therefore marked by dynamic approaches,
Nachträglichkeit and transference vicissitudes. The visible absence or at least
scanty use of the concept of PP in French thought is nonetheless a complex
point, whose deciphering entails examining a certain range of positions
which span from a radical and explicit criticism to uses which are more
implicit, deduced from the treatment of contiguous subjects. The overall
impression is that the concept of PP in the French milieu constitutes a
theoretical reference with a more problematic and diversified status than
those adopted by Anglo-American psychoanalysis, even where it presents
points of contact, as we will see below.
According to Green (1974), it is precisely the interest in object relations
(a term whose meaning can differ greatly) that has promoted the concept of
PP, with its gradual substitution of transference neurosis. Green understands
PP as a form of organization of the inner development of the patient’s
psychic processes in the course of therapy or patient-analyst exchanges. In
this view, he embraces authors like Meltzer who, as shown above, adopted
the concept of psychoanalytic process in a clear and recognizable way, as
well as Bouvet and Diatkine, whose perspectives certainly do not overlap
with Meltzer’s. It is nonetheless significant that, though both indicate
“weaning” as the last phase in the analytic process, Meltzer and Bouvet have
a way of understanding it which illuminate its different conceptions. Leaving
Meltzer aside for the moment, we would like to recall that for Bouvet, the
assumption of the conceptual model of weaning for the end of analysis in the
so-called typical therapy appears simultaneously inappropriate and rich in
meaning. It is inappropriate in tying the present level of the subject to a
regressive condition - typical of some analytic moments – whereas in
preparing himself for termination, he must have achieved the Oedipal stage.
As Bouvet puts it:
It is, instead, extraordinarily significant because its nature is

that of filiation with regard to a father, giving this period the
predominant tone of a harmonious and natural continuation of
filiation to the mother”.
(Bouvet 1968, Ital. ed.: 74).
Unlike Bouvet, Green places his vision of the PP in the context of the
psychoanalysis of extreme states, and he is therefore led to create a much
stronger connection between setting and process, in keeping with
contributions such as those by Winnicott and Bleger. His conception of
process, centered on the analytic object as it is formed by two doubles - one
situated on the patient’s part and the other on the analyst’s - does not escape
the key question of regression. Regression in treatment “… is always
metaphorical: it forms a limited and reworked model of the infantile state, to
which it is related through homology, exactly like the interpretation
clarifying its meaning, which would have no effect whatsoever were there not
a relationship of correspondence” (Green 1974, Ital trans. p. 78). This is a
complex position which we might say does not reject the reference to
regression, but at the same time it problematizes the affirmation of the
genetic point of view (held in France, and in particular by Lebovici) to the
extent that such a point of view promotes visions of development that do not
utilize the psychoanalytic conception of time.
The attempt to think of PP in metapsychological terms, following
Freud’s idea of “psychic process”, was the theme of a Congress held in 1995,
entitled Metapsychologie: écoute e transitionnalité, whose acts were
published in a special issue of Revue Française de Psychanalyse. The
keynote address by R. Roussillon (1995) proposes a rereading of Freudian
metapsychology in which there is no space for the PP concept, if not in terms
of a probing of the relationship between Freud’s first and second
topographies in view of a further theoretical articulation of the modes of
functioning of psychic processes. Rather than taking into account PP,
Roussillon considers the “process” element of psychic functioning, in which
various items have a place and demand theoretical attention: mnemic and
structural ones, as well as ones related to the drives and repetition-
compulsion. In other authors, such as C. and S. Botella (1995), the “process”
element of psychoanalysis is viewed above all in relation to infantile
sexuality and its vicissitudes.
The recent positions of Pontalis and Laplanche are among the most
interesting: contrary to what one might expect, we examine them here not so
much to demonstrate their affinity as to point out a subtle and productive
difference. Writing in the wake of the aforementioned French Congress of
1995, Pontalis dedicates a brief and dense piece to this subject, in which he
argues his aversion for the concept of PP on the basis of two essential
considerations. The first regards the risk implicit in an idea of process which
he describes as follows:
…whatever the field in which one resorts to it, it implies the

idea of a objective unfolding, a continuous (that is, irreversible)
succession of phenomena: historical process for Marxists, and
transposed into psychoanalysis, it evokes an analysis that flows in
a practically autonomous way, like Althusser’s subjectless
process, which passes through stages or positions (as in Klein) or
gets confused with natural history (Meltzer).
(Pontalis 1997, Ital. ed.: 50).
In short, then, an excessively specific and definitional idea of process

does not do justice to the complex unpredictability of analytical movements.
On the other hand, the second consideration has to do with the idea that the
notion of process - which appeared insistently after the 1960s – is overly
inclusive and therefore too unspecific. As Pontalis puts it, it is a “way to
gather under the same heading all of the elements of an analysis
(transference, regression, remembering, working-through, etc.” (ibid: 49),
without making a reality appear which was, up to then, unperceived.
Pontalis clarifies his aversion (or rather, as he defines it, reticence) as a
rejection of the idea that:
[A process] is understood as linear or dialectic, follows a

definite course and moves toward a definite end. It accounts
neither for the event (what is happening and does not stop
happening) nor for the experience of time in the analysis (in short,
the experience of a disturbing extraneousness that “comes from an
area where I am not present”
(ibid: 51).
What is radically in question here is the tendency to a definite end,

which corresponds at the opposite extreme to a particular and problematic
representation of the beginning of an analysis. In the first pages of the work,
the argument of process is introduced and prepared through the
interconnected theme of history, which makes quite clear Pontalis’s attitude
of mistrust of a certain transparency in what can be considered the starting
point of the analysis – the preliminary interviews. A consequence of this
vision of things is a weakening, we might say, both of the beginning and the
end of an analysis, and an implicit strengthening of what lies in between -
“the crossing” (traversée). As for the beginning, we can perceive the same
concern about a definitional schematism which too rapidly focuses on the
individuation of a scenario in the initial encounter that is somehow
preconstituted, the deceitful illusion of something already given which is
simply to be carried out and rearticulated. This schematism is contrasted with

a path which, having reach its end, renders the initial, expressive talking
encounter silent and opaque.
In Laplanche, unlike Pontalis, the question is not dealt with directly but
is inferred from an article on time (perhaps not coincidentally, conclusive), a
constitutive and foundational dimension of the notion of process. In
Temporality and Translation: For a Return to the Question of the Philosophy
of Time (Laplanche 1989), a conception of the analytic process is introduced
which is identified with the interpretive method of a translation, and is
described above all as proceeding and procedure. It is thus possible to
observe, first and foremost, how such a notion is not so drastically rejected as
in Pontalis, and this probably derives from the important insights regarding
time laid out in the beginning as the backbone of the discourse, a veritable
supporting framework. Two of these insights appear most important: the
attention to a temporality detached from time (which summarizes all of the
psychoanalytic work inherent in the investigation of plural dimensions of
time), and the effort to theorize the movement of progression as ternary - a
dialectic treble which corresponds to the three dimensions of the past, present
and future (the so-called phenomenological ecstasies).
According to Laplanche, it is in the way of conceiving the relationship
between these three dimensions, and in the primacy of one over another, that
the various conceptions of analysis part ways (and the first historical
divergence between Freud and Jung is represented in this light). It is here,
too, that the centrality of Nachträglichkeit is proposed as the specific time of
the analysis, both of transference and interpretation. A note in the essay’s
margin crystallizes the essence of Laplanche’s position:
To address the issue very briefly, ingenious as may be the

invention of the term, the Freudian Nachträglichkeit remains torn
between two one-sided conceptions: that of the ‘deferred action’
(in Strachey’s translation) of the past on the present, and that of
retroactive comprehension, proceeding from the present toward
the past. A dialectic conception of Nachträglichkeit is only
possible by means of the model proposed by the process of
translation.
(Laplanche 1989: 258 fn 31).
What are the consequences for the process of treatment? Laplanche

writes the following:
What we are describing here as the temporality of the

[psychoanalytic] cure, must find its equivalents in human
temporality: on the one hand as situations which could be
considered as imperfect precursors or analogues of what it carries
to a certain degree of purity and efficacy, on the other hand as

grounds on the basis of which its method, as we have just
described, can be understood
(ibid: 253).
The translational process lies between a before to be translated (the

unconscious, the original, oneself) and an after, the unconscious again as
endlessly untranslatable, with translations in the middle that are increasingly
complete, more comprehensive and less repressive. In the final analysis, it is
an emphasis on the progressive dimension that recalls the famous image of
the draining of the Zuiderzee - an infinite, cultural task.
We find an interesting bridge between French and British
psychoanalysis in the work of W. and M. Baranger (1969, 1982), who were
mentioned above. While attributing central importance to regression in
understanding the PP - like some North American writers – they give a non-
chronological version, rejecting genetic hypotheses which are both
naturalistic (modeled on the scheme of developmental psychology) and
abstractly anchored to criteria of depth and timelessness. These authors
understand regression to be an artificial, partial condition, more or less
limited to the session, sought by the patient and analyst, and characterized by
the interplay of projective and introjective identification within the bi-
personal situation. According to the Barangers, when the concept of
regression is applied to the PP without sufficient explanation, difficulties
arise due to the coexistence of a genetic, causal, etiological process of linear
temporality alongside a technical one with ambiguous temporal
characteristics, based on conceptual categories like situation, integration and
insight. For these authors, it is precisely Nachträglichkeit which marks the
discontinuity between psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. The
PP, then, appears different from the pathogenic processes, for which there is
a strong temptation of associating the development of the pathology with the
development of the treatment.
In the English milieu the most interesting positions on the PP are

Meltzer’s, which we will briefly trace, and Bion’s, to which we must also add
J. Steiner’s more recent one. The reconstruction of the analytic process’s
natural history proposed by Meltzer reflects a certain sequence of psychic
life, just as it takes place in the analysis when it is adequately followed and
supported by external environmental factors. The various transference
constellations following in succession are visible both in the process as a
whole and in its single elements: the session, the analytic week, etc. The
conception of the process as a natural product of the mind’s structure implies
that the sequence of events is the most faithful recapitulation of early
development and can be described by various highlights, such as the passage
from the superego to the ideal ego - the main consequence of abandoning the
omnipotence of the infantile portion of the self. Meltzer clarifies:
One may suppose that, extrapolated, this process would

approach asymptomatically to a state of “giving them (the internal
parents) their freedom”, meaning freedom to preside over the
infantile structures, and therefore over the unconscious
(Meltzer 1967: 86).
If, on the one hand, different psychopathological constellations will

produce greater or lesser difficulties in analytic working-through in different
phases of the analytic process, on the other hand, it is not conceivable that a
phase gets skipped, since each phase is in absolute metapsychological
dependence on an adequate working-through of the preceding one. The two
fundamental insights of the final phase, defined as “weaning”, entail the
recognition of introjective dependence on the maternal breast and the
differentiation between infantile and adult levels, which permits the
development of capacities for introspection, thought and responsibility,
aimed above all at the primacy of psychic reality.
Bion’s Elements of Psycho-analysis (1963), presents a theory of
psychic development as the basis of the analytic process which, although it
does not reject the genetic point of view, includes it as a vertical feature of
the grid in coexistence with a horizontal one. The connection between these
two features is made more comprehensible by the conceptual effort to
connect the container-content model with that of the oscillation between
paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The cohesion and integration
promoted by the depressive position, as opposed to the fragmentation and
disintegration characterizing the paranoid-schizoid position, form the basic
conditions for the constitution of the container-content relationship as the
foundation for the production of meaning. The abstraction of this model
allows for its application to primitive and relational vicissitudes of the mind,
to thought processes and the formation of thoughts, and to typically
psychoanalytic operations like interpretive activity and the evaluation of
analytical progress.
Steiner’s perspective (1996) is Kleinian and centers on projective
identification. He schematizes the development of analytical thought with
regard to the psychic structure and functioning according to three theories –
of damming up of the libido, mental conflict and projective identification –
which developed in succession without wholly substituting one another. The
role of projective identification, if reversible or rendered so by the analytic
work, is that of allowing the patient to deal with the reality of psychic loss
and to go through the mourning following from such a confrontation. For
Steiner, projections get removed from the object and directed to the self
through the mourning process. The place of insight in the PP remains central,
but there is a deeper knowledge of the means by which it is facilitated or

impeded. With regard to conflict, what really counts is that the patient is
placed in better conditions for utilizing his own mental organization to
resolve the conflict in a personal way.
Without any claim to having exhausted the bibliographic or conceptual

overview, we believe that it is nonetheless possible to attempt to draw some
conclusions from our exposition, noting some decisive points in taking back
up the observations made at the beginning of this chapter. The PP appears to
be an umbrella or container of a host of conceptual and pragmatic problems
regarding the intersection between psychoanalysis as therapy and
psychoanalysis as a general theory of psychic functioning (cf. Arlow and
Brenner 1990). In the sense of treatment, psychoanalytic therapy rests on
theoretical assumptions which have undergone a progressive modification,
understood as the widening of the conceptual base and as the derivation or
substitution of some concepts with others. From abreaction to reminiscence,
transference neurosis, character analysis, and developmental resumption,
therapy has been informed by various criteria, both synchronically in the
scientific debate and diachronically in the various phases of the development
of psychoanalytic thought.
Now, at this point in our discussion, the criteria of therapy - that is, of
its taking place - appear to clearly include (if only implicitly expressed) the
criteria relative to termination and the ideally achievable goals. What we
intend to note is that, for logical and methodological reasons, each
conception of therapy without exception contains indications regarding the
beginning, the conduction and the end of the therapy itself. The indications
are not normative clarifications (at least, they almost never are) that serve as
a hinge between process and procedure, that is, between theory and clinical
practice, with functions of indication the direction and the handling of the
therapy. When this occurs, it is often due to the pressure of request for a cure
(cf. “the incurable idea” in Pontalis 1978), and of the inevitable influence of
the medical model of therapy. Rather, the indications are orientations, sets of
expectations and predictive models whose strength derives from the fact that
they are fostered by theory’s logical necessity and by psychological necessity
(the desires, needs and defenses of both members of the analytical couple)
operating jointly in a temporal direction and in the direction of forming a
mutual support network. The expectations of theory contain a predictive
element regarding who, what, when and how the therapy can or cannot
interest and modify; this element interacts with personal, individual elements,
attributing them with - or receiving from them - all sorts of confirmations.
Here, we can glean the danger that the theory’s predictive element
becomes the analyst’s personal expectation, so that the PP in such an event
becomes more similar to the manufacturing model rejected by Abend or to
the algorithm described above, than to the Ulm model of process and still less
to Pontalis’s “crossing” (traversée, in Pontalis 1997). For example, the

problem of analyzability can be seen as the principal question of the
beginning of therapy and can therefore receive a different approach according
to the conceptual nucleus endorsed by the analyst. We do not intend to speak
of incommensurable differences, but rather of the range of conceptual
preferences which the patient-analyst couple must engage before forming as
such. In the classical and structural theory, analyzability is based on the
possibility of establishing a transference neurosis and, additionally, on the
capacity of the patient’s ego (or a part of it) to cooperate with the analyst. In
its macroscopic progress, the course of therapy can be seen as being
constituted by different phases according to whether, for example, work on
resistances or working-through dominates (Rangell 1982). The analyst’s role
appears in different perspectives and with various aims, with the consequence
that a diverse accentuation of the sundry elements of the analytic work
(analysis of the transference, analysis of the defenses, containment,
interaction, etc).
In turn, the termination of therapy appears doubly conditioned: on the
one hand, it appears as an explicit carrying out of an implicit aim in the
beginning of therapy; on the other it constitutes a compendium of the work
carried out in the course of therapy. Here, we do not wish to refer to the idea
of the termination of analysis as its recapitulation (this is only one of the
possible conceptions), but to a methodological vision for which the final
steps are entailed in the preceding ones, and all of them together are entailed
in the general conception of the PP. The authors who perceive the danger in
this view of constructing some sort of algorithm or at least of an overly
mechanical and prescriptive finalization - and therefore seek to reject the
concept of PP (like Abend), or else weaken it to the point of neutralizing it
(cf. the definition cited above by Thomä and Kächele) - find themselves in
any case faced with the rebus of how to create a general view of analytical
therapy as a source of change in which to combine particularities and
microprocesses with universals and long-term tendencies. In Rangell’s
words:
The motive for change is embedded within the larger

psychoanalytic process in an individualistic manner with each
particular patient. The process of change weaves in and out of
view, is on the surface or in the understructure throughout the
analysis. It is by no means a subject that waits for the end phase
into which it enters with a rush; nor is there any other particular
moment at which this takes place. The motive, or the thought of it,
is present from the start, for a cloudy mixture of reasons, in part
the fuel of the analysis, in part its impediment. The analytic goals
are not always the patient's goals. Change can be premature, as in
the flight into health, for defensive purposes, it can be too long
postponed, also for purposes of defence, and it can be appropriate

in accordance with the goals of psychoanalysis, admittedly a
tender and changeable and ambiguous area.
(Rangell 1992: 419).
We recall the Barangers’ position with respect to the necessity of

differentiating the various aspects of regression and the substantial diversity
between genetic processes and PP, which we feel can also be applied to the
difference between the medical model of treatment and the psychoanalytical
model of therapy. In the very moment in which it is adopted (and here we
will not discuss the reasons which do or do not legitimate its use in various
circumstances of clinical psychoanalysis), the former forcibly vectors thought
according to the axes of causality and linear temporality in a genetic scheme
that subsumes within it the idea of development - whether physiological,
pathological or therapeutic - in each specific occasion of reflection. The latter
bears a dual-phase conception of temporality and a vision of psychic
determinism strictly linked to meaning, so that the ideas of process and the
individual event are compared with a conception of the historicization of
human being as a subject in continuous dynamic, economic and structural
reworking of the functions and representations characterizing it.
Five
The Termination Process
Our use of the concept of psychoanalytic process as a theoretical

reference point requires that we make some important clarifications. If, as we
have sought to demonstrate, there is indeed a close relationship between the
model of process and that of termination, this correspondence cannot be
compressed into simplified, univocal patterns reducible to a few essential
configurations. Often, it can instead be inferred from a careful and scrupulous
parallel survey of both the conception of analytic process and the
phenomenology of termination, in order to guarantee a productive
theoretical-clinical interconnection rather than a reductive logic of deduction
or pragmatic induction.
In the context of this methodological assumption, we would now like to
focus on our own particular position, articulating it in the dual point of view
of the model of psychoanalytic process and model of termination, starting
with what they share - that is, the concept of process taken as the cornerstone
of both analysis and its termination. To define our idea of process, we intend
to make use of the renewed reflection on Freud’s passage dedicated to the
concept of PP; our primary aim is a demonstration of the dialectic between
two aspects. Both of these aspects are crucial, although discussions of them
sometimes privilege one over the other. Comments on the vision expressed in
Freud’s essay generally underline the unpredictable nature of the analytic
process: it is a nature whose course and direction cannot be predicted, both
escaping a precise possibility of influence on the part of the patient as well as
the analyst. We fully concur with this conception of the analytic process,
which must nonetheless be made compatible with the analogy used by Freud
in reference to the beginning of treatment (Freud 1913, cited above) to
represent the termination of therapy.
In this context, in using a biological analogy like conception, gestation
and birth, Freud seems to induce an implicit representation of the outcome of
the PP as analogous to a child’s separation from its mother. This is a
comparison which, certainly not coincidentally, is based on a strong concept
like separation, which emerges as a watershed between a before – the
conduction of the analysis and the formation of an whole organism – and an
after – termination and life as a single individual. How should we understand
this reference to separation in terms of the keystone of the psychoanalytic
process?
As we see from the meticulous survey by Quinodoz (1991), many

authors assign a central place in the PP to separation anxiety, and they
identify in the transformations that it undergoes in the course of an analysis
important reference points for changes in the transference relationship.
Quinodoz illustrates the two different meanings of the psychoanalytic
concept of separation corresponding to two distinct processes: one designates
separation in the context of a relationship entailing the differentiation
between self and the object, while the other, on the contrary, in the absence
of this sort of discriminating capacity configures separation as the loss of a
part of the ego in addition to the object. To this indicative categorization -
whose theoretical-clinical validity is undisputable - we prefer a different
formulation of the fundamental concept of separation, one which is more
immediately inclusive of cognitive as well as developmental references.
Even if the concept of separation-individuation has become associated
with a crucial goal in the developmental process (thanks especially to
Mahler’s contribution), we may instead understand it to be an element of
psychoanalysis (Bion 1963)1: an attribute of the “detached personality”
caught in the difficulty of separating itself “from the source or base upon
which it depends for its very existence” (Bion 1963, Ital. ed.: 25), a difficulty
inherent in the activity of investigation. Thus it is a structural constant of
mental life perennially torn between pressures for non-differentiation and the
capacity of bearing differentiation. As Servadio points out with regard to
Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, this is an immanent contradiction
in human existence, to which the origin of all anxieties can likely be traced:
All of these types of anxiety have a common feature: the

fact that in order to live, the individual must “distinguish” – inside
and outside himself. While the regressive attraction toward the
indistinct persists, that dangerous attraction which Freud
described in the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents
(1929), the ‘oceanic sentiment’ for which one desires – against the
forces pushing for objectification – to make him be at one with
the world and with things. Anxiety is the price of this
renunciation: an excessive and anti-economical price in the
neurotic, a proper price for those who accept to live and act.
(Servadio 1951, cited in OSF 10: 235).
Facing this task, if the spiral of anxiety2 entails a developmental path, it

nonetheless in no way constitutes the achievement of a definitive or
conclusive goal, appearing instead as the acquisition of a capacity for
oscillating between different mental states in an increasing order of
complexity.
From another vantage point, the ability to bear one’s own separateness
entails the construction of an identity. For this reason we prefer to invert the
The Termination Process 89
order of the conceptual pair, preferring individuation-separation and

nonetheless maintaining the connotation of the simultaneousness of the two
aspects. It is possible to represent this as a stratification of multiple levels, a
stratification that is indebted to the endowment of instincts and to relational
vicissitudes. Now, the question posed here can be summarized as follows:
since we do not agree with a conception of the analytic process as self-
referential, in the sense that it is based on and justified in the interactive
operations and exchanges that constitute it (Compton’s second model), we
need to clarify what we mean by constraints with respect to a theory of the
development of the mind in which it finds its mandatory reference. We do not
believe that such development can be identified with a linear, gradual and
painless series of states - the expression of the so-called model of continuous
change (Klimovsky 1994). Nor do we think the maintenance of a
developmental reference, however necessary, is to be understood, strictly
speaking, as the model of development at the beginning of the process,
capable of influencing and orienting the course of analysis. We noted above
the normative risks inherent in the close parallelism between a certain theory
of development and the way of understanding the termination of analysis. The
reference to Freud’s lesson of “becoming what one is” presents developmental
tasks – for example the construction of gender identity – as accidental paths
which unfold marked by a perennial conflict. With the introduction of the
second topography, this conflict is presented as even more encumbered at its
origin by a double alterity, that of one’s own body and of the other’s
unconscious (in this, our reading is a radical departure from Hartman’s). The
wearisome journey of the ego’s emergence from the id forms the
metapsychological horizon not only for the ongoing structuring of psychism,
but also for the analytical process which, no less than the former, can be
viewed as coinciding with a long series of transformations. These
transformations are necessary for passing from the chaotic and
undifferentiated world of the impersonal, the cauldron of the id (appropriately
rendered in the adoption of a neutral term like id) to the incipient forms of the
ego represented by the repressed and repressing unconscious, places of the
subject’s emergence with its own history and destiny. It is in this conception
of the analytic process that our interest in the process of termination lies,
centered on the separating vicissitudes captured in their inseparability from the
psychic functions of temporalization and historicization.
Having recalled, however summarily, the essential coordinates of our
conception of the PP, we will now focus on the reasons which lead us to
hypothesize a process of termination and describe its features and peculiarities
in more detail. Although there is widespread agreement that the analytic
couple is involved in a crucial and complex psychic work when dealing with
the task of termination, in general an articulated differentiation is not
presented between the opening of a prospect for termination and the course to
be followed up to the actual termination. The two endpoints of this course
somehow overlap and are identified with each other, and the space-time
separating them is short-circuited and compressed in both theory and in
clinical practice. Actually, we are aware that this concise consideration
embraces a wide range of theoretical-clinical positions that have instead
important and differentiating nuances. Let us cite some of these positions as
examples.
A conception such as Laplanche’s (1987) “temporal window” is
certainly different from that of Quinodoz (1991) or Rosenfeld (1964). In
Laplanche, the attention is directed above all to the conditions which make
exiting from the analytic frame and the induction of a transference of the
transference feasible. In the other two authors, however, there is a careful,
meticulous and accurate observation of events and separation dynamics
mobilized by the end of analysis. In Laplanche, then, the discourse on the
termination of analysis is limited to a discourse on the conditions of
terminability, whereas the other two authors privilege the actual vicissitudes
of the termination and their connection to the particularities of primary
relations. All the same, what these conceptions of termination share is the
emphasis, in each case, on just one of the aspects of what we believe to be the
termination process. From this point of view, Novick (1988) must be credited
with having highlighted - explicitly and with exemplary clarity - the need to
avoid a confusion created by superimposition between criteria and indicators
of termination and the achievement of analytic goals. In his review of the
problem of the end of analysis, Novick emphasizes the lack of indications for
beginning the terminal phase, whereas generally one finds the formulation of
criteria for cure: “a cure which should be effected in part by the work done in
the terminal phase” (Novick 1988: 312). This yields the necessity of
differentiating the useful criteria for deciding when to begin the terminal
phase from the criteria for cure which can also be used for evaluating the
outcome of therapy.
This crucial distinction opens a conceptual space which is, in our view,
highly significant for the examination of the termination process, urging us to
deconstruct it in its multiple combinations and to explore and recognize its
different forms and configurations. A first important implication of this
perspective on termination is that it postulates a termination process which is
not reduced to demonstrating a simple final phase, one understood as the
gradual epilogue of a process which has already taken place and is solely to be
perfected. Instead, it is a matter of individuating a mental experience of great
intensity which, in order to be dealt with, requires the mobilization of all of
the combined energies of the analyst and the patient. The judgment of their
presence in the field, to the extent it may be relied upon, can be considered a
version of the so-called therapeutic alliance, operative only in this moment.
This alliance does not, then, constitute a initial premise of the analysis, but
rather an important achievement promoted by the analytic process and which
has, for example, an expressive linguistic indicator in the appearance of the
pronoun “we” designating the analytic couple. Together with other elements
which, as we shall propose, regard the changed relationship over time, this can
form the basis of what some consider the most important interpretative act of
the entire analysis: the beginning of a terminal phase. And yet this beginning
does not offer per se any guarantee or prefiguration of the actual termination,
since there is, on the contrary, the risk that in the handling of this phase the
meaning of the entire analytical experience can be jeopardized. For
psychoanalytic reflection on this theme, a consequence is the theoretical-
clinical necessity of identifying and reflecting on the criteria of termination, or
rather, on the indicators not so much of termination as rather of the formation
of an inner willingness in the patient to face this theme and its ramifications.
The handling of the entire process thus turns out to be an increasingly complex
operation, quite distant from the model of exhaustion or from that of the
patient’s progressive assumption of the analysis, and closer instead to a more
dynamic and constructive vision of an unrepeatable experience.
An attention to grasping the first signs of termination process is
supported by an awareness that the termination of analysis is such an
important event, it requires being lived to the fullest symbolic capacity. This
capacity in turn needs a lengthy working-through, without which the analysis
cannot terminate, but may instead be interrupted or head down the path of
interminability. Indeed, interruption of the analysis can be a way terminating
without passing through the process of termination. Moreover, the complexity
of this working-through refers directly to the analyst’s counter-transference,
which can determine either a tendency to stalemate or a stimulus to
acceleration in order to reach a tacit agreement aimed at avoiding or canceling
the tumultuous work which goes along with ending. In fact, the analyst can be
quite tempted to abbreviate this phase, sparing himself the vehemence and
anger of infantile lived experiences and colluding with the patient’s need to
make it painless. Instead, it is in this interval that an irreplaceable psychic
work gets carried out which is an integral part of analytic historicization.
A second significant implication of the concept of the termination
process then emerges relative to the possibility of having a conceptual
apparatus available and a method for reflecting on the variety of analytic
outcomes which make up the complex geography of termination (interrupted,
intermittent, or interminable analyses, re-analyses, etc.). It is certainly no
coincidence that it was Novick, once again, who forcefully drew attention to
the scarcity of terminated analyses as compared with those he defines as
premature or overdue. We will return below to these typologies to examine
them more closely and to point out some of the subtypes which are important
to distinguish. First, though, we will clarify that our intent is not to provide a
taxonomy of termination, but rather to increase awareness of the complexity
of the task of ending analysis and refine the analyst’s skills in carrying it out.
A third implication is that speaking of process instead of a phase more
clearly opens a perspective on the relationship between the type of termination
and post-analytical outcomes. The process of terminating analysis, thus

understood, has two principal features:
1. it leads the prior analytical work to its highest point (at least in ideal
cases), achieving the couple’s analytical project in terms in which it has
been elaborated;
2. it introduces a scenario of change which goes beyond the initial premises
and the work already carried out, as well as the termination itself. The
situation we describe is intrinsically dual, in that termination can be
defined in a first approximation as a second moment in the analytic
process and at the same time as a possible first moment of further
psychic work, whether analytic or post-analytic.
To speak of termination as a process rather than a phase, however

typical, or as a simple “act of passage” implies the adoption of a point of view
centered on temporality. However, this implication - which seems obvious at
first glance - actually requires an examination of the relationship between the
analytical and termination processes in the attempt to highlight (as we seek to
do here) characteristic aspects of the relationship with time during this specific
phase. As a differentiation of the PP, the termination phase takes its first steps
from it: on the conceptual level, as well as on the technical and clinical level,
it receives an impression which characterizes its horizon and structure, and
conditions its sphere of operation. The operation of differentiation that
constitutes it does not represent a negation of the PP from which the
termination phase originates, but the development of already-present
characteristics, combined with the emergence of others which are not present.
In a certain sense, the termination process rests on the psychoanalytic one, and
this is equally true on the level of events as on the conceptual level. From this
point of view, the relationship between the two can be seen as asymmetrical:
since the termination phase is fully a part of the therapy, the concept of the
termination process must embrace all of the characteristics of the general
process in addition to other new or emergent ones. As an emerging
characteristic we propose that of liminal time, and one which is reproposed on
a wider scale is that of Nacträglichkeit (deferred action).
In short, then, and as we will show more extensively in the next chapter,
the termination process appears characterized by these two particular aspects
of temporality: liminality and deferred action. The former dimension
highlights the peculiar mental quality inherent in the capacity of transition and
thus identifies the basis for a permanent psychic mobilization. The latter,
instead, understood in its fullest meaning establishes a particular and
reciprocal relationship between the two times of trauma – the then and the
now – works as the basis of historicizing operations.
But what history are we speaking of?
In writing about Leonardo da Vinci, Freud proposes a parallel between

the birth of historiography of a people and the history of an individual
punctuated by screen memories. He points out the common feature of
alterations produced by desiring thought and mythopoetic activity, expressions
of the need of the present from which the need arises to create a past and
invent origins that are often embellished and rescued from unimportance.
Here, a question of wide theoretical-clinical importance is symbolized in
relation to the self-theorizing subject, which flounders between the Scylla of
Kris’s personal myth, and the Charybdis of alienating mirroring (the self
narrated by an other).
In proposing an interconnection between the liminal dimension of time
and Nacträglichkeit as typical qualities of the termination process, we intend
on the contrary to point out the emergence of a lived experience of the
subject’s own history, one capable of combining closures and openings of
meaning and imposing, in retrodiction, “the sense of a final point” (Kermode
1966) upon the configuration of the past and its events. This is not, then, an
excess of history which can be based on a defensive or occlusive use of
memory, even less the lack of history, inherent in fragmented universes and
not integrated. Rather, it is a lived experience of the subject’s own history as a
narrative identity and subjectivization of those “impression events” (Pontalis
1997) to which his life is tied.
The particular lived experience of the subject’s history as the
inexhaustible product of the conclusion process is close to the description
given by Bollas, when he writes the following:
The past is inert…. By transforming the past into a history,

the psychoanalyst creates a series of densely symbolic stories that
will serve as ever-present dream material in the patient’s life,
generating constant and continuous associations.
Unlike the past, which as a signifier sits in the self as a kind
of lead weight, history requires work, and when the work is done
the history is sufficiently polysemous to energize many
unconscious elaborations
(Bollas 1995: 143-144).
Notes
1
Di Chiara (1978) uses the concept of separation in this sense, making it an additional
element with respect to those indicated by Bion.
2
We speak of a spiral of anxiety in the sense that in the various theorizations it seems
difficult to escape the connotation of more primitive anxieties as the backdrop upon
which more circumscribed forms of anxiety are delineated. Consider, for example, the
following: paranoid and depressive anxiety, automatic and signal anxiety, anxiety for
the loss of self and integration (Gaddini 1981), fragmentation-intrusion anxiety versus
castration-penetration (Green 1990). The latter author rejects a binary temporal
causality, following Freud in preferring to position castration as an organizing center,
with the consequent search for what corresponds to it in other registers.
Six
The Termination of Analysis as a Psychoanalytic Event
1. The Concept of Psychoanalytic Event
In psychoanalysis, the expression “termination process” is widely

referenced and established in its use, whereas we have proposed the concept
of “psychoanalytic event” in order to “define an investigative model of the
particular and complex phenomenology represented by the termination of
analysis” (Ferraro and Garella 1997a). There are several reasons motivating
this hypothesis. In part, they are a consequence of the observation of the
growing recognition attributed to the termination process in psychoanalytic
research and of the hope for further investigations relative to its last
development. In part, too, these reasons also arise from the conviction that
termination has such individual features - that is, it is such a singular
occurrence - that it merits at least our theoretical curiosity in order to
ascertain whether or not it is possible to trace the boundaries of this
singularity and construct a typology in the same way that there are typologies
of classes of phenomena which are otherwise irreducible. The debate over the
criteria of both the termination of analysis and the beginning of the terminal
phase reveals an incessant effort to question theoretical and clinical work in
order to grasp something more constant and stable in termination with respect
to the diversities of single analyses.
It will be recalled that in Freud’s chess metaphor the opening and final
moves of therapy are known and the intermediate ones unknown, but in the
conception that gradually developed through the last century, the course of
therapy – understood as a model of the analytic process - gained importance
and clarity, while the beginning and final phases appeared in greater need of
theoretical refinement and technical investigation. Especially in the
phenomenology of the final session or sessions, the termination of analysis
has the aura of a non sequitur from the point of view of theory as well as
clinical practice: the most important thing seems to be the dual need (fully
comprehensible and endorsable, let us immediately add) of bringing to an end
and/or making an inventory of what has remained unachieved. The rest, the
scrap and the excess remain in the sphere of the unsaid (Muratori 1980), but
not for this do we feel that they should remain in the sphere of the
uninvestigated and un-thought by theory. In this sense, the postanalytical
attempts through conversations and interviews to revisit people who have
terminated an analysis have the meaning of recuperating, among other things,
features and lived experiences of the termination in the attempt to enhance a

knowledge whose insufficiency appears insurmountable.
Why does the termination of analysis, in the temporal fabric of the last
session (sometimes sessions) appear this way? From a general point of view,
the situation at the moment of termination is not unlike other moments of the
analysis. There is nothing different in the macroscopic elements of the
analysis if not that a dream, a slip, a parapraxis or an action can have a
meaning in relation precisely to the fact that there will be little or no
working-through. For example, verbal exchanges can convey meanings that
are destined to remain in the shadows due to the material impossibility of
being analyzed and/or the difficulty of having a frame of reference to guide
the research and investigation in the direction of what constitutes the most
obscure and evasive part of the termination itself. The final session or
sessions appear as a temporal horizon of the psychoanalytic process: the
elements of the analysis draw irresistibly near to the point that their trajectory
is no longer observable, with an acquired escape velocity, so to speak, or a
temporal characterization that removes them from analytical investigation.
Indeed, the central theme we perceive in the termination of the analysis
(in the specific sense of the final session and not that of the termination
phase) is that no matter how much the existence of a temporal limit might be
accepted on the conscious level, it is a condition to which the primary process
does not yield. The limit is instead introduced into the unconscious dynamic,
in the play of the defenses and in the affectively invested representations.
Thus, in the passage from the level of external, material reality (where the
conventional, intersubjective and social element predominates) to that of
psychic reality (where the drive economy prevails, with the interplay between
drives and defenses), it undergoes a transformation, becoming a psychic
content. For this very reason it differentiates itself, individualizing itself
through the acquisition of meanings which can be quite different from
conventional ones.
The termination of analysis in these final moments poses a double
challenge. On the theoretical level, it challenges theory to comprehend it (in
the dual meaning of containing it and conceptually understanding it), with a
view to an (impossible) completeness. On the clinical level this demonstrates
- at times brutally, at times more subtly - that Freud’s expression “where id
was, there ego shall be” contains a significant share of illusion: the future, at
this point, is beyond the analysis, whereas the timelessness of the
unconscious rejects the present of termination. The reader will notice that the
subject, as we present it, has an aporetic quality that risks making discourse
appear vain and propped up by an illusion of power. Nonetheless, we might
say that the very same aporetic quality can act as a negative engine: it
prevents the finding of a solution, but not the finding of a path which it itself
fosters through the tension between its poles.
The Termination of Analysis as a Psychoanalytic Event 97
A further step along this path was the recognition of the peculiarity of
termination, which led to the attempt to interrogate it rather than ignore it or
remain silent about it as something of which we do not (and cannot) have
knowledge. The termination of analysis is an event in the etymological sense
of occurrence or happening, and thus features a minimum of characteristics -
the coordinates of the event itself. But it also possesses an additional meaning
in the semantic direction of a “success”, with the implications of
“accomplishment” and “attainment”, often reinforced by an adjective (great,
significant, unprecedented, etc.). In point of fact, the termination of the
analysis can be the successful completion of therapy or else an event which,
far from having to do with the completion, has instead to do with the
meaning of event or occurrence, whose value is unknown. The interaction of
these two semantic areas appears suitable for defining termination as a
psychoanalytic event (and henceforth we will italicize the term, so as to
distinguish it from the common usage), employing it as a theoretical
framework of reference whose aim is the investigation of analytic
termination, conceiving it “as a composite and polymorphous structure,
precipitate which condenses variously mixed symbolic components of acting
and communicating, both individual and as a couple.” (Ferraro and Garella
1997a). Thus the event of termination is not distinctive because of its internal
structure, but because of the definition we give it: its constitution is complex
and more easily related to a network made unique (single, individual) by the
nodes and connections forming it. We further underline the gap between the
event that we attempt to conceptualize here and the common “factual”
conception of the event: what renders the termination particular as an event is
the network of relations characterizing it, more so than the single elements. In
our view, this is a key point: if ignored, the event can evoke the impression of
“thingness”, that is, of a factuality unyielding to comprehension. The more
the quality of achievement and its complement – nonachievement or lack of
success – slips away from event, the more event narrows to the meaning of
“fact”. The unanalyzed and unanalyzable residue (but is it correct to call it
that?) present in every therapy endows the event with an opacity or hardness,
evidence for future memory (we are thinking here of cases of reanalysis) of a
situation which precipitates toward an unsaid point. Thus, termination is not a
fact (or at least, not only that), but an analytic situation which can interest all
of the elements of the process. This perspective allows us to appreciate the
weight of each element in the single termination (patient, analyst, analytic
couple, setting, etc.) as well as observe the resemblances and differences
between various terminations at a finer level, opening the way to a typology
of termination which in turn would be useful for further definition of the
termination process and for investigating postanalytic processes.
The definition we have given of the event aims at giving it a complex
representation which guarantees the singular and non-reproducible quality of
its occurrence in therapy. But all this alone would not take us much further
than the statement of an ineffable singularity, which contrasts with decades of

research on factors, criteria, indicators and objectives of the termination of
analysis. If the single event is individual in its constitution, this should not
imply an impossibility in principle of searching for an underlying structure
that embraces a common feature of the events or a methodological filter
which allows us to construct a general representation of the events
themselves. In our investigation, we felt it possible to obtain a good
characterization through the use of three conceptual axes, which we will now
describe: direction, communication and temporality.
1.1 Direction
With reference to analytic therapy in general, the event of termination is

centripetal, whereas the termination process is centrifugal. Indeed, the latter
can be conceived of as the psychic work carried out by the analytic couple in
order to reach its dissolution, while we view the former as aimed at creating a
separation which is actually the last and extreme moment of common work.
The first of our axes, direction, is clearly conceived of in a particular sense
provided by the existence of a relationship which has had the means and time
to get underway, and which now faces the task of concluding itself. The
direction enunciated here is thus relational: the event appears within a series
of analytical occurrences that involve the members of the couple to varying
degrees, and it simultaneously lies at the intersection of the individual level
with that of the couple. More specifically, the event is centripetal with respect
to the analytic couple, but centrifugal with regard to the single members. To
put it differently, the event of termination lies at the point in which the
trajectory of the analytic couple branches off into the divergent ones of the
single individuals. This branching off is at least potentially a catastrophic
situation, in the sense that it symbolically and temporarily establishes two
different domains – a before and an after – with an irreversibility that renders
the termination itself problematic if unaccepted (in the course of the analysis)
and makes the resumption of analysis necessary (after the termination). Lying
at the point of the forking, the event is subject to the influence of the
relationship - in a certain sense quantitative - between centrifugal and
centripetal forces. It thus ends up representing the resultant between the two
and can thereby offer an indication of that relationship. The prevalence of
one force over another and the forms of this prevalence or relationship can be
traced to the junctions and connections of the event, that is, in the
communications, acts, dreams, etc., which can form part of the structure of
the event itself.
In the first definition of the axis of direction, we obviously referred to
ideal terminations or those in which an impression prevails of a sufficiently
deep work or a quite advanced analytic process. We nonetheless think that
the direction of the event is also present in other types of termination,

including those for which the term termination is certainly not appropriate
(interruptions, impasses, interminability), with a different presence and
weight of the centrifugal and centripetal elements.
1.2 Communication
We can understand the event of termination as a message, that is, a

communication established between a sender and a receiver, requiring a
channel of communication and a code. In the termination event, the message
should not be seen solely in terms of conscious exchanges, but also and
above all in symbolic terms which range from the conscious to the
preconscious to the unconscious. The channel of communication, like the
code, can thus be non-linguistic, as in the case of an action or a somatic
manifestation; it can be linguistic in a secondary way, as in a dream; or it can
be linguistic, but in its aspect closest to action (in the sense of having a
perlocutory or illocutory function in terms of Austin’s theory of linguistic
acts). A further point is represented by the fact that the content of the
message - and we might say the very nature of its communication - requires
the initial and preliminary placement of a pole. This pole can give the value
of communication to an event or exchange, making it into a message. If in the
classic condition - in informational terms - the sender, receiver, channel and
code are co-existing (even if it is not in a rigid spatial-temporal sense), in
psychoanalysis the multiplicity of levels (intrapsychic, intersubjective, etc.)
makes it common for only one pole of the communication to be present or for
the two poles to be on different levels. Indeed, it often happens in
psychoanalytic work that the analyst is the receiving pole, but the patient is
not the sender (in the sense of a conscious sender). In this case, of course, we
find one of the general tasks and functions of the analyst: recognizing and
revealing events and communications offered by the patient as hidden
messages. In the process of terminating analysis, the patient can also be the
receiver by taking on this analytic function through interiorization. It is
therefore necessary to examine the various possible configurations in the
intersection of the sending and receiving poles with the analytic poles
represented by the analyst, the patient and the couple they come to form in
the course of the analysis.
A first possibility - obvious for its centrality to analytical therapy - is
that of the sender and receiver as the single elements of the couple, whose
roles are defined from one instance to the next. Another possibility is the
couple at one end of the communication and the same couple or one of its
single elements at the other. We repeat: the identity of the message’s sender
and its receiver is not indifferent, nor is the level at which the channel is
situated. For example, a distinction must be made between communications
taking place within the analytic couple in the course of the termination
process – defined as shared and communicatively worked-through
understandings, such as the intention of terminating, the interpretive work
and working-through connected with it, the setting of a date for the end, etc.,
- and the emergence in the analytic field of the event as a message requiring a
decoding that is necessarily incomplete and only partially shared by the
couple as such.
From the point of view of the couple, the termination event is a message
that the couple sends to itself and/or its members regarding a state
(termination) and a prospect (breaking up into single members). As sender
and receiver together, the analytic couple finds itself in the difficult situation
of deciphering a message formulated by itself, whose central content is an
end to the messages and the closure of the channel. In this perspective, the
couple that terminates analysis is faced with the communication “this
message is not (or is no longer) a message” - a paradoxical and irreducible
situation. The single individuals making up the couple will inherit the
paradox, breaking it down at an individual level in the form of their own
lived experiences and psychic contents.
Generally and in the abstract, this is the case of shared, ideally complete
terminations. But what about others - for example, those interrupted by the
patient or declared terminated by the analyst, or in those in which termination
has been substituted by interminability? In such cases, we argue, an
asymmetry between sender and receiver prevails: one of the roles is carried
out by the analytic couple and the other by one of the members of the couple.
The patient who interrupts or the analyst who declares the termination of the
analysis in any case carries out the role of sender of a message that the couple
cannot receive and make its own (for a variety of reasons we will leave aside
here). This impossibility obliges the single individuals to an inner work,
unshared because it is not communicated, that no longer represents the
resolution of the paradox outlined above, but rather its transformation into a
form of traumatic nucleus. The centrifugal component of the termination
event in the single individuals thus predominates over the centripetal one of
the couple.
The situation of interminability can in turn be characterized by the fact
that the couple does not succeed in sending the message and therefore it
cannot receive it either. The single individuals do not manage to
communicate as a couple, that is, in a sufficiently shared and open way; and
so an impasse is formed as a situation in which the potential receivers
indefinitely postpone the choice of the sender. There is no one who thinks
that there is a message and searches for the sender, and even if someone gets
close, he does not find an adequate level of reception. Neither the analyst nor
the patient manages to take on the role of initiators (senders) of the message
relative to termination, and thus the work of the couple on the theme cannot
take place: the situation gets blocked while awaiting the non-existent
message. In this case, the termination event does not come about due to the
lack of a termination process, or else it impetuously invades the scene
disguised as the need for external reality (thus even more intractable to
analytic work), appearing as an interruption. Another possibility is given by
the analyst’s counter-transference work, which can allow him to get out of
the difficulty of being one of the poles (either sender or receiver), and thus
initiate a terminating phase with the related process.
1.3 Temporality
The value of temporality in the general analytic process and in

termination is well known. Arlow (1986) emphasizes that psychoanalysis
offers an investigation of time with a unique method for describing the
complexity of the temporal experience. According to de Simone (1979),
temporality is crucial in relation to the very possibility of terminating
analysis. Our opinion is that temporality is also fundamental for the
investigation of different modalities of termination. We may thus postulate a
methodological continuity between the concept of temporal indicators as
privileged clinical signs for the end of analysis (developed in particular by
Argentine authors like Liberman [1985]) and our concept of the termination
event, in which the axis of temporality plays a fundamental role. We also
believe that it is important to draw attention to the definition of indicator
proposed by Liberman: “the material produced by the patient whose
unconscious referent is a positive, concrete datum on the path of the
psychoanalytic process located in time and real external spaces” (cited in
Preve 1994). As we will argue in the next chapter, where we examine the
theme of the opening of a prospect for closure more closely, this definition of
indicator contains an feature which we also consider crucial: the self-
representation of the course of the analysis as located in time, in space and in
the relationship. From a certain point of view, we might assert – moreover, in
line with the definition above - that even the other types of indicators,
specifically designated as indicators of movement or of separation (birth,
death, high school graduation examinations, etc.), of typical characters, and
of architectonic restructuring (Preve 1994) imply temporality, as will perhaps
appear more clearly if we carefully consider the termination event.
As we mentioned above, the temporal shape of the termination event is
not rigidly circumscribable, though it is heuristically convenient to make it
coincide with the last week or session of analysis. The reason for this
indicative delimitation is evidence indirectly emerging from clinical
experience of a sort of unity of temporal lived experience of the patients
which is probably patterned on the basic units of the analytic setting, both the
single session or the mini-cycle of the entire week of analysis. Given this
premise, the temporality of the termination event can be explored from
several vantage points, such as the relationship between acted-out time and
represented time, or between the perception of time (connected to external
reality) and self-observation as absorption in an inner time, and even through
the relationship between conscious representations and unconscious fantasies
influencing temporal lived experiences. This is because the phenomenology
of temporality is formed by an interconnection which is always varied in the
quality and intensity of these features, which can lie in harmony or in
contrast, and even present singular contradictions.
Details related to the final session such as delay, earliness, or absence,
forgetting the circumstance that it is the last one, confusing the day or hour,
etc., are examples of the acted-out time which may yield indications
regarding the manner in which the subject is facing the imminent termination,
the direction in which he attempts to manipulate its incidence (accelerating it
or prolonging it, blocking it out so as not to show up, etc.), and more
indirectly, regarding the way the announced termination is taking shape. A
rather macroscopic, and in a certain sense “classic”, epiphenomenon regards
the last payment (for example, paid in advance in the next to the last session
or “forgotten” in the last one, with the consequent “necessity” of having yet
another contact with the analyst). In these cases, time is present through the
association with money and can thus reveal a contrast with other lived
experiences and representations characterized by a greater harmonization
between the conscious and the unconscious.
The explicit communications that have temporal lived experiences as
their object during the last session or sessions can regard a wide range of
aspects. These range from the lived experience of the act of passage –
improvised, gradual, surprisingly continuous and developed from within, or
on the contrary, as a abrupt irruption straying into a time tyrannically
imposed from without – to the specific lived experiences of the last session.
They include all of those notations on the perception of the duration – too
brief or intolerably long, etc. – and on the use which can be made of them.
For example, the patient can associate up to the very end, with the meaning
of using up the whole last hour, or else leave a bit unutilized through a
prolonged silence which anticipates the closure.
As we have emphasized, the aspects of the temporal lived experience
most immediately influenced by affects can refer to feelings of trust, hope
and the capacity for planning, or on the contrary to impotence, block, and the
inability to envision a future. If we want to identify an essential
discriminating element, we could say that a radically different dimension of
the present is implicit in these temporal lived experiences. In the former case,
we find the present as a lived experience of contemporaneousness, that is, as
a mental quality that bears an element of transience and is thus imperceptibly
in relation with the past and the future, a time which flows but precisely
because of this stirs the desire to fill it with events and emotions. In the latter
case, the eternal present of immobility prevails, a frozen time in its own way
crushed in the vice of the past, which appears to be the sole dimension of the
future. In one last analysis dream, a patient asked a gypsy to tell her future,
while the scene concluded in uncertainty and in the absence of answers.
Strangely, this did not make her disappointed or frightened; she commented
that she had learned from analysis that “the future actually depends on one’s
relationship with her past.”
As for representations of time, these can be found in both verbal and
oneiric language. Arlow (1986) has proposed their distinction from temporal
lived experiences by virtue of the fact that the conception of time can be
reified or anthropomorphized - that is, treated as an object or a person, and in
this way be employed as a conscious presenting element, as the manifest,
derived representation of a fantasy or unconscious desire. Among the most
common representations, we find spatialized time (a hole-abyss; flowing sand
or a river; a series of places or rooms) or those figurations marked by
fantasies of voracity or control, influenced by pregenital impulses. In
personalizations, time has the form of an allied, friendly presence, or on the
contrary, of a pursuing oppressor or a strict regulator, these being
connotations of Oedipal time. It is clear that even the representations of time
entail affects; all the same, a unified study of lived experiences and
representations with particular reference to the metaphors of time (Arlow
1989) can refine our plotting of the means of relating to time and its
variations in the course of analysis.
From this point of view, a rich source of information appears to be the
attention to all of the instances of temporality in the last analysis dream.
Oremland (1973) has proposed an exploration of the last analysis dream as an
indicator of different typologies of termination, but temporal aspects are not
explicitly mentioned in his hypothesis despite the fact that, in our opinion,
they constitute a fundamental element of differentiation. Indeed, in
termination dreams he identifies two fundamental aspects which differentiate
a successful termination from an unsatisfactory one: references to the
patient’s symptomatology, with the representation of an eventual
transformation, and the way in which the relation with the analyst is depicted,
who appears undisguised in dream in an analysis actually brought to term.
These two aspects, respectively related to what we might indicate as “the
living history of the subject” and “the evolution of transference”, demonstrate
the work completed in the course of analysis. Last dreams in analysis can
thus be illuminating for the way they demonstrate the recovery of a
temporalizing memory that establishes connections between past, present and
future, or else is on the contrary blocked in repetition-compulsion,
reproposing the initial situation practically unchanged. Complementing
Oremland’s approach, Ferrara Mori (1993) hypothesizes the last dream in
analysis as a precursor (avant-coup) of post-analysis. Using the experience of
patients who requested supplementary analysis after the termination of
therapy, she investigates last dreams with the hypothesis that these implicitly
contain their subsequent outcomes, with greater attention to the post-analysis

developments than to comparison with initial situations, as in Oremland.
By combining these two different perspectives into a wider view, we
propose an investigation of the temporal aspects of the termination event in
both directions: as a means of highlighting the transformations which have
taken place in comparison with the beginning of analytical therapy, and as a
prefiguration of post-analysis outcomes, an indication of the particular
qualities of the relationship with the analyst. Both of the contributions on
dreams cited above were probably stimulated by the need - not unlike our
own - to outline different typologies of termination. The difference lies in the
way they circumscribe the termination event to the last dream, whereas we
suggest that it can be investigated by adopting a wider view, mindful of what
might have surprised us in the closing of the analysis and what can cover a
temporal range that goes beyond the chronological fact of the last session. It
is therefore necessary to consider what happens after termination (though
perhaps limited to the analyst’s thoughts and fantasies alone).
At the end of an analysis led by one of the authors, the termination
event was characterized in the final session by the patient’s goodbye, which
included - in a elusive and almost enigmatic manner – the promise of a gift.
A gift did in fact follow, and its content clarified some of the analyst’s doubts
as to the termination of that analysis, regarding his impression of a work that
was not sufficiently thorough, of a certain haste in an otherwise satisfactory
termination process. The gift was a print depicting a worker from the past,
perhaps a porter, happily sleeping on top of a basket. The analyst had been
put to sleep: he should have been satisfied with the work done, but the patient
could not say this; rather it was the analyst who had to receive.
In another case, the gift brought to the last session consisted of two
bottles of wine chosen with great care and emotional participation. The
analysis of the gift confirmed the meaning that the patient gave to the
analysis and the termination: the end of a lengthy lived experience of blame
and hate; a freeing up of positive feelings of joy and the actuation of behavior
which was no longer subject to a stifling control; and a certain sadness mixed
with euphoria for having brought the analysis to a close. The surprise
appeared only after some time, when the analyst understood the close
connection between the gift and a fantasy about the analytic process and the
analyst himself. In this fantasy, the wine metonymically symbolized a harsh,
threatening relationship of dependency that had long dominated the analysis.
The fantasy had been expressed from early on in the analysis through a
reference to the Greek legend of Procustes, the brigand who attracted
travelers into his cave and got them drunk in order to rob and mutilate them
while they were tied to a pallet. In this fantasy, the reference to time was
hidden but considerable: in his life, the time of the patient’s responsibilities
had always tyrannized the time of his pleasures, in a perspective of sacrifice
and masochistic renunciation. More than pacing it, this time actually
measured his life, varying the duration and intensity of his sense of
responsibility (and of that of guilt and inadequacy) in a painful and
implacable way.
In both cases the termination event extended beyond the last session,
pointing to a part that could not be worked-through and was thus extraneous
to the analytic couple. Although the termination of the analysis had been
reached with an adequate understanding of its meanings, keeping to our
discussion of temporality, an element remained which manifested the
presence of a quantity of affect regarding time experienced as something that
was not wholly controllable. In the first case, this was a time tied to processes
of identification, the time of the analysis as the time of the analyst, which
could perhaps lie in the background as a time of dreaming (to sleep in order
to dream). In the second, time was a feature of Oedipal aggression, intrusive
and castrating, “domesticated” and softened, but which always remained
under an intimidating effigy, that of the superego which requires an ego that
measures up to its own ideals.
We have another important source for investigating temporality in the
plans that take shape during the termination of analysis. By its very
definition, this domain of planning lends a strong continuity to the entire
process of termination from beginning to end, in that at a certain point in the
analytic process we often see plans emerge which take on consistency and are
carried out in the course of the process itself. Vice versa, they may simply
surface as outlines, and there will be no opportunity to follow their progress.
Having identified these plans as further articulations of the conclusion event,
we intend to explore them in relation to the temporal aspects forming them,
as paradigmatic of the relations between the psychic agencies - in particular
of the relationship between ego and superego, as mentioned in the preceding
case. Loewald (1962) has incisively emphasized that if we conceive of the
superego as a psychic structure representing the ego’s future, from whose
point of view we are judged, loved or hated with respect to the planned
achievements, the specific characteristics and qualities of the plans presented
can offer precious indications about the modes of interaction of temporality,
understood as organizing and ego’s connective action. For example, an
excessive distance between the plan and the subject’s possibilities to carry it
out in fact establishes an interaction between the psychic agencies marked by
a fragmented temporality: the future will never become present, and seeing as
the past as unconscious drives cannot be introduced within the plot of
becoming, it will thereby continue to function as a devilish (or regressive)
attraction rather than as a container for propulsive desires. On the other hand,
plans which are long-term but commensurate with the subject’s resources can
be conceived of as expressions of the ego ideal which animates and supports
the incessant search for self-realization. In an analogous vertex from which to
describe this difference, based on a different temporality, the former are plans
marked by a narcissistic time and the latter by an Oedipal time (Di Chiara
1979, Faimberg 1994). In narcissistic temporality, plans are supported by the

omnipotence fantasy of a sudden and magical execution, or else they are
prepared at an abysmal distance, to the point of disappearing. However,
based on the examination of reality, Oedipal temporality accepts the gap
between infantile and adult dimensions of the mind, finding a propelling
impetus for bridging it.
In her last week of analysis, a patient dreamed of a lovely house full of
plants which she was visiting with her boyfriend; she had the intention of
purchasing it. She was excited and surprised to discover that the asking price
was 25,000 [Euro], and in her waking thoughts she wondered about that
objectively low price. In reality, the work on the dream clarified that the price
alluded to the payment for analysis, merging the trust in something acquired
(the analysis led to an end) with the idea of a plan within her reach. In fact,
though this plan was not immediately feasible, it appeared as the point of
arrival for precise and definite goals (graduation and marriage), in which
energies that up to that time had been blocked could be channeled as existing
resources and concrete instruments of actuation.
In this same case, through the clash between the aspects of temporality
described above, it is possible to note the presence of a residue or excess,
expressions of the analysis as the interminable task even in cases in which the
analytic process basically appears terminated. Indeed, the patient wanted to
pay in advance during the next-to-the-last session, expressing the need to
avoid this duty in the final one. Here we can perceive a temporal acceleration
that contrasts with the lived experiences and the representations of the time of
the last session, as in Bion’s capacity to live the experiential moment.
Another patient, in her leave-taking upon the termination of the
analysis, surprised the analyst with her words as she made her goodbye at the
door, visibly moved: “For me, you have been the mother that I always
wanted to have and would like to be for my son.” More than by the specific
content, the analyst was struck - in a general impression which she was able
to focalize only later – by the use of the temporality condensed in that type of
final communication, and in particular by the optative form of verbal
expression. The analyst perceived the strength of an unsatisfied need-desire
from the past, which in the Nachträglichkeit (après-coup) of the transference
relation had been re-signified, and a disposition toward a future in which
indeterminacy coexisted with the propelling intensity of a desire-hope that
could draw force from lived experience.
2. A Typological Reflection
The description of the termination process and event outlined in the

preceding sections now allows us to proceed with a reflection on the different
ways in which a therapy can end. Our intention is fostered by a dual impetus:
the consideration that the most common experiential and definitional modes
of the end of analysis are a common ground for the majority of analysts and
are the reference of our discourse; and the conviction that our hypotheses can
refine our observational framework, revealing similarities and differences
where the continuum of experience sees only differences or only similarities.
As our point of departure, we have chosen Novick’s (1988)
classificatory scheme for the termination of analysis: terminated analyses,
prematurely terminated analyses - in forced and unilateral versions
(respectively, on the initiative of the analyst and the patient) - and overdue
analyses. We believe that this scheme provides the basis for a first attempt at
categorization, in that it establishes common experiential reference points: all
analysts have the experience of interminable analyses or interrupted
therapies, or situations in which they feel the need or obligation to terminate.
Let us repeat that the scheme should not be confused with the reality of
analytical therapies, which appear instead to lie along a continuum, of which
the above definitions are conceptual clippings. What counts, in the end, is the
ability of the scheme to capture experience with increasingly fine degrees of
resolution. We therefore propose to articulate and enrich the proposed
typological configurations with more subtle differentiations within them,
pointing out elements of a different type within each type of termination, if
only in a problematic form.
We note, for example, that although the unilateral feature of termination
is actually common to both of the variations proposed by Novick for
interrupted analyses, it becomes in any case necessary to distinguish between
cases in which the analyst “pushes” for termination, usually with a certain
range of “heroic measures”, and those where it is instead the patient who
imposes a termination that appears premature to the analyst. An important
difference between these two outcomes consists precisely in the particularity
of the process of termination, which in the first case probably takes on
particular characteristics; in the second case, however, it instead collapses
into the event of termination to the point of nearly coinciding with it.
Similarly, in overdue analyses - in which the analytic process seems to have
missed the crucial goal of termination - we can find situations of impasse,
now as prefigurations of subsequent outcomes of interruption, now as
outcomes of an unbearable fantasy relative to the process of termination.
Moreover, analysts quite frequently seem to have rather satisfactory
experiences of terminated therapies which nonetheless appear partial, due to
the presence of areas which remained obscure and off-limits. Had they been
prolonged, these analyses might have touched those areas, too, or perhaps
they would have gotten bogged down in them. In any case, they are analyses
whose success does not erase a sense of incompleteness and certainly not that
type of incompleteness which theory clearly tells us is inherent in every
attempt to deal with the unconscious.
Interrupted analyses (with premature termination, following Novick)

seem to lie at the center of the continuum which has terminated therapies at
one end and overdue analyses and impasses in prolonged therapies (that is,
which are not able to advance to a termination) at the other. Though the
proposed scheme is valid as a point of departure, this brief reflection has
already shown how flexible and elusive the boundaries are between the
divisions it postulates. Our intention now is to examine the specific
particularities of the termination process and event more closely in their
various configurations and to investigate the possibility of a relationship
between the various analytic outcomes and the structure of the event on the
basis of the characteristics described above.
Our hypothesis is that in the case of terminated analyses, the event

crowns and seals the process of termination, even recalling it in its essential
features. From the point of view of the direction, it appears above all
centripetal, to the degree that it creates the existence and functioning of the
analytic couple even in the moment in which the couple is breaking up.
Further, the event is surprising but not extraneous to the preparation
connected with the termination process, and it constitutes a message received
for the couple as well as the individual. The more general content of the
message appears to be that of the existence (“We are here because we are
leaving each other”, “Because we have been a couple, I can now be alone”,
etc.). The event, moreover, forms an act of passage; in its own structure it
contains an element of action which is untranslatable for the analytic couple,
represented by the passage from the communicative mode of analysis to that
of daily life. The dimensions of lived and represented time are to be found
predominately in the event; we stress predominately, because it is almost
always through details relative to temporality in some way acted out that we
see indications of the share of incompleteness inherent in every analytical
process. It is with this aim that we now describe in detail a termination event
in which the various dimensions of temporality are present together with the
complexity of the temporal experience (following Arlow), which can be
investigated through a final sequence of the analytic process.
A patient begins the final session of the last week of analysis by saying
that she had a colic the previous evening, something which had not happened
to her for a long time, and that she had it while she was dreaming:
She was in a session with a psychotic child, and she realized

that she had not conducted consultation interviews with the
parents. She was worried because she thought that the child’s
mother had entrusted him entirely to her rather hurriedly, without
the preliminary agreements which aim at a sharing of
responsibility.
Then there was a second dream: a car driven by the brother

of X [a man with whom the patient had had an unhappy
relationship which had ended] drove away at high speed. A pretty
green vintage automobile pulled up with X and various women
and his own mother, who looked younger. Unseen, the patient
could watch the car driving away, not as quickly as the first.
The two dreams have a temporal lived experience in common (relative

to assuming a responsibility and a departure) in which an excessive velocity
is noted; this is an indication of the end of the analysis drawing near, which a
day earlier the patient had said she did not want to think about. At the same
time, however, she told how she had gotten over her reluctance to take the
child she had been sent into therapy, a reluctance connected with not wanting
to fill the time left open by the hours of analysis in the coming year. Two
significant associations regarding the second dream (the bright green of the
car reproduced the color of the upholstery of the analysis couch and the
description of the younger-looking woman corresponded to the patient) also
both contained clear temporal references: the patient dwelled on the fact that
the brightly colored vintage auto seemed to contain a story, and she
underlined the contrast with the younger-looking woman she saw driving off.
She nonetheless reacted vividly to the interpretive comment which likened
the separation from X to that from the analyst.
One is inevitably struck by the concomitance of a somatic event like a
colic with the production of the dream. In this concomitance, we can perceive
two diametrically opposed sides of the psychic work imposed by the
traumatic task of the end. In the first, there is an automatic anxiety aimed at
an immediate discharge; in the second, instead, there is a signal anxiety
capable of producing representations centered on the possibility of gradually
modulating the lived experience of the separation (the significant difference
in velocity with which the two cars drove off). Thus, the emergence of an
anxiety that gets worked-through in the course of the dream is itself an index
of the work of transformation, which has a meaningful indicator in the
passage from too quick to slower movement.
It was certainly no coincidence that in the last two sessions of analysis
the patient chose to come to the session by a different route from the one she
had followed for several years, and after having hinted at the anxious
preparations to arrive in time, she related two last dreams.
In the first, she was at a hotel reception desk asking for a

single room just for herself. Two other women appeared: she
recognized one as the wife of a noted politician from her
hometown who seemed to be angry with her; she was frowning
and was accompanied by another, younger woman.
The patient’s comment was that she thought she was ready to be on her
own. The analyst drew attention to the name of the important woman,
identical to the patient’s; having already thought of this detail, the patient
observed that ending the analysis made her feel important, but she detested
the traits of the homonymous character. The woman was the professional
rival of the patient, who felt that she had been unjustifiably criticized by her.
After a prolonged silence, she added that her own mother, who for years had
never asked anything about the analysis, had suddenly asked that day, “Is the
person you see young?” With a certain surprise, she answered, “Yes,” but
silencing her implicit thought, “Not old like you [the mother]”. The detail –
age - which likened the two women (the patient and the escort in the dream),
was forcefully reproposed in the transference relation, in this way addressing
a detail which had already appeared at the beginning of the week in the
dream of the two cars (the woman/younger-looking mother that the patient
saw slowly driving off in the vintage auto). The assumption of responsibility
- but also the expansive dizziness connected to being alone - lies at the center
between the recognition of reality, especially of finiteness as the expectation
of the death of one’s own parents, suddenly seen as truly elderly, and the
perception of a future-oriented potential present in the metaphoric
representation of rejuvenation (a feature identifying both the analyst and the
patient), conveying elements of hope for planning.
In the last dream, the patient was with a man, not clearly
identifiable, “an imaginary presence”, and was faced with her
hairdresser, to whom she replied smiling. Yet addressing her
imaginary interlocutor, she commented (alluding to her
hairdresser), “He says a lot of nonsense.” She saw him heading
off with his two daughters (he has a brunette and a blonde) and
saw the brunette (the patient’s hair color) from behind, a twelve-
year-old girl who appeared to be six or seven. She has always
wondered if the father was aware of the difference between her
real and her apparent ages.
Once again, the patient is reluctant to accept the likening of the analyst
to the hairdresser; then she remembers a phrase pronounced by the latter
which sounds like a confirmation: “You don’t yet know what it means to have
your head in my hands.” In this, too, the dream reproposes a duality: in the
preceding dream, in concomitance with the request for a single room for
herself, a hostile woman appeared. On the one hand, there is a “smiling”
communication here, of the “putting on a good face” sort; on the other hand,
talking to her self, she expresses a significant reservation. The analyst points
out the double scene of the dream: the imaginary dialogue, a likely precursor
of the internalization of the analytic function, and the ambivalence connected
to separation, which makes hateful both the self that desires emancipation as
well as the analyst-hairdresser who is perhaps overestimating the maturity

acquired (in a reversal of the manifest content, mistaking the patient-child
with seven years of analysis for one with twelve). This seems to foster a
conflict over whether or not to terminate; the patient replies that she feels
very sad and tense, but at the same time determined to finish.
There is a brief silence and then, just a few minutes from the end, she
says she feels blocked. The analyst comments that she nonetheless seems to
know how to relate to what she is feeling, and the patient adds that she wants
to leave herself a chance, that she cannot believe that it is all finished. At the
moment of taking leave, she says that she brought an object and places it on
the table. Like the cases mentioned above, in its closeness to the act of
passage this gift also goes beyond the bounds of the shared interpretive work
and remains entrusted to the unconscious work of the analyst. At first glance,
the object – which turned out to be a Venetian glass ink-stand and pen – had
appeared to the analyst to be a colored crystal ball. In a subsequent reflection,
the object was associatively likened to a head, as a possible reference to the
oneiric thought in the dream of the hairdresser. Reconstructing the two
associative thoughts belonging to the work of counter-transference with the
manifest meaning of the chosen object, the analyst found herself thinking that
the communication as a couple could be attested to by the shared desire to
stay somehow in contact, such as by writing one other. The gift object could
thus reacquire a shared meaning, but only after the couple’s members had
experienced the following feelings: in the patient, the unconscious desire of
entrusting her head totally to the other’s hands – the prototype of the
beginning of analysis, as in the dream of the psychotic child taken into
treatment; on the analyst’s part, apprehension and uncertainty over the
patient’s destiny, uncanny affect for which the unconscious fantasy of having
a magical instrument – a crystal ball – had momentarily offered relief. The
allusion to writing as the symbolic content of the object, implying the
acceptance of distance and separation, arises in place of the renunciation to
the non-differentiation or to magical-omnipotent communication and testifies
to a more symmetrical reciprocity. Moreover, it seems to ratify the gap
between the immediacy and contemporaneousness of the lived experience of
the analytic couple and the imaginative constructions aimed at recreating
imaginary dialogues in their respective isolation.
As we have already mentioned, the category of interrupted analyses is

probably the broadest, due to the possibility of bordering and partial
overlapping with the other two types proposed by Novick, a situation which
is a sign of areas of disturbing contiguousness. Indeed, we intend to note how
some analytic processes that at first glance appear terminated can actually
turn out subsequently to be interrupted. On the other hand, we feel that the
dynamic of a premature interruption can be grafted onto the channel of
analytic processes that have resulted in an impasse - that is, ones that are
bogged down in non-process, and for this reason requiring mechanisms of

mobilization characterized by an inevitable quality of “forcing”. So-called
“heroic measures” form a good part of such mechanisms: they are an
expression of the analyst’s conviction of the need to place an end to the
analytic work. Obviously, this is nothing more than the clearest and most
recognizable instance of counter-transference suffering which gives rise to a
precise procedure, like the one theorized by Meltzer (1977), for example. He
proposes a technique which he defined (not casually) as “interruption
technique” as a way of treating the specific impasse of being on the brink of
the depressive position. He is cautious in applying it, and he refers to an area
of responsibility that, after all, can only safeguard the procedure “in the
scrupulous work of self-analysis”. This implies the perception of a complex
and problematic area requiring a careful effort to penetrate into the nature of
the impasse and a “logical basis” for interruption.
In our view, there are several intermediate situations that are more
complex and difficult to decipher in which, for example, the difficulties and
eventual blocks to the process can surreptitiously influence the decision to
bring the analysis to term. Perhaps it is precisely these more nuanced
situations that can benefit from a reflection on the termination event we are
proposing, as characteristics echoing the process preceding it. Though in a
subsequent chapter we will examine more closely the various forms that can
be isolated within the basic configuration of interrupted analyses, we limit
ourselves here to the general distinction proposed by Novick between
prematurely terminated analysis through the patient’s initiative or the
analyst’s: a distinction which we will explore in the light of our hypothesis
regarding the various coordinates of termination events.
From the point of view of the axis of communication, interruption –
regardless of who instigates it – is a communicative action concerning the
couple (and in this, it preserves a potential symbolic dimension as a message)
that is not able to transform itself into a message received by the couple as
such. This is because it lacks or does not find a shared point of arrival: the
termination process - absent or so predetermined as to challenge the
constructive character of the process itself, which is oriented to the event - is
equivalent to the absence of a dual relation, in short, of a couple that together
with the individuals receives what is emitted in the analysis. More than a
message received by the couple and the individuals, interruption thus appears
to be a form of communication, an utterance which is not received by
anyone, inasmuch as it tends per se to conceal the sender and negate the
receiver. In analyses interrupted on the patient’s initiative, the event is
dominated by the acting-out, which leaves little or no space for elements of
symbolization and verbal elaboration; the event flattens the process, short-
circuiting it in an ambiguous exit from the scene. It appears more alienating
than surprising, in that it caps the analytic couple’s difficulty by finding some
sort of solution only by placing itself outside of the analysis. The interruption
of analysis on the part of the patient may be little surprising or not at all, but
for the analyst it almost always constitutes the patient’s final alienation from
analysis.
In “forced” analyses, the element of acting-out is present in a more
ambiguous way, because it does not necessarily coincide with some form of
“heroic measure”. Paradoxically, it may instead show up in a figure-
background relation, beginning precisely with elements of the patient’s
acting-out which inevitably lead the analyst to think about less evident
counter-transference actions.
In one case, through a termination event whose principal feature was a
dissonance of temporal lived experiences, the analyst understood that it was
an interrupted analysis, and more exactly – in Novick’s terminology – a
forced termination. Despite the fact that the problem of termination had long
been discussed in the analysis, and the date had been set far in advance, the
patient was surprised when he got up at the end of the last session, and as
confirmation of this and in contrast with his usual behavior, he left without
paying. Looking back in the light of postanalytic developments (after a
difficult experience, the patient resumed and then interrupted the analysis
again), the last dream of analysis appeared to the analyst to contain a number
of signs as to how premature the termination was.
In his dream, the patient was with a man who discovered

himself to be Jesus Christ in disguise. The patient approached him
from behind and gave him a kiss, feeling a very strong emotion.
The man led him to an isolated place, and giving him a sort of
blessing, encouraged him to go, saying, “Now you are an adult
warrior, go.”
The patient woke up with a strong feeling of anxiety, and he thought he

heard organ (wedding) music and could feel earthquake tremors. In
commenting the dream, the patient added that the man appeared to be
perspiring, as if he had greatly exerted himself, and exclaimed to the analyst,
“You have certainly held out.” He then added the final scene of the dream,
which had at first been forgotten.
He was in an empty chair where a woman was supposed to

sit, but who was no where to be found, although everyone was
looking for her. When all hope seemed to be lost, the patient saw
a note, a faint clue which might lead him to her.
The analyst had an associative thought regarding the dream (Judas’s

kiss), which, however, he did not have the chance to utilize; in light of what
happened subsequently, it in fact expressed the situation quite well.
Combining Oremland’s hypothesis with Ferrara Mori’s, we might say that
the termination of this analysis was marked by betrayal and an unresolved

transference idealization that predicted the analyst’s destiny: his strenuous
search. The second scene of the dream, remembered only in a later moment,
can instead be considered what precedes and “causes” the first. The absence
of the analyst placed in relation with “having gone away” seems to induce a
pseudo-adult assumption under the dual and ambiguous sign of an initiation
(a wedding) and a disaster.
In the dynamic of analyses unilaterally interrupted by a patient, we can
often perceive a temporal urgency which compels him to catapult himself
outside of the analysis, claiming the need for greater time and space for
impetuous plans that the analysis seems to cramp and mortify. The presence
of an adolescent pattern, incisively identified in this type of termination by
Novick (1982, 1988), has its strength in the subjective perception of time,
which reveals the conflict in managing the relationship between infantile
aspects – felt to be too dependent and regressive – and the urgency to become
adult, up to that point lived as the total dominance of the present, created in
the self-appropriating effectiveness of action. Here lies the paradox of a time
so explicitly referred to, but which produces a movement that in reality tends
to immobilize it, amputating its connection with the past and postponement to
the future – we might say, an interruption as a means of not terminating.
Even in terminations that are (too) late, a fundamental aspect might be
the proportion of acting-out which can be noted. In this case, both members
of the couple emit messages but no one receives them – neither the couple
nor the individual members. The couple cannot agree upon its own separation
and it turns in upon itself, in all likelihood waiting for an action of one of the
two members. In effect, in interminable analyses or ones in which it is in any
case the analyst who takes the initiative, termination appears as an extreme
attempt to create a centripetal event that brings about a change in the
functioning of the couple, at least in the final moment. The termination event
seems to be so surprising and alien for the couple that it appears as a
centrifuge (termination as a destructive catastrophe). The analyst’s initiative
then becomes – in our opinion - an attempt to regain his blocked individuality
in the analytic relationship and, moreover, constitutes an injection of sense
and emotion. We can make a similar consideration regarding the temporal
part of the event: the condition of interminability, and often also of block
(impasse) in an analysis, represents a conspicuous defense against the
recognition and acceptance of time. The indefinite continuation of analysis
(for an entire lifetime, as in so-called therapeutic “lifer” patients [Wallerstein
1989: 937]), can represent the way in which the patient, and sometimes even
the analyst, preserves the object and/or the desired relationship, which is
rendered innocuous, however, by a double treatment: preventing the threat of
a loss and inhibiting the introduction of a temporality borne by the object.
Unlike analyses interrupted by the patient, in which time gets rejected
through the refusal of the object that represents and bears it, in forced
analyses, there is, so to speak, a mutilation or parceling of the object. In our

view, this explains the immobility and alienation which the object (usually
the analyst) feels and can lead him to assume “heroic” measures. The analyst
introduces time – his own time - forcefully in the analysis, obliging the
patient and the couple itself to come to terms with it. In our experience, this
determines either a break on the part of the patient, who cannot accept the
object bearing time, or a fluidization and resumption of the analysis.
In a certain sense, at least in some cases the impasse can be considered
to be the manifestation of a type of overdue analysis (“im-passed”, so to
speak), and how it is overcome can be examined in relation to the means of
facing the theme of termination.
A patient whose analysis continued for over a decade finally managed
to face the subject of termination, proposing the end of the year as a term (a
date which was explored in its analytic meaning as much as possible). At the
end of her summer vacation prior to the termination, the patient did not
resume analysis, though she continued to keep the analyst informed of the
serious reasons which prevented her from coming from one time to the next,
and was careful to make her monthly payment. The serious reasons – a
pregnancy followed by an abortion – clearly actualized the transference
theme provoked by the imminent task of separation. However, they were
actions outside of the analysis, in a pressing and unyielding centrifugal
movement, appearing to the analyst to be a highly significant communication
which could not find a place of shared reception (the analytic setting which
was so ambiguously vitiated). The impossibility of being present at the
termination event therefore lasted for some months, making the temporal
anticipation of the end macroscopically clear. The patient subsequently
wanted to meet the analyst for a talk; during this, apart from the verbal
exchange, it was through the disturbing significance of the patient’s body
language that the analyst was able to gather the patient’s self-image as she
emerged from the period of invisibility. Instead of the pretty young woman
she knew so well, the analyst was faced was a person of awkward
appearance, deformed by a weight gain of 20 kilos. What had been a
terminated analysis (in many ways) turned out, more clearly and concretely,
to be an interrupted analysis. The patient, in an analytic process blocked in an
impasse, had not managed to enter fully into the representative and affective
dimension of termination; rather, we might say that she had glimpsed it, only
to retreat from it right away in the form of a substantial interruption.
3. Conclusions
The termination event, which we hope to have illustrated, contains

surprising and alienating features with respect to the context in which it takes
place: alienating (in the sense, too, of uncanny) in that it is a hiatus in regard
to a work of the unconscious and on the unconscious which continues

indefinitely. First of all, it is surprising in that it is alien to the life of the
couple (to the extent that this life tends to maintain itself indefinitely), and
second, because it can represent an unexpected moment of an unveiling or
expression of the unconscious. The surprise and the alienation vary with
respect to the analyst and patient poles, as well as in the moments in which
they are manifested: the last sessions, the last instant or after the last session.
Further, it is important to underline that the emergence of the event does not
refer exclusively to the patient pole: the analyst’s contribution is
indispensable to the reestablishment of a symmetry with regard to the
unconscious. Some follow-up studies have sought to compare the memory
that each member of the couple had of the analysis undertaken together;
likewise, it would be interesting to compare the memory of termination: Was
the event transformed into memory, that is, was there a memorization of the
experience? If so, what and how do the patient and analyst remember?
What is the legacy of the event? It should in fact be seen in the
formation of a memory. Yet we do not mean this in a banal sense: here we
follow Pontalis (1984) when he argues that the event in psychoanalysis is not
a reminiscence of lived experience. We must think that the termination event
participates in the mnemic process not so much through archaeological
unearthing (of further and specific buried memories), as in consenting
memory to appropriate what has not been. In this perspective, the act of
passage described by Flournoy (1985) lends itself to designating the feature
of memorizability of the termination event as a deep and complex experience
of the subject.
A result of this is the interesting hypothesis that the construction of the
memory (for example, of an achievable, bearable and representable
separation) as a precondition to a postanalytic working-through of the
termination event requires an experience (the event) which has the inherent
quality of surprise. A difference between termination process and event, then,
might be understood in the fact that the process prepares for an unexpected
event, whereas the event creates the memorizable experience which will
saturate or at least fit into the preparatory work. The process creates an
indispensable condition of reducing the unconscious defensive deformations
relative to the termination of analysis, stirring up expectations regarding the
event through their connection with the various phases of the analysis and
thus the various psychic contents analyzed. The event brings the preparatory
work of the process to be condensed in an experiential singularity, whose
mnemic trace, on the one hand, seals the process, and on the other, enters into
postanalytic dynamics. The centripetal character of the termination event
contributes in turn to the memorizable experiential quality described above:
unexpected and surprising, the event (in an ideal termination) is livable
within a symbolic dimension as representation. We might sum it up by saying
that if the event establishes a memory through its factual dimension, the
process of termination is the working-through of the memories which are

opposed to the event itself.
The close relation existing between the termination process and event is
not limited to the latter’s being, so to speak, a replica of the process on a
smaller time scale, as a sort of fractal which is self-replicating on every level
of scale; nor does it constitute a deformation of it in the topological sense,
that is, in which the relations between the parts are maintained constant.
Instead, the event represents the blossoming of the Freudian unheimlich: in a
familiar situation of the analytic process (and familiar, here, in all of its
possible meanings!), the end of analysis introduces a disturbance which can
mobilize unforeseen defensive fronts - unforeseen in the sense of never
having been seen, but also in the sense of unexpected, because they were
thought to be overcome. The process of termination manifests itself as an
emergence within of the general analytical process; the event as an
emergence within or at the end of the termination process. The difference is
that while the termination process’s emergence or lack of it can be an object
of analysis, the emergence of the event can only be analyzed to a minimal
extent, if at all. For this reason, it is necessary to have a different
methodological attitude: for the termination process, the identification of its
emergence and the criteria of reference and evaluation are of decisive
importance; the greater significativeness of the event instead lies in the
possibility of functioning as the second moment of evaluation of a terminated
process. The event can form a hinge between the termination process and the
subsequent period when an encounter with the patient occurs (on the latter’s
request, or planned, as in follow-up studies, for example). The termination
process and event can thus be seen as two terms, or rather, two times of a sole
process. It is precisely in a temporal view provided by the expression “two
times”, understood in the psychoanalytic sense of deferred action or
Nachträglichkeit, that we intend to continue our discussion of the termination
of analysis.
Part Three – A Third Time for Termination: The Liminal
Seven
The Liminal
1. Introduction
The relationship between time and psychoanalysis is a subject that

intersects two different areas of psychoanalytic thought. On the one hand,
there is the metapsychological sphere with its developmental (genetic),
dynamic hypothesis, etc.: on this level, research investigates the modes of
development and the representation of temporality in psychism. On the other
hand, there is the clinical sphere, which focuses on the relationship between
the psychoanalytic process (in a broad sense, including transference, the
setting, etc.) and temporality, both in terms of the individual participants
(lived experiences and representations in the patient and the analyst), as well
as the couple (the course of the process). This is the level that we shall
address here after a necessary introduction.
In Freudian metapsychology, temporality arises in the psychic world as
a derivative of psychic activity itself. The sensation of the passage of time
derives from the perception of the flow of internal processes on the part of
the consciousness; temporal succession is modeled on the characteristic
periodicity of psychic systems (unexcitability after discharge; temporariness
of the investments, whether they are innervations or pseudopodia of the id or
attention cathexes of the ego). To this we must add what Laplanche (1989)
calls the rhythm factor, which is connected to the sequences of the
quantitative variations in the stimuli (Freud 1924). In the field of the somatic,
temporality – in addition to being rhythmic – is non-symbolic and thus
unrepresentable in its immediacy, being tied to an organization in which the
organic present prevails (Fraser 1996). The fact that this has to do with a
different level from the psychic one is quite present in Laplanche (1989):
biological rhythm is defined as the tempo of time, the temporal essence of
immediate biological consciousness. The somatic continuum is the biological
premise of our existence as individuals, and it is widely known how
corporeal rhythms (circadian, ultradian, infradian) express the necessary
coordination of the multiform processes underlying our sense of being a
biological unit. For Laplanche, psychological time emerges from a doubling
of physical (biological) time, in the sense that is a derivative of it without
being identical to it. The form assumed by relationality clearly concerns the
integration and coordination of corporeal functions and rhythms.
Most recently in psychoanalytic thought, psychic temporality appears
irreducible to mere corporeal temporality, which is essentially cyclical,
automatic, conservative and non- representational (whose most striking
expressions might be the extreme forms of life of the fetal period and coma).
The different forms of temporality are conceived to be the result of processes
that organize experience (Jaques 1982), or else the expression of functioning
of psychic structures whose nature is intrinsically temporal (Loewald 1962).
Modell (1990) conceives of the ego as a structure engaged in the elaboration
and reorganization of time.
On the social level, social habits of regulating time - including
judgments, behaviors, techniques, and explanatory and normative patterns
relative to time - form a continuum whose fabric is made up of multiple
forms of social relations: public and private, personal and group. For German
sociologist Norbert Elias (1984), continuum, relationality and triangularity
are the three reference points for a sociological discourse on time. As we see,
the routes of time can be quite similar for different disciplines. In the social
sphere, the rhythms and forms of temporal organization have a symbolic
nature and expression: the structure of language, the symbology and
iconography of time, and the formal organization of social behaviors are all
examples of areas in which individual psychic processes, collective psychic
processes and cultural processes all mix. It is in the social sphere - thus a
symbolic one - that we find the anthropomorphic operators of time
(Brockmeier 1996), a metaphor that helps us to construct our temporal
synthesis on both an individual and social level. These are symbolic “acts of
signification” which organize the meanings of the culture in which we live
and together express a dimension intrinsic to the meanings and their creation.
The anthropomorphic operators of time - which for Brockmeier are
chronology, activity, language and space – appear to resemble and be
connected to unconscious figures of time, as described by Arlow (1986) for
example.
In a discussion that is of interest to analysts, Brockmeier argues that it
is not possible for humans to have a stable epistemic distance from
diachronicity or from their experience of it, since they are immersed in this
very diachronicity. Brockmeier then supposes that one of the psychological
functions of our temporal concepts is that of enabling us to find a sort of
“theory” for our life, a temporal framing of life which makes intentionality
and the meaning of life possible. This scheme of temporal reference consists
in the ordering of a succession of diachronic events in a meaningful way,
whose final outcome is continuity, autobiography and identity. For
Brockmeier, the narrative plot is a fundamental form of temporal ordering:
each autobiography underlines or summarizes an implicit autobiographical
temporal theory. This is articulated through many spatial references,
The Liminal 121
organized by the different locative systems of our language and by the

cognitive map of the narrative scenes. Such deictic and iconic references are
often synesthetically connected to aural tones (coming from natural linguistic
and musical contexts) and to tastes, smells and temperatures.
In Brockmeier’s other efficacious formulations we find another way of
describing the function of time and the psychic processes characterizing it
and characterized by it. In short, time is a means to an end: it is used to come
to terms with the structure of the meaning of our culture, but it is also a
means that is a part (feature or quality) of the aim itself, in that it exists only
within and through the world of human meanings. We believe that such
formulations do not lose their efficacy if transposed to the analytic field: time
is a means through which the ego comes to term with significant psychic
agencies (id, superego), organizing the past, present and future, as well as
regulating the lived experience of temporal duration according to a
compromise between needs, desires and ideals. But time is part of the end
itself, since it is only within a network of interstructural (intrasubjective) and
intersubjective exchanges that it can find a place and a sense.
Thus the irreducibility of psychic temporality also regards the socio-
cultural level, which in turn inevitably finds the biological world of the
somatic irreducible, since at best this level can only partially symbolize or
semanticize the somatic as a cultural category (thereby clashing with the
famous Freudian bedrock). In the common-sense notion that we are born in
time and at death we carry away (our personal) time, we find an intuition
expressed that the time given to us at birth is something which enters so
closely in our psychic constitution as to be irrefutable, first, and then
unrenounceable. In some ways, Time is strictly connected to the Other: to
what - external body or reality - is not self and continuously refers the
individual psychic organization to itself. It is precisely in the latter that the
ways of physical-biological, linear and cyclical temporality blend together
with the times of society and culture, which are also linear and cyclical in
their own ways.
We think this clarification is important, because the references to
cyclical and linear temporal modalities that make them exclusive attributes of
univocal psychic spheres seem too rigid. Typically, timelessness is associated
with the primary process, cyclicality with repetition-compulsion, and
linearity with the secondary process and with the ego’s synthetic and
conscious action. These attributions leave open the questions relative to the
relations existing between the various spheres: recall, for example, the
diversity of opinions over the definition and role of both repetition-
compulsion (expression of a fundamental drive or manifestation of a
compromise between timelessness of the primary process and the linearity of
the secondary one) and Nachträglichkeit. With reference to the latter, the
question is whether or not the relation (in this case between a before and an
after) indissolubly intersects with representation, that is, if the signification of
the individual’s fundamental themes – such as sexuality, trauma, etc. –

requires a dual-phase course in a inherent way or only in a secondary way.
Moreover, in the concept of Nachträglichkeit there is the question as to
whether the cyclical (the necessity of re-presenting the excitement) or the
linear element (the importance of the context of the second time) prevails. In
short, it is difficult to reconcile or theoretically connect the two types of
temporality as distinguished in the manner described above. As a result, it is
necessary to find mediations - such as idea or figure of time in a spiral - that
bridge the cyclicality of repetition and the linearity of developmental
processes. In other words, we argue that the distinction between linear and
cyclical time does not exhaustively define the field of psychic temporality, in
that it imposes definitions and attributions that are too restrictive.
The study of the process of termination, its modes of beginning, playing
out and conclusion, and its relationship with the termination event, has led us
to think of an alternative temporal modality capable of interacting with the
other two. This modality is characterized by uniting the properties which in
the other two temporal modalities appear arranged according to rules of
mutual exclusion, if not actual opposition. The search for concepts with
which to represent this modality has led us to examine the works of writers
with an ethnological and sociological background, who even back in Freud’s
time had already dealt with the subject, achieving results in their fields that
were made public and received. We will briefly explain how their discussions
have stimulated our interest.
2. The Liminal
In 1909, Arnold van Gennep published a book which had little success
in its day, only to rise to the status of a fundamental volume around the
middle of the last century when it was adopted in the work of other authors,
such as Victor Turner. In this book, the scholar – a German assimilated into
French culture – formulated the concept of the rites of passage, including
among these a variety of sacred and social rituals which up to that time had
been viewed as variegated and scattered. In the Introduction to the Italian
translation of the text, Remotti defines them as follows:
Rites of passage are the ceremonial mechanisms which

guide, control and regulate changes in every type of individual
and group […, with the aim of] facilitating changes in status
without violent shocks for the society or sudden interruptions in
individual and collective life.
(van Gennep 1996 [1909], Ital. ed.: xviii, 41).
The Liminal 123
The characteristic that identifies rites of passage is the placement of the

individual undergoing them in a condition of transition: existential, social,
sacred – and we add, psychological. In particular, in the sphere of rites of
passage, van Gennep distinguishes between rites of separation, rites of
transition (or liminal rites), and rites of incorporation. The second group is
the most interesting one for our work; as Remotti’s states:
[The transition] slows the passage and introduces a rituality

typical of the ritual. In other words, it is the transition which
impedes the coincidence between the movement of separation
(from a situation A) and the movement of incorporation (to a
situation B)
(ibid: xix).
An important point is the automation of the transition with its

preliminal, liminal and postliminal rites. Indeed, as van Gennep notes, the
transition is sometimes so well-defined that it forms an autonomous step, a
mark of the border or a neutral zone where the passage takes place. Often
symbolized as a threshold, the transition is a boundary through which the
passage is carried out; it is temporalized in the form of a stage with its own
rites: some transitions can take on a certain autonomy, like novitiate,
engagement, pregnancy, or mourning. The rites of passage can regard time,
as in the case of seasonal or monthly cycles, or they can place the passage of
condition in the form of birth-death-rebirth: in effect, birth, childhood and
adolescence are the periods richest in liminal rites.
Turner (1967) borrows the concept of the rites of passage and further
specifies it. The period of transition or liminality is considered “an
interstructual situation” when the model of society taken is that of “a
structure of positions.” These rites indicate and construct “transitions
between states” which include social constants such as legal, professional,
marital status, as well as ecological, physical, mental and emotional
conditions. Turner prefers to “regard transition as a process, a becoming, and
in the case of rites de passage even a transformation” (Turner 1967: 94);
moreover, he notes, “rites de passage are not confined to culturally defined
life-crises but may accompany any change from one state to another” (ibid:
94-95).
Turner distinguishes between the sacred ceremony, which confirms,
from the ritual, which instead transforms: in certain rituals, the individual is
treated like a dead person waiting for rebirth in the new condition. Turner
notes that the subject of the ritual in the rites of passage is structurally
invisible, since he does not fit into any of the culturally existing categories:
for example, a non-boy/non-man (an initiate in a male puberty rite). He
writes: “The structural ‘invisibility’ of liminal personae has a twofold
character. They are at once no longer classified and not yet classified” (ibid:
96). On the one hand, the neophytes are neither alive nor dead, and on the
other they are both alive and dead: theirs is an ambiguous and paradoxical
condition which all of the traditional categories are confused. In societies in
which gender distinctions have great structural importance, the neophytes are
seen now as neither male nor female, now as both. Another negative
characteristic of transitional beings is that they have nothing (status, property,
rank, etc.). Turner further elaborates the concept of liminality: “We are not
dealing with structural contradictions when we discuss liminality, but with
the essentially unstructured (which is at once destructured and
prestructured)” (ibid: 98). He also writes the following:
Liminality is the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there

is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence. As in
the works of Rabelais, there is a promiscuous intermingling and
juxtaposing of the categories of event, experience, and
knowledge, with a pedagogic intention. But this liberty has fairly
narrow limits. The neophytes return to secular society with more
alert faculties perhaps and enhanced knowledge of how things
work, but they have to become once more subject to custom and
law.
(ibid: 108).
The liminal period, with the ritual accompanying it - for example in

initiation rites - does not consist in the acquisition of an attribute, but in a
downright ontological transformation: the expression “making a girl grow”
expresses the initiation of the girl to adult female life in terms of the
incarnation of adult feminineness in the girl.
More recently, Halpern and Christie (1996) reexamined the term
“liminal”, giving it a meaning which is above all temporal. They begin by
considering the existence of “temporal morphologies”, that is:
…the ‘shapes’ which events, activities, and institutional

structures take on the temporal landscape. Beyond time reckoning
and the conceptualization of time itself, there lies a “cultural
ecology” of temporality – patterns of adaptation to certain key
temporal realities: the inevitability of change, and the perception
of recurrence
(Halpern and Christie 1996: 188).
The two authors deal with the study of such morphologies and
ecologies along three temporal dimensions: linear, cyclical and liminal.
Leaving aside the first two, where the authors are basically close to common
opinions, they conceive of the third in the following:
The Liminal 125
It may be thought of as the absence of “real time” or “real

event” experiences. On the subjective level, liminality is
experienced in psychologically altered states such as trance and
epiphanous visionary events, whether induced ritually or by
means of substances such as psychedelic drugs. […] On the
conceptual level, we see liminality as the quality of sacred things
and events […] imbued with a timeless aura. … On the
conceptual level, the liminal may be “dreamtime” or mythtime,
time before time, when another order of life prevailed
(ibid: 189).
Halpern and Christie recognize their indebtedness to Turner and van

Gennep, but they argue that the antistructural characteristic (which Turner
defines as interstructural) of liminality - its “being in between, neither one
nor the other” - also concerns temporality. In temporal terms, there are events
whose structure is neither progressive nor linear, nor is it cyclical, recurring
nor repetitive: the authors cite sleep as a model of such events. Sleep can be
socially regulated (as to the where, when, and how, etc.), but it remains
outside of normal patterns of interaction: “It is a temporary death in the sense
that it involves a removal from life’s activities” (ibid: 196). Liminality is
particular in that it can be situated in the present, the past, or even in the
future (in origin myths or in millenarian conceptions), but in each case it
coexists with the present of chronological time.
This excursus provides a brief background to our hypothesis that a
particular temporal modality is essential for the psychic world - one which
differs from cyclicality or linearity: that of liminality or liminal time. This is a
suspended, parallel time, that of rites and myths, of consciousness’s sleep and
dream, and – we would add – of the psychoanalytic process and setting. This
is not so much a different way of defining the timelessness of the
unconscious, or rather, of the primary process, as it is an identification of a
temporal modality of psychic functioning that does not appear to belong to
consciousness (secondary process) nor to corporeal functioning, nor even to
the unconscious in a structural sense. Liminal time – keeping in mind the use
of the concept in the authors cited above – can be conceived of in two ways:
as a time at the limit, a time-threshold between linear temporality of the
consciousness and timelessness in the unconscious, and as a time which is
part of the intermediate psychic functioning between primary and secondary
processes, or between fantasy and rational thought. In our view, it can be
fleshed out in a topographical perspective: it can characterize the functioning
of consciousness in certain moments in temporal terms, as in daydreams or in
conscious fantasies; or it can appear as part of preconscious functioning, or
even as a modality of binding the primary process on the part of the
secondary process, participating in the consciousness’s working-through, as
happens for dream in the moment in which it is remembered and told.
The characteristics of liminal time are both chronological and

kairological1. Indeed, if on the one hand they preserve the order of
succession, and thereby the set of “before” “after” and “simultaneous to”
relations, on the other hand, on the level of lived experience they present
features of completeness and closure which draw it away from the linear time
of actual consciousness and place it closer to the time of mythology and
fable. In mythological narrative, chronology - that is, the succession of events
according to a temporal order - is preserved, but the story as a whole is
presented as temporally closed off with respect to the time of the listener’s or
reader’s consciousness, situating it in an eternal, basically timeless present.
Our understanding of this aspect is facilitated by Ricoeur in his
recognition of the relationship between time and narrative:
To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of

contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation
that finds its fulfillment in the "conclusion" of the story. This
conclusion is not logically implied by some previous promises. It
gives the story an "end point" which, in turn, furnishes the point
of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a
whole. To understand the story is to understand how and why the
successive episodes led to this conclusion, which, far from being
foreseeable, must finally be acceptable, as congruent with the
episodes brought together by the story.
(Ricoeur 1984 [1983]: 66-67)
In the presence of a linear path ordered according to a sequence, the

liminal dimension offers the possibility of following that path in both
directions. In these conditions, it is as if the arrow of time allows a choice: it
is possible to head toward the end point (Ricoeur), or move back to the
starting point. Moreover, if we mean the end point precisely in the sense
given above by Ricoeur, in liminality we perceive the possibility of circularly
repeating the path, passing from the beginning -with its drive toward the
conclusion - to the final point, which summarizes or subsumes the beginning,
making it explicit and thus reproposing it.
It is clear that the liminal dimension finds its sense in the production of
psychic material it organizes and from which it gets actualized. The
construction of a meaning can reach the dimension of a story or of an
(auto)biographical vision, that is, a historicizing narrative dimension. On this
conceptual level, the question again arises of the foundations of subjectivity,
which oscillates between the snares of auto- and hetero-mirroring. If the
auto- element dominates, a restricted, non-developmental configuration of
personal history is created; if elements taken from the environment dominate
in the autobiography, there is the risk of eliminating the auto component, and
thus the lived experience of integration of the individual’s story in his self-
The Liminal 127
representation. Even Freud’s concept of the “family romance” (Freud 1909)

is based on the affirmation of the subject’s necessity2 to construct an
autobiographical story for himself, to which he must accede as an always-
present space, characterized by a closed configuration of life events. The
subject - especially the child – looks to this space for the openings of
meaning that life and development ask of him. The family history can
become the “family romance of neurotics” constituted - with a passage from
physiology to pathology - by a limited, defensive and coercive autobiography
in which closure dominates and temporality becomes cyclical and repetitive,
rather than becoming liminal and thereby interstructural. This seems to fully
characterize the “personal myth” according to Kris: “A coherent set of
autobiographical memories, a picture of one's course of life as part of the
self-representation [… which] has taken the place of a repressed fantasy”
(Kris 1956b: 674). Personal myth does not allow for openings, in contrast to
an activity based on the dynamic of the fantasy when conflict is not
excessive, but instead functions as a fixed interpretive scheme and thus
obliges an autobiography which is closed upon itself, rather than closed
within the representation of self. In 1986, Lester proposed broadening the
concept from its reference to the field of neurosis, extending it to narcissistic
pathology but maintaining the characteristics of defensive rigidity.
In short, our theoretical hypothesis is that liminality in its temporal
aspects – but not only these, recalling the origins of the concept in van
Gennep and Turner – can usefully describe a modality of psychic
functioning, and above all it can serve as a precious indicator of the
beginning of the termination process. In our understanding of it as a typical
quality of the termination process, we intend to demonstrate the emergence of
an experience of the individual’s story capable of combining closures and
openings of meaning and imposing “the sense of an end point” on the
configuration of the past and its events, retrodictively (see below).
As we see it, the construction of the individual’s story is not simply an
operation of a merely narratological type, in which the construction of a text
dominates, but rather a psychological operation in which the working-
through of a lived experience and a representation prevails, and it therefore
requires a metapsychological theorization. Even if the entire analytic process
is characterized by the recovery of repressed memories and the working-
through of personal aspects which are profoundly unconscious and therefore
automatic, the process of terminating analysis demonstrates with greater
clarity and significance the role and importance assumed by the working-
through of a representation of self in time, and this is true from both a general
point of view of overcoming conflicts and the development of identity, as
well as the nearly ostensible prospect of terminating the analysis itself. The
appearance of the possibility of conceiving oneself within a story of which
one is the author and not an actor or inheriting performer does not seem to be
well-comprehended in the exclusive terms of the elaboration of a good story
to be shared with the other-analyst, in contrast to a “bad” story, perhaps

shared only with unconscious fantasies. Instead, it is a “construction” that
indicates and implicates a different dynamic, or rather, a reworking of the
interstructural relations and internal object relations, in the initial transitional
condition, thus of the type which is both destructured and prestructured, to
use Turner’s words. The possibility of constructing is closely imbricated with
the need for reconstructing and requires an intermediate condition in which
the structuration is reversible and bears a minimum of structure to allow for
working-through. Would “ego-but-not-ego” sum up what we are saying, or
could we better express the situation as “neither-ego-nor-id”? Who, or what,
then? Here we should point out that liminality can have its own space and its
own form in addition to its own time, as van Gennep and Turner have already
shown, and therefore it can have some sort of organization of its own which
makes it identifiable and observable.
When the analytic process reaches a point where a vision of time (of the
analysis, of life, etc.) appears as an internally ordered whole - between the
repetition of sessions and the succession of the different moments of the
analytic process - then it has reached the initial moment of the termination of
analysis. In the beginning of the termination process, liminality has a psychic
quality configuring time, space and personal history; that is, it is expressed in
the possibility/capacity of thinking (in the widest sense of the term, with
dreams, daydreams, etc.), as an organized set, those episodes from the
subject’s past which are remembered and preserved in the formaldehyde of
fantasy, and plans (or perhaps better, visions of his own future) in which the
subject can equally follow a linearity or – precisely through the “sense of an
end point” – a circularity.
Linearity can contribute certainty to the reconciliation of external and
internal reality; circularity can offer stability in the affirmation of one’s own
life as both circumscribed and organized. This is to be contrasted with
defensive linearity, which chronologizes everything with the aim of
controlling, and repetitive circularity, which opposes the signification of the
new, demanding a stability which is unhealthful, and in the end, senseless.
We again turn to Ricoeur to illustrate this point:
On the one hand, the episodic dimension of a narrative

draws narrative time in the direction of the linear representation of
time. It does so in several ways. First, the "then, and then," by
which we answer the question "and then what?" suggests that the
phases of action are in an external relation. Next, the episodes
constitute an open series of events, which allows us to add to the
"then, and then" a "and so forth". Finally, the episodes follow
upon one another in accord with the irreversible order of time
common to physical and human events.
The Liminal 129
The configurational dimension, in its turn, presents temporal

features directly opposed to those of the episodic dimension.
Again it does so in several ways.
First, the configurational arrangement transforms the
succession of events into one meaningful whole which is the
correlate of the act of assembling the events together and which
makes the story followable. Thanks to this reflective act, the
entire plot can be translated into one "thought", which is nothing
other than its "point" or "theme". However, we would be
completely mistaken if we took such a point as atemporal. The
time of the "fable and theme" to use Northrup Frye's expression,
is the narrative time that mediates between the episodic aspect and
the configurational aspect.
Second, the configuration of the plot imposes the "sense of
an ending" (to use the title of Frank Kermode's well-known book)
on the indefinite succession of incidents. I just spoke of the "end
point" as the point from where the story can be seen as a whole. I
may now add that it is in the act of retelling rather than in that of
telling that this structural function of closure can be discerned. As
soon as a story is well known- and this is the case for most
traditional or popular narratives, as well as for those national
chronicles reporting the founding events of a given community- to
follow the story is not so much to enclose its surprises or
discoveries within our recognition of the meaning attached to the
story, as to apprehend the episodes which are themselves well
known as leading to this end. A new quality of time emerges from
this understanding.
Finally, the repetition of a story, governed as a whole by its
way of ending, constitutes an alternative to the representation of
time as flowing from the past towards the future, following the
well-known metaphor of the "arrow of time." It is as though
recollection inverted the so-called "natural" order of time. In
reading the ending in the beginning and the beginning in the
ending, we also learn to read time itself backwards, as the
recapitulation of the initial conditions of a course of action in its
terminal consequences .
(Ricoeur 1983: 139-140).
Ricoeur draws from the literary critic Frank Kermode, who is also cited
by a psychoanalyst, Arnold Cooper (1987), precisely in relation to the theme
of the termination of analysis. According to Kermode, there is no real closure
or end to any great story: stories, at least worthwhile ones, have in fact
always been planned in such as way as to provide a continuation of the life of
the characters and of the narrative interpretation which can be made of them.
Just as every great story is valid for every period and generates an endless
exegesis of its own text, so too, for Cooper, every analysis generates an
infinite number of terminations: different readings and re-readings of the
story are always possible.
Although its reasoning takes place on the level of philosophy and
narrative theory, the work of Ricoeur and Kermode highlights the
coexistence of two elements that are apparently incompatible. First, there is a
“sense of an end point” and the importance of a certain closure of the story,
making it perceptible in relation to the meaning it bears and comprising
various temporal modalities. Second, closure is like a transition, a liminal
zone or a passage whose end is favored by the opening of sense through
possible and always new re-readings. In this way, it avoids the equivalent of
sacralization, which is represented in psychoanalysis by repetition-
compulsion in its most overwhelming and harmful form.3 In a certain sense,
the family romance of neurotics - and even more so, Kris’s personal myth -
are the equivalent of a movement of rigid confirmation of a past that is
simultaneously present and future, and thus quite near to timelessness in its
non-differentiation of times and events.
The operation of configuration described by Ricoeur illustrates an
aspect which, we repeat, concerns not only the narrative sphere, but also the
psychological one as well, offering suggestions for a brief reflection on the
aspects of psychic reality illuminated by liminality in the beginning of the
termination process in analysis. We start by evoking Eliade’s work on myth:
“…myth is… ‘living’, in the sense that it supplies models for human
behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life” (Eliade
1975: 2). Myth is true history because it always refer to reality: “Myth, then,
is always an account of a ‘creation’; it relates how something was produced,
began to BE” (ibid: 6). In these features, Myth differs from History; modern
man’s attitude toward them differs from that of a man from archaic societies.
The former considers himself the result of a universal, irreversible History,
but he does not feel obliged to know it; the latter is obliged to remember the
history of the tribe and must periodically re-actualize much of it.
At this point, we recall what Freud said in the Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of His Childhood: a people already constituted in its historical
identity does not turn to myth, but rather it mythologizes the documents
attesting its own history (for example, the Jews with the Tables and the
Pentateuch), eventually rewriting them and submitting them to a process of
reworking (the Torah). A young people or one tied to a primeval cultural
state maintains myth as a guarantor of the actuality of history, understood as
the history of the existing. In his much later Moses and Monotheism (1934-
38), Freud reproposes the essence of this thesis: historical reality arises from
a historicization of the reality of events and is therefore subject to re-
inscriptions and transcriptions on the basis of the need of a people’s or an
individual’s present. That is, history is always a history in two times. If we
The Liminal 131
combine these two perspectives, we might say that historical re-transcription

saves the myth’s nature as “truth”, always present, but which under its cloak
hides a truth – the historical one- that one is no longer obliged to know.
3. Liminality and Transitionality
Our description of the liminal dimension of time undoubtedly has a

good deal in common with Winnicott’s concept of transitional and potential
space. Yet we insist upon a distinction between the two concepts, starting
with the two vantage points utilized – in ours, prevalently temporal, and in
Winnicott, spatial. Certainly, there is a shared reference to the coexistence of
opposites supported by the tolerance of paradox, but nonetheless a closer
examination of the nature of the paradoxes might allow for a clearer view of
the difference between the two concepts. The fundamental paradox on which
the transitional lies, in its genesis, consists of the coincidence between
fantasy and reality, between need and achievement made possible by a brief
experience of omnipotence - that is, by the circumstance that the object is at
the same time found and invented. Other paradoxes are superimposed upon
this relative to the symbolic meaning of the transitional object, which
simultaneously is and is not the breast, is and is not an object, is a me and
simultaneously a not-me, and so forth. While the use of the spatial metaphor
does not rule out the temporal one – seeing as Winnicott speaks of the child’s
journey from total dependence toward independence - in our view it aims
principally at identifying and giving substance to the so-called third area,
configuring it as the elective area of play, art and culture. Thus, in a certain
sense, it is the area most susceptible to an indefinite expansion, as Tagore
reminds us in an epigraph Winnicott uses for a chapter dedicated to the
application of the transitional: “Children play on the banks of infinite
worlds.” The area of the illusion, which contains strong references to the
oceanic feeling, is an area where separation and union co-exist and as such, it
is foundational and promoting that capacity to searching which is never
exhausted in any place or possession.
In the way we have outlined it within the specific argumentative context
of the termination of analysis, the concept of the liminal not only intends to
describe a transition between mental states and different relational
organizations, an element which is nonetheless decisive – but also to indicate
that in the space-time of that passage a definite form was emerging, a new
configuration of one’s own life which includes its traumatic nuclei and gives
life to a story as a base for endless re-transcriptions. Such is the typical and
central paradox inherent to the concept of the liminal: the coexistence of the
reference to a definite, closed-off form with the potentials that start from it to
make their way to a re-opening.
Resuming our exploration of the affinity between the two concepts in a

regime of contiguity-differentiation, we can underline two aspects in
particular: the relation with triangularity and the convergence of both toward
a sort of aesthetic quality of experience. As for the first aspect, we note the
transitional area is by definition the third one: third not only in the sense
relative to the conceptual need for identifying a mental place where cultural
experiences can be located, as various authors have pointed out underlining
the difference with Freud, but also in the sense of an area whose task is that
of maintaining a relations between internal and external reality, allowing for
their interpenetration. The triangularity of the liminal seems instead to have
to do with the emergence and consolidation of a perspective and style of
thinking capable of oscillation and marked by mobility, unlike the
dichotomies of the phallic logic that generally underlies the situations of
impasse paralyzing analytical courses. In the concept of the liminal, there is a
strong accent on the virtual character of the third element, which
simultaneously functions as limit and frontier, both to be understood – more
than as figuratively representable places – as junctures where transformations
of energy and meaning are created, elective places for the translation of
psychic material which, as Freud perspicaciously argued in a letter to Fleiss
back in 1896, must take place at the border between different territories-
epochs.4
As for aesthetic quality, the second aspect enunciated, a particular
element is visible in the transitional aimed at making it the basis of aesthetic
pleasure, as pleasure which implies a certain drive regulation. In this regard,
we must recall the crucial distinction between soothing effect and consolatory
effect connected to the use of the transitional object as qualitatively different
from the fetish, the former being characterized by a type of pleasure mediated
by ego relationality and the latter characterized in contrast to the escalation of
excitation in the latter. As for the liminal, some of the elements used to define
it - such as the relation with the sacred, the mythical dimension, narrative as
production of a significant whole and the characteristics of a neutral territory
- suggest to us an area of affinity with the aesthetic experiences. This is
different from Winnicott’s transitionality, to the extent that the transitional
encounters initial and prototypical conditions, while the liminal deals with
the final ones at the end of the route.
In the termination process there are sometimes scenes which have a
strong emotional impact by virtue of particular characteristics that appear to
liken them to types of pleasure aroused by aesthetic experiences. This seems
to arise from a transformation of the course of personal existence into an
object that can be contemplated, combining the characteristics of a necessity
with those of freedom. In these aesthetic objects, we can perceive a process
of poetic transfiguration which does not erase the original traces, the
traumatic nuclei, but rather weaves them into a new warp which protects
them from encystment. If we borrow Freud’s analogy used for connoting the
The Liminal 133
story a people gives itself, we can certainly keep the idea that giving oneself
a story constitutes a need and an enterprise of maturity, corresponding to the
acquisition of wealth as opposed to the difficult period of origins coercively
encumbered with the problem of survival. Instead, with regard to the feature
of falsification (embellishment of one’s own origins), we may introduce a
distinction in order to better clarify how in a specific sense it converges with
our concept of the liminal, which includes and subsumes that of
Nachträglichkeit. We are keeping something of the Freudian concept of
embellishment in other terms, but not so much in its dominant sense of
falsification (humble origins hidden by grandiose genealogies), as that of an
enigmatic aesthetic quality assumed by the subject’s story as viewed from its
end point. It is here that the passage by way of the model of temporality
inherent in Freud’s theory of trauma appears crucial, bearing in mind the
interrelation of meanings between Nachträglichkeit and liminality.
Notes
1
In the classical Greek world, Kronos and Kairos respectively identify the objective,
serial time of events and the cyclical time of rites and myths.
2
This necessity must have been constantly present for Freud, since we find traces of
it as early as in Draft M of 1897, with the mention of a romance of alienation in
paranoia and a romance of prostitution in agoraphobia, and in the letters to Fliess of
January 24 and October 17, 1897, and of June 20 in the following year, in which
appears a reference to myth in his own family origins.
3
We recall Turner’s statement cited above regarding the sacred ceremony, which has
powers of confirmation, in contrast to ritual, which has transformative qualities.
4
We are well aware of how much the concept of liminality recalls some historically
consolidated concepts such as symbolization, sublimation and tertiary processes,
which nonetheless do not fully render the particularity of the specific opening phase
of the termination process, which we are attempting to grasp through this concept.
Eight
Forms of Time
1 Nachträglichkeit and Liminality
Both of the two preceding sections concluded with references to

history, to historical reality in its double sense as an a posteriori construction
and as a depository for a lived experience whose truth lies in always being
present and real in individual and collective psychic life. This is one of the
central points of the Freudian discourse on the termination of analysis,
keeping in mind the fact that Constructions in Analysis is contemporary with
Analysis Terminable and Interminable. Indeed, from the point of view of the
basic characteristics of analytic method as well as of the general structure of
the aims of therapy itself, the connection between the constructive and
reconstructive aspects of analytical therapy impinges on the question of the
difference and relationship between historical (or material) truth and
psychological truth. We shall not provide an in-depth treatment of the
problem here, since we are merely interested in pointing out that in the initial
phase of the termination process, the liminal phase, the emergence in the
patient of a representation of his own life – certainly summary, but
circumscribed and different from the autobiographical representation of the
family romance or of the personal myth - in a remarkable way represents the
imbrication of the two aspects just cited. This type of representation
(understood in the general sense of depiction, at times history and even
narration) is simultaneously and inseparably a construction in the present, an
emergence of a new vision and synthesis (recall Balint’s position expressed
in the concept of new beginning) and reconstruction of the past. The latter is
to be understood as the redefinition (re-signification) of the past through a
reworking of the dynamic and the energetic. Here, the past gets invested in its
triple characterization: a past of the preconscious-consciousness, always
evocable and thus, so to speak, always present; a repressed past, which the
analytic work has allowed to recover; and finally, the unrepressed past (or, in
Freudian terms, of primal repression), which the experience of the analysis
does not recall, but rather, draws nearer. The latter two forms of the past
obviously also participate in the present, but with an atemporal dimension
and according to categories of affect and action, rather than of conscious
thought and language.
The question of the emergence of a representation of the self with
features of closure and completeness - premonitory symptom of an opening
to future developments in which the termination of analysis can be among the

most important - thus intersects with a theme, that of Nachträglichkeit and of
trauma, whose role in metapsychology is curiously both crucial and
peripheral. Nachträglichkeit is peripheral because reflection on it has had an
unequal development: greater, for example, in French psychoanalysis and
lesser or absent in Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis, in the American context in
particular. However, it is crucial, since Nachträglichkeit represents the
metapsychological formulation of a deep and general characteristic of the
psychic processes - that of being ab origine partial and subsequent to what
has placed them in motion. Moreover, it ties the developmental aspects to the
pathological ones of psychic functioning through the intersection of the
theory of biphasic development of psychic sexuality with the theory of the
explication of traumatic action - the theory of the pathogenic action of trauma
– in which the first time of the stimulus interacts with the second time of the
re-signification and of the constitution of the actual trauma. We must
therefore discuss, if only briefly, the concept of Nachträglichkeit.
As Thomä and Cheshire (1991) argue, Strachey’s translation of the
German noun Nachträglichkeit with the English expression deferred action
only amplifies a flawed understanding of Freud’s term. This translation is not
so much responsible for and the source of the misunderstanding, as it is a
result of it. The conceptions of causality and temporality that various authors
after Freud take as a more or less explicit background to Nachträglichkeit
range from a theory of energetic accumulation and delay of the discharge
with an a posteriori abreaction, to a retroaction (sometimes in the causal
sense), to a “narrative” or “rhetorical” causality in which a temporary
inversion may appear (the second time precedes and is thus cause of the
first), etc. Thomä and Cheshire highlight the ambiguity arising from the lack
of recognition of the various levels of discourse put into play by the term and
by the use Freud makes of it, so we feel that it is necessary to present our
thought here in the clearest possible way.
Laplanche and Pontalis have written that Nachträglichkeit is to be
understood in the dynamic sense of a “ ‘work of recollection’ which is not the
mere discharge of accumulated tension but a complex set of psychological
operations” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973 [1967]: 114). This general
definition unites the factor of plurality with that of memory and psychic
work. Following this, we argue that the functional complexity of
Nachträglichkeit lies in the fact that the work of memory – that is, the re-
transcription of mnemic traces – not only produces re-signification, but also
modifies the temporal structuration of what is recorded. The retroaction of
the second time on the first, then, exists to the extent that the preexisting
mnemic traces interact with the perceptions and thoughts of the present (of
the second moment), with the consequence – at least in theory – of a double
transformation. Drawing from Edelmann’s theory of neuronal Darwinism,
Modell (1990, but also Kirschner 1993) argues that Nachträglichkeit consists
Forms of Time 137
less in a re-transcription than in an incessant work of re-categorization which

characterizes memory. Thus it acquires the status of general characteristic of
psychic functioning, of which the psychogenesis of trauma is only a limited
part, though one which is important for psychopathology.
Although they are interesting, Modell’s hypotheses are simultaneously
too specific and too general, ignoring the diversity of traumatic developments
in developmental histories. The position of Thomä and Cheshire appears
more subtle but precise, proposing to see two different conceptual
possibilities at work in Nachträglichkeit: one seen in the action and capacity
a certain event possesses to invest a past event with causal potential, so as to
constitute the latter as a first moment of a biphasic process (and naturally,
itself as a second moment). The other consists in seeing the primary event -
in the form of mnemic trace - maintain a causal potential which only the
secondary event can bring to realization or fulfillment. This position can help
us understand how the constitution of psychic trauma can follow different
paths from the start but coincide in their final results.
C. Le Guen (1982) argues that Nachträglichkeit is intrinsically
traumatic, that is, the trauma does not belong to only one of the two times.
Instead, there is a coming and going movement according to which the
present event provokes anxiety, whose meaning and existence depend on a
preceding event (that originally appeared harmless). This past event in turn
prefigures and prepares the way for such an anxiety. The first time (the scene
or event) is traumatic, even if it is not pathogenic, but only as recollection
(“hysterics suffer from reminiscences”). In the second time, the association of
a lived experience or perception present with the repressed recollection is
lived as an aggression and stimulates an active defense which can, we add,
intensify the sense of dangerousness of the first event. The Barangers (1987)
have proposed defining the first event that enters into the constitution of
psychic trauma as pure trauma, an event whose chief characteristic is a
breaking-off of ties or the prevention of their creation. In the second time,
instead, the traumatism is linked to the insertion of an extraneous body in a
weft of continuity between psychic occurrences removed from the
fortuitousness of their concatenation. The necessity for a double influence
between the two times of trauma was incisively expressed by Skolnikoff
(1993): there need to be two traumas in order to make a trauma.
We hold that the Freudian notion of re-transcription can attribute a
traumatic character to the original trace, since its process of constitution
occurs within a different symbolic context and defensive organization from
those in which the inscription of the original trace takes place. The re-
transcription is not only translation, but a further semanticizing which upsets
the economy and dynamic of the present. At the same time, the re-
transcription itself can take a traumatic complement from the original trace,
just as a puzzle is completed with its missing piece. The completion can be
that extra bit of energy remaining unbound, and here we are thinking above
all of the affective element, just as it is manifested in the most primitive

sensoriality. Indeed, it should be recalled that in the Wolf Man, Freud
identified the second time in the dream at age four, the one in which the
patient’s trauma was organized, and he located the first in a period in which
the sensorial perceptive element was entirely dominant.
Various authors have considered the relationship between
Nachträglichkeit and analytic process, even underlining how the concept of
Nachträglichkeit is the basis of curative factors in psychoanalysis (Wetzler
1985). Le Guen, previously cited, writes the following:
If the second effect of deferred action (during treatment),

which is what interests us here, is beneficial (whatever the
element of trauma), it is because it is contained within a newly-
found continuity, because it takes its place in the individual's re-
organized history, in the present 'pattern of recognitions'. This is
the way treatment reproduces earlier phases through
reconstruction, by allowing re-appropriation to occur; this
radically distinguishes it from repetition (unless we get caught on
the snag of negative therapeutic reaction).
(Le Guen 1982: 323).
Similarly, Flournoy (1979) presents the idea that the time of analysis
absolves the same function as the interval between event and symptom in the
schema of Nachträglichkeit. For this author, at the moment of the decision to
undertake analysis, an intersubjective, secondary time begins that manages to
organize the material forming the analysand’s personal myth. Through the
analyst’s interpretive activity, such material gets pushed outside the chaotic
temporality of the unconscious into a historical context particular to the
single patient in his specific analytic situation. The chronological temporal
order is unimportant, since recollections and associations are reorganized in
the course of therapy. Through the analytic work, a new personal myth gets
developed, a new historical version whose construction/reconstruction takes
place through the direction provided by the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus.
According to Flournoy, the analyst imposes or superimposes these two myths
on the patient’s personal myth to create order and permit understanding. In
this way, then, it becomes possible to give a name to and modify the personal
myth, and remove the obstacles that the personal myth has posed for the
analysand.
From what has been stated above, we may note how the discourse on
Nachträglichkeit and trauma quite often involves the theme of temporality,
on the one hand, and repetition, on the other. In our discussion of it,
Nachträglichkeit possesses neither a deterministic linearity nor a strict
circularity1. Moreover, it compels us to also take a stand on the concept of
Forms of Time 139
repetition, inasmuch as the phenomena put under the heading of repetition

can often be read according to a perspective of Nachträglichkeit.
Laplanche (1984) argues that the concept of repetition shields that of
Nachträglichkeit, so that a theory of trauma emerges that is predominantly
spatial-economic rather than temporal. In this sense, the conception of trauma
as an excess of stimulation (an excess of free energy) leads us to conceive of
repetition as the reproduction of this excess and as “isolation” or “separate
constitution” of a part of psychism. Repetition thus acquires a “pernicious”
quality which characterizes it as “beyond the pleasure principle.”
However, as one of us has shown elsewhere (Garella 1991), psychic
repetition - as the concept would define it - features a greater range and
ambiguity than we might think. Indeed, Freud himself indicates this when he
distinguishes (Freud 1920a) between a compulsive repetition - tied to the
irresolvable nature of the inner conflict among the psychic agencies or
between desires and impulses subject to censorship that push for access to
consciousness and realization - and a repetition that is even more compulsive
because it is often asymptomatic, linked to the radical drive duality between
Eros and destructiveness. The theme is made even more complex by the fact
that we may make the following implicit judgment of phenomenal repetition,
whether it is symptomatic - of a clear psychopathological sort - or
asymptomatic, or even “existential”, as in forms of “destiny”: that repetition
can appear “negative” as the impossibility of overcoming, an atemporal
chaining to a traumatic time and event that are forbidden or cannot be
accessed. But it can also appear “positive” as an actual form of mastery, as a
means of putting a recuperative temporality into operation or as a process of
wearing down the trauma and exhausting the conflict through unlimited
psychic and experiential reactualization.
In Bibring’s account (1943), repetition-compulsion can be understood
as the expression of the “inertia” of living matter, of the conservative
tendency to maintain and repeat intense experiences, as well as a regulatory
mechanism assigned to discharge the tensions caused by traumatic
experiences once they have been bound. Bibring holds that these two aspects
are related to different tendencies: one to a repetitive or reproductive
tendency to conserve or repeat the traumatic situation, and the other to the
restorative tendency of the ego to reestablish the pre-traumatic situation.
Each of these tendencies may or may not have a role in the psychopathology,
but they certainly have one in normal development, since all of us experience
the way repetition is a necessity as well as a constriction. This
notwithstanding, in the field of psychopathology the differences that arise
from privileging the observation and role of one tendency or the other clearly
stand out. In the case of the reproductive or repetitive tendency connected to
the Freudian conception of the conservative character of the instincts,
repetition-compulsion defines an element of impediment to be overcome or
reduced or else a danger for every aim of change. In the termination of
analysis, for example, the danger lies in the opposition to the analytic work of
the termination itself. In this sense, repetition-compulsion has long been
perceived through the observation that as termination approaches, the patients
seem to have a revivification of their initial symptoms. In the case of the
ego’s restorative tendency, instead, things are more complex, depending on
whether one emphasizes the “curative” element or the “negative” (in the
sense of ego’s negation of the traumatic event) one.
What space does Nachträglichkeit have in the semantic-conceptual
spectrum of repetition-compulsion? There is no doubt that it presents an
intrinsic feature of repetition, following a dual necessity: that is, in requiring
two times, it implies that the constitution of the trauma arises from harping
on a point, a repetition of something, and not just an addition or extension of
the original event. Moreover, the second time possesses some kind of feature
which enables it to function as such and this cannot but be isomorphic or
homologous to a characteristic of the first time. The original Freudian
approach is clear: in the drive model of (sexual) trauma, the two times are
conceived of as homologous, since both deal with sexual development and
identify crucial periods in this development. Instead, in the dual-drive model
(Eros-destructiveness) there is little space for Nachträglichkeit, since the
action of the destructive drive establishes a cyclical and isomorphic
temporality. Finally, in the conception of trauma based on different models –
object or relational – there seems to be no place for Nachträglichkeit, since
the constitution of the trauma includes a form of autonomy from which the
repetition follows.
For various reasons, then, in each of the models discussed
Nachträglichkeit is not fully taken into account. In our view, this is not due to
an inadequacy of the models or of the very concept of Nachträglichkeit. The
fundamental reason is that Nachträglichkeit is a more general concept,
related to the functioning of the psychic apparatus and its conservative
nature: in its explanatory range, Nachträglichkeit embraces all of the
phenomena of normal and pathological repetition, since the representational
game of the working-through and re-working-through of lived experiences is
located in the continuous dynamic of mnemic traces and the traces they
leave.
The concept of repetition-compulsion features a more limited range,
referring to the sphere of pathology (psychopathology and pathology of daily
life). The phenomenal field which it attempts to encompass is more that of
repetition with cancellation (of the emotional impact, sense, or organic
vitality itself in Beyond the Pleasure Principle [Freud 1920a]), than that of a
repetition which – we must insist – has constructive elements (but no less
conflicting and traumatic). We cannot offer here a more detailed discussion
of Nachträglichkeit and its relation to repetition-compulsion, but the idea of
conservation it conveys takes on very different features according to whether
Forms of Time 141
it is placed in connection to the concepts of process or structure, the first or

second topography, representation or trace.
Now we must sum up the various points of our discussion. We believe
that the termination phase of analysis as a whole is a manifestation of
Nachträglichkeit understood as a quality of general psychic processes, and in
particular, that it asserts itself as a second time of the analytic process, the
first time being that part of the process which has preceded it. Indeed, we
argue that it is the emergence of a second time that qualifies the preceding
process or some of its aspects and phases as a first time. In this perspective,
Nachträglichkeit is recursively manifested even within the termination phase,
to the extent that the termination event can be understood as a second time
with respect to that first time which is the start of the termination phase.
The articulation of our thesis is rather complex, and therefore we shall
explain it further. If we understand Nachträglichkeit as a process in which a
re-elaboration or re-transcribing takes place, then liminality - with its
characteristics of temporality, interposition and ongoing construction of a
new and different vision of self - inaugurates this new mode of transcription
and represents the second time of the process.2 In the beginning of the
process of terminating analysis, in conjunction with the appearance or
emergence of a new condition (the possibility of thinking about the end of the
analysis), a series of thematic and traumatic psychic contents are reactivated
and re-transcribed. In other words, the beginning of the termination phase
constitutes (or perhaps, institutes) a traumatic situation, which is
comprehensible precisely within the perspective of the two times of
Nachträglichkeit. In a prior work on trauma, one of the authors argues the
following:
The approach of the termination gives rise to a kind of

precipitation that condenses crucial experiences of the patient's
life history, which intersect with the events of the analytic
relationship when faced with the complex task of its own
dissolution. This affords a valuable opportunity to ‘work afresh’
on traumatic nuclei, which, while having previously emerged,
now take on particular significance, either by virtue of the nature
of the termination process or because of the intense
countertransference emotions mobilised
(Ferraro 1995: 52)
The beginning of the termination phase of analysis thus bears a doubly

traumatic quality, in the sense indicated above of re-presentation or
precipitation of pre-existing traumatic nuclei, as well as in the sense of the
formation of a new traumatic nucleus, represented by the very prospect of
termination. We do not intend here to propose a clear differentiation so much
as to indicate a diversification of the perspective with which to examine the
termination (phase) of analysis. One may intuit from this the importance and
delicacy we attribute to the beginning of the termination phase of analysis
and the effort to identify in liminality a conceptual constellation which helps
us in the work of recognizing and starting the termination. In fact, liminality
serves as a key to identifying various, concomitant elements: as a threshold, it
indicates a line of both boundary and rupture between different phases of the
analytic process; as a border [margine], it refers to a third place with respect
to territories of the unconscious and the consciousness, not necessarily one of
interposition; as temporal modality, it characterizes the emergence of a
temporal lived experience in which the representation of self begins to get
reorganized according to a scheme equipped with a closure, described above
with the expression “sense of the end point.” Unlike the rigid structure of the
family romance or the personal myth, whose defensive aim prevails to the
point of closing it off to development and turning it into the premonitory
symptom of pathology, the closure of the liminal is that of an open,
transitional area with nuanced and mobile borders. It is closure as a
organizational necessity of the ego, so to speak, and for this reason it is
certainly also defensive, but at the same time it is open to re-transcription,
reworking and redefinitions of the subject’s self and his own history, making
each reworking into a foundation for the subsequent one.
However, liminality does not seem to form an strict indicator of the
process of termination, or at least not in the precise sense of its presence as a
criteria of the existence of such a process, if only in the beginning stages. We
see it instead as the signal of a possibility for reorienting the analytic process
in a direction whose most desirable (though perhaps not most common)
feature is the termination of the analysis. On the whole, liminality can show
up but turn out to be unbearable: the threshold can appear to the patient or to
the analytic couple as hardly practicable or transitive, the border too unstable
and permeable to allow one to dwell on it, and temporality too alien to
proceed into it.
2. The Liminal at Work
In the light of what we have said above, we would now like to

exemplify what we consider to be the particular features of the liminal
dimension of temporality with a closer attention to clinical experience, in
order to demonstrate its connection to Nachträglichkeit and to the first steps
of the termination process. Generally, dream is privileged as the most reliable
scenario within which a steering of the analytic process toward termination
takes form, but the very centrality of dream appears as a junction at the
intersection of multiple, equally significant indicators.
Thus, for example, we have the case of A., an agoraphobic patient3 who
usually limited relating dreams to the end of the session, so as to not be able
Forms of Time 143
to utilize them most of the time. After a brief summary of her latest
undertaking (a short trip alone for an out-of-town weekend, an unthinkable
achievement for her which was experienced with great pleasure – this, too,
unusual), she announced that she wanted to tell a dream which had troubled
her very much, thereby demonstrating that she was sensitive to the use of
time in the session. The dream was as follows:
I went to a couple who are friends of mine to get my hair

done, and rather than the usual hairdresser, a boy of eleven or
twelve did my hair. At one point he leaned on me from behind; I
found that I was all wet, and intuiting that he had had an
ejaculation, I started shouting that he was crazy…I later found
out that his name was P. [the same name as the patient’s oldest
child, a youth with numerous plans whom she supported in his
ambitious choice of university]
Two associations immediately oriented the exploration of this dream:

first, the surname of the couple of friends, pronounced in a completely
unconscious way, led to that of an analyst who had recently passed away;
second, the age of the boy corresponded to her total years in analysis, which
A. summed up in her comment as “a real piece of my life.” She added, “In all
these years I’ve continued to use Lei with you, but I could have at least
attempted a Voi”4 (which the analyst affectively registers as the reciprocal of
we).
In the clinical case excerpt reported, we can see a convergence of
indicators signaling a new perception of temporality, one that is rich in
restructuring potential. There is an initial variation in a ritual pattern (the
session in question was preceded by an unusual telephone call in which the
patient had requested to move the session, and the analyst in an equally
unusual way conceded it) which served as a catalyst for conscious,
preconscious, and unconscious communications for the analytic couple. We
then find a different use of the time of the session, which for years was
impeded by compulsive and evacuative talking, within which the different
positioning of the dream – no longer at the fringe - signaled a greater
centrality of psychic reality. Finally, through the discourse over the use of
“Voi”, a relational prospect appeared marked by a greater symmetry, in
keeping with the presence in the dream of the shop-boy who took care of the
patient’s head, and who therefore attempted to act in place of the analyst-
hairdresser (who is there, but one day will not longer be: the double meaning
of the surname). In all this, we see the appearance of liminal time, an
eminently analytic time that emerges at a certain point in the process; it
impacts and mobilizes both the time of the setting - used by A primarily in its
aspects of repetitive circularity - and the time of life, which can begin to
move from being a bearer of catastrophic anxieties to becoming a container
of pleasant events. The recovery (or the appearance) of a capacity for

pleasure is perceived as newly traumatic: the coitus from the rear in the
dream, which stages a presaging orgasm of madness, is depicted as an act of
seduction on the part of a pubescent boy. This second time of trauma is what
we propose reading as a significant step in the work of Nachträglichkeit. In
this case, it is clearly sexual; if on the one hand it recalls a first time, both
that of the outbreak of the symptom (agoraphobia after her marriage) or the
developmental one of puberty, it can now form a second time that conveys
the distinctive specificity of liminal time. In other words, a rediscovered
capacity for pleasure - which reactualizes a traumatic and ungovernable
excitation - now moves in a suspended temporal dimension that allows for a
binocular vision protected from the rejection (as in the past) of a maddening
sexuality as well as from the rush into a future unmindful of the past.
In this case, the eleven-year-old boy is a personification of the analytic
work, condensing the history of the analytic relationship in its potential for
translating into a capacity for self-analytic support. Quite often we find this
same simultaneousness expressed by spatial figurations rich in temporal
references. The analytic journey is represented through a succession of rooms
filled with objects with intense evocative qualities; one is intent on going
through them in the company of the analyst (who acts as a sort of guide), and
the couple seems to acquire a clearer configuration of an intersubjective
relationship, as indicated by the recurrent desire at this point in the process of
passing to “Tu”5. In our opinion, it expresses a dual significance: a focus on
the reciprocal subjectivities and on their convergence in a “Noi” [“we”] that
does not obliterate, but rather reinforces them, joining them in the prospect of
an arduous and difficult work of termination. This, too, is a paradox on one
level: the topos of death inevitably casts its shadow upon the appearance of
“Noi” as a point of arrival in the analytic process and as its thrust toward the
prospect of an end. This is a complex, multifaceted and recurrent theme
which we also propose to read as a recurrent depiction of liminal time.
We have noticed how the prospect of ending is at times opened up
following a death in the family, generally the loss of a parent, and this has
directed our attention to the necessity of more carefully unraveling the
intertwining of fantasies and anxieties of death which inevitably accompany
the termination phase. B., a fifty-year-old patient returning to analysis after a
brief interruption due to his mother’s death, related this dream:
I came to the session and found the office in a big mess; it

looked more like an archive-library than the usual and familiar
place. A move was taking place in order to give the rooms
different functions, but there was no sign of the analyst’s
presence. After searching anxiously, I finally encountered the
analyst, who was very embarrassed because she had been
surprised in an unusual situation. I reassured her, saying that the
Forms of Time 145
analysis was not finished, and that there was no reason to be

uneasy over this odd encounter. The analyst looked around for the
couch but didn’t see it, so both of us sat facing each other. At the
end you could hear an off-screen voice, probably Mother’s, who
signaled her presence in this way even though she was dead.
Although in a first reading the dream would appear to suggest an

attempt to shut the analysis down, and the patient did not reveal the intention
of terminating on a conscious level, his associations moved in a completely
different direction. He related having always thought that he would not have
been able to bear the death of his mother together with the end of analysis.
He surprised himself by hoping that his mother’s death would take place
during the analysis in order to find support, and now that the event that was
so greatly feared had actually occurred, and he felt that he had somehow
survived it, he wondered if this might not be utilized as a test of the
transformations that had taken place. The patient’s history had been marked
by two deaths: the loss of his father at age nine, recorded in his memory
without any emotional reaction, and the sudden death of his ex-wife, which
completely paralyzed him and consequently made it necessary to go into
analysis.
The additional death of his mother – a third, virtually cumulative death
– instead formed the second time of the Nachträglichkeit, marked by a
liminal temporality. Actually, the loss of a tie upon which B. had long made
his own psychic survival depend this time entailed a difference with respect
to the prior losses, a prospective as well as retroactive movement that
endowed the analytic relationship with the presentiment of the end. The
possibility of making both of the distinctive movements of liminal time
coexist confers the temporal process of repetition with the dynamic quality of
a resignifying recapitulation. In this way, the new death reactivates the prior
ones and especially the Kleinian “primary situation of mourning”, but
maintains its differences, mitigating the non-deferrable need for detachment
and the rigid eruption of chronological temporality and its laws with the
patient’s perception of being alive.
In this sense the dream captures B.’s query and attempts to unravel its
deepest unconscious resonances: covering his whole life in a single glance,
he wonders about his reaction to the recent death as an indicator of the work
achieved, and thus potentially of the sustainability of the termination of
analysis. Even in this case, as in the preceding one, the temporal perspective
is shown through a more symmetrical analytic relationship, created by the
changed spatial arrangement, the seating facing one another, rather than - as
in A. - the adoption of a language that aims to reduce the distances.
In the light of what we have shown here, we might consider attributing
greater meaning to the recurrence of the theme of death in termination events,
seen as a typical expression of temporality in action through the
representative register of its extreme limit. It appears in ways that can be

explicit or sometimes more indirect, and despite its transparency it poses a
complex problem of deciphering. It is frequently found in the manifest
content of dreams as the death of a significant family member (usually one of
the two parents) and is normally read as a typical movement of the work of
mourning, which recapitulates or divulges the cumulative pain of the loss.
What seems to get lost in this reading is precisely the coexistence of a double
movement which, as B.’s dream shows, attributes to the figuration of death -
imbricating it with the undertaking of terminating the analysis - a singular
richness of motives whose stirring up or resolution (we might indicate it as
the work of ending) constitutes the unavoidable bench test for the termination
process.
Freud (1915) described people’s extreme reluctance to represent their
own death, the unthinkable par excellence which can be approached and
rendered real only by forcing a representation to exist of the death of a loved
one. The announced or feared death of the analyst, present in associative
thoughts or evoked by deaths in the family, exemplifies the crucial task at the
fore of the termination process: to render the separation representable as an
event that recalls, but does not coincide with, death. Similarly, the couch
(which in B.’s dream is absent, though the analyst is still present), unites an
absence and a presence, configuring that “emptiness-in-the-presence-of” that
is a necessary condition for making the absence thinkable, and thereby
exemplifying a point of intersection where the retrospective and prospective
visions of one’s own existence unite.
On this subject, Meltzer makes a problematic assertion, arguing that in
the work of termination -labeled a “weaning process” - we face some
limitations in the case of children who have not yet experienced the great
biological and social upheaval of puberty, as well as in adult patients whose
parents are still alive and thus have not yet been faced with the primary
mourning situation. We site from him in the following:
Without having traversed these great upheavals it is virtually

an impossibility for full resolution of the transference to take
place by way of internalization, since some measure of
dependence upon external parents is bound to remain active
(Meltzer 1967: 47).
Although we believe this assertion to be highly problematic, we feel it

is important to note how the author’s argument unwittingly implies a theory
of trauma in two times whose character of completeness influences the so-
called “complete resolution of transference.” It seems to us, rather, that the
question of a psychic mobilization revealed by the liminal should get placed
at the center of the termination process; such a psychic mobilization confers a
plural dimension to the transference and the analytic relationship being
Forms of Time 147
crossed through. We tend to think that where the event that has a cardinal
function in Meltzer’s view (the parents’ death) has not actually taken place,
there may be other psychic events which function as the first time of the
trauma.
The time of the analysis as a liminal time is a place from which one can
look simultaneously at the past and the future, tied not only – as Freud says
(1908) – by the thread of desire, but also by that of necessity. In short, as we
propose it, the finding of this specific dimension of time in the recurrent
figuration of death in the termination phase of analysis differs from the usual
readings in that it seeks to highlight, not only or so much, the double
mourning of object loss and the belief in one’s own immortality, as instead
the work of the Nachträglichkeit as differentiating work.
3. A Final Hurdle: Setting the Date
In the context of our discussion, the problem of setting the date merits
special reflection. This problem is sometimes downplayed as an
inconsequential technical detail, but in our view it instead takes on an
interesting paradigmatic value. Paradigmatic of what? In the first place, of
the complex suffering inherent in the termination process, and second, of the
relational entanglement between termination’s transference and counter-
transference elements, which are intensified by the task of leading the
analysis to an end. In our opinion, greater attention has been given to the
other aspect interconnected of the termination process, that of the setting
utilized with this aim. The debate over this opposes two ideas: one of a
gradual reduction of analysis sessions, supported by an analogy with the
developmental task of weaning, and the opposite idea of an unchanged
constancy in the setting motivated by the need to not dilute the psychic
impact of the analytic separation. In the first model, it is possible to recognize
a theory of the end of analysis which is closer to Ferenczi’s discourse on
analysis by exhaustion, whereas in the second, we see a more radically
Freudian point of view that appreciates the aspects of potential traumatism as
those which are most in line with the analytic enterprise. In point of fact, in
our experience we have found an instinctive propensity in patients for the
first model, so that acceptance of the second in most cases requires a
significant cognitive mediation which makes it possible to take on the
analyst’s reasoning. Generally, once the motivations are understood, a fairly
practicable acceptance is created that indicates the shared perception of how
arduous the task of ending is, such that it requires the maximum use of the
analytic couple’s resources, including the optimal functioning of the setting.
An initial hint of resistance dissolves in what we might consider the tolerance
of a paradox: the horizon of the end is reconnected to that of the beginnings;
lived experience is amplified by the rather frequent observation in the final
moments of analysis, “I think that it is only now that I would like or would
know how to begin.”
Once the temporal coordinates of the setting are renegotiated and
reaffirmed, the last hurdle on the path of termination arises: the date of the
last session. There is no doubt that a real battle is waged over this necessary
preliminary, one which makes the sharpening of a significant conflict
evident. The lines of the conflict are simultaneously internal and external:
they express the patient’s ambivalence, but at the same time they reflect the
delicacy of a subtle counter-transference monitoring which, as we have
already argued above, grapples with the temptation of colluding with an
impulse to speed things up aimed at evading the complex work of ending.
The oscillation between contrasting aspects (signs of being ready to terminate
consistently nullified, the reappearance of symptoms or the sudden
appearance of signs of bodily affliction) is at its greatest in this moment,
inducing understandable effects of disorientation in both members of the
analytic couple. Taking a cautiously atypical position, Goldberg and Marcus
(1985) question the necessity of setting a date, appreciating the condition of
uncertainty that is the most typical feature of this sub-phase of the
termination process. They reflect on a case which ended without the
indication of a date for termination, though we might reasonably wonder if
this was in response to the analysts’ needs rather than the patients’ and
suspect a possible gap in their goals.
Our own orientation is instead marked by an equal distribution of
responsibility. We feel that that it is the analyst’s duty to signal the opening
up of a prospect for ending, whereas it seems useful to leave the patient the
task of proposing an end date. Obviously, neither of the two moves indicated
schematically above coincides with or is completed by the first and unilateral
indication, which in any case is entrusted to the joint work of the couple. In
the unpredictable space opening between the two moves, we have been struck
by the recurrence of some dynamics (to be examined below) that imply that it
may have to do with identifying some sort of path leading to the end. In his
dense and richly meaningful essay, Luchetti (2000) effectively employs the
expression “traumatic strait of the end” to indicate the unavoidable necessity
of carrying out a passage in conditions that appear impervious to the point of
sometimes triggering the illusory temptation to postpone the end.
We wonder if this expression cannot find a specific application in the
search for that “tenuous path” revealed precisely when a precise date of
termination manages to get delineated. The date might represent the hurdle
which in Flournoy (1985) must allow for the passage from a circular,
spinning-top movement to that of a wheel. Faced with this hurdle, we have
noticed a typical oscillation which generally entails presenting a date that is
either too near or, on the contrary, too far off. How do we probe this fact of
lived experience? Above all, by attempting to place it alongside another
aspect which has struck us as a recurrent oneiric scenario: one of the
Forms of Time 149
unconscious responses deployed in the prospect of the end often takes the
form of a scene of seduction. We have already seen this feature present in the
case of A., and we propose it again more extensively in two other cases,
which regard patients C. and D.
In the session subsequent to the one in which the possibility of

terminating the analysis was considered for the first time and C. had
expressed the desire to have another year of analysis, she related the
following dreams:
In the first dream we found out that a man who lives in my

building had died, a man whom my husband likes very much. He
has a wife who is completely dependent on him, so in the dream I
was wondering, “How will she get by without him?”
In the second, I was at some sort of celebration…I forgot to
take hold of my daughter, and my sister pointed it out to me…I
held the girl in my arms, and afterwards I was with S. [a widow
friend of hers who had loved her husband very much, and who
had then accepted the courting of a refined man with whom she
had an even better sex life than with her husband]. We were in a
sort of garage [which reminded her of the one near the analyst’s
office], very dark and little by little we became afraid of not being
able to get out of that place…all of the sudden a rather vulgar
man appeared and forced S., my widow friend, to have oral sex,
saying “give me ten minutes of fun [sfizio]”… In the end, though,
I managed to get out of there safe and sound; it was as if S. had
protected me from what could have happened.
C. associated immediately with the analysis and said that the dream
expressed all of the negative things she had gone through, which the analyst’s
presence had allowed her to overcome: “I have always been afraid of getting
raped.” She then mentioned a roguish comment by a male friend and the
difference between fun and involvement in sexual relations. After having
drawn attention to the fact that the prospect of ending seemed to have
activated not only a recapitulation (as C. had proposed) but also specific lived
experiences in this regard, the analyst hypothesized that the first dream also
referred to the analysis. C. immediately accepted this, saying that she felt
entirely dependent on the analysis and feared its loss. This thought allowed
for a passage to the second dream, in which a celebration turns into a
potentially dangerous situation. It is moreover possible to perceive some
conflict between the desire to remain inside and claustrophobic anxieties of
remaining imprisoned without a way out.
A few months later, the patient arrived on time for the last session and
began by relating that in the elevator the initials “US” came to mind along
with a passage by Italo Svevo in La coscienza di Zeno, quipping that it does

not mean “United States” but “last cigarette [ultima sigaretta]”:
I said to myself that for me it instead meant last session

[ultima seduta]…I thought I’d go, finish paying, and then I’d go
away, and then I thought instead: no, it’s my last session. I’ve had
a lot of dreams, and I wondered: what does that mean? Is there
still so much work to be done? In any case they were all dreams
in which men appeared who in some way courted me: my friend
S.; the ex-racer V., who died in maneuvers with a helicopter; and
a colleague of mine from the university. The second sent me a
sticky card which was supposed to be gallant, but I didn’t
appreciate it very much. I thought that he had in common with S.
fact of being hurt [S. was on crutches at the time] and the fact that
they were both from Veneto…
The patient further related that the colleague touched her breast
and she very naturally rejected his advances. She said something to do
with feeling left helpless and disorienting oscillations of her moods.
The analyst asked her to think about the dream.
C: I thought that I was reconciling myself to my sexuality.
And the analyst: Is it a desire, a hope or a real potential for the

relationship?
C: I think all three of these things…in my dream I was astonished

to see that I could be desirable…and this is what I am trying to
prove.
There is a silence, then she turns to the analyst: Is there something

that you can say to me, some advice, a suggestion so that I can
continue to work?
She is told that she would like to take away something tangible and that
she can instead reflect on her use of the last session, where fighting against
the initial impulse to run away, she was able to remain in contact with her
own feelings and to use the time to think about her emotional experiences.
The analyst then asks her about the initials US and two other meanings.
C: The last cigarette belongs to someone who doesn’t want to turn

back…something that is closed off forever and also a bit
connected to lived experiences of the end as death. Coming here, I
though that I felt like someone who had lived through an
Forms of Time 151
earthquake and now has a house, but the walls have traces of the
earthquake that once took place…as for being in contact, I have
always been in contact with my emotional states… but here
something has happened which depended on your presence more
than mine, and I’m afraid that this will get lost…how can I
substitute it? When my husband finished his analysis, he tried to
do it with me, but I wasn’t up to the task… I feel a bit more
confident in myself and I realize that this is no small thing;
coming here I told myself, I hope I can get through it… From the
moment one decides to end, every moment is a good one, but it’s
not like you ever really end….
The analyst comments that this is exactly the way it is, and that she has
an awareness of an end that is converted into a beginning alongside the fears
of ending as total extinction. Then she asks: “and the united states6?”
C: Who knows, wanting to remain united… I feel changed, but at

the same time I feel like I don’t have an absolute mastery of my
mechanisms and a sufficient comprehension of them.
The analyst: This perhaps belongs to the other meaning of the

states: a fantasy of domination and power?
C: I’ve never liked [the United States], I’m anti-American. I

always rooted for the Indians, and tomboy that I was, I dressed up
as an Indian chief for Carnival: Red Cloud, an emblematic
choice.
We are five minutes from the end, and these last minutes have passed in
silence.
As we look at the beginning of the termination phase and the
termination proper as a whole, a common element appears in the two sessions
despite their distance: the emergence of an oral sexuality masked as a genital
act. And yet in the intervening space between the session indicating the date
and that of the termination, we can perceive a process of a taming of the
drives, intending with this the work of control and regulation made possibly
by the bond with the object. A distinctive, significant feature of the
termination event is the set of initials US in which we find condensed an
autoerotic background of the “oral fun” of the dream of sexual assault, as
well as the polysemic communication of “united states”. However, as always
happens, only in retrospect was the analyst able to reflect on a counter-
transference motion of sharing which she had restrained in avoiding verbal
comment. This regarded the reaction provoked by the patient’s observation
about the United States as a successful power, which had never garnered her
sympathies and the simultaneous, silent associative thought rising up in the

analyst: “She’s in good company.” What was actually being discussed, as the
patient herself had moreover pointed out, was the impulse to remain united,
that is, to cancel the incipient separation that returned to be experienced,
somehow, as an act of imposition and abuse of power which conversely
activated the defensive assumption of a masculine pseudo-identity (the Indian
chief). Among other things, the mention of this defensive movement took
back up a specific problem which had had a central role in this analysis, that
is, the attraction exercised by a strong masculine identification which tended
to interfere with a full assumption of her own femininity. On the contrary,
C.’s assertion relative to her astonishment in perceiving herself as desirable
probably captures the revelation of that virtual aspect which introduces a
crucial difference between feeling oneself the object of a predatory and
violent act, and instead being the subject participating in a dynamic of erotic
attraction.
We now report a series of patient D.’s dreams connected to termination,

whose process had a long development and risked getting bogged down
precisely in relation to the setting of the date, an operation which took place
at a distance of nearly two years from the beginning of the termination
process. The first dream was told at a short interval (two weeks) from the
final determination for the end date; the subsequent ones characterized the
last two sessions of therapy, which took place four months later, and they
lend themselves to illustrating the termination event.
It was the last session of analysis. It took place in a large

and airy room. The atmosphere was like that of an examination, a
graduation or doctoral defense. The atmosphere was good. I got
up and you [the analyst] began a conversation that was
increasingly friendly, asking me where I or we [he and his wife]
would be going on vacation. There was the feeling of a task that
had been brought to completion. I left, but on the street I
remembered that I hadn’t paid. I came back and told you. You
weren’t worried, you maintained your cordial attitude, almost as
if you didn’t care – as you said. Then I woke up the next day. I
was in a hotel and I had to modify the article [written for a
congress] and I thought I was due for the usual ritual.
D.’s associations regard the desire to end the analysis, with the
expression of an attenuated but unshakable ambivalence. On the one hand,
the analysis was a test passed with high marks, associated with the thought of
completing some intellectual work that had been procrastinated for a long
time, of which a copy or proof was to be sent to the analyst. On the other
hand, though, there was the difficulty in modifying obsessive behaviors (the
Forms of Time 153
anancastic ritual): there was no longer much time to use the analysis for
change.
The analyst comments on the figure of the father, who initially
sponsored the patient’s intellectual work, noting a link between D.’s thoughts
and a paternal figure that is activating and at the same time inhibiting. He
recalls the way in which the discourse had begun on necessity of setting a
date for the termination of the analysis, which by then could no longer be
postponed: there had been a dream the month before in which it was as if
there had been a sort of sexual relation with his parent; this dream had
simultaneously opened an area of sexuality (passive, anal and homosexual)
and clearly posed the risk of interminability. The analyst observes that had
been a chain of events that had led D. to modify the interior image of his
parents and to experience the anancastic ritual as a problem for the first time.
D. thinks about the homosexuality of the dream recalled by the analyst
as a danger instilled in him at puberty without really understanding it. He had
never received blows from his father, but he had never played with him,
either. He reached puberty with a father who treated him as a “man”, without
really understanding his parent’s meaning and intention. Sighing, D. remarks
that perhaps the analyst is the father that he would have wanted.
A. comments that D. had never been able to play or fight with his father
or feel him physically. There was only an obscure fear of paternal violence,
experienced as a sudden and drastic intervention, as happened in his
childhood. Subsequently, in adolescence there was the feeling that he was
required to give proof of his masculinity and again, an obscure threat (the
imposition of being masculine, otherwise being immediately suspected of
homosexuality).
Approximately three months after the session described above, in the
third to the last session of analysis, D. tells of two dreams:
Dream I: I was home [in his native city]. X., that French
singer, was there with me. He was performing fellatio on me. I
was half-naked, leaning on the door which divides the apartment
in two parts, and he was also half-naked. I realized that my
mother was moving about in the same room, but she did not seem
to notice anything. I then realized that I had already had oral sex
with a young student. At the time, I thought I should tell you [the
analyst]. Then, I thought that a long time before I had had an
incestuous relation with my mother. I remembered myself in bed
with my mother, making love. I had a doubt as to whether it was
true or a dream, and I thought I should tell it.
Dream II: I came to analysis drunk. I lay down. At a certain

point, I turned toward you, lost my balance and fell off the couch.
As if relating associative thoughts, D. tells of a dream from a few days

before:
I was in my city with my father. We had to dock the boat. I

don’t know what my father said, and I, as if it were for fun,
jumped into a channel - which in my city are like sewers - but the
water was clean.
D. associates the French singer with the name of a healer as well as the
analyst. He recalls having sex years earlier with a transvestite, but then he
had had an active role. This demonstrates that he is male and not
homosexual. Upon the analyst’s comment that analysis is an oral relation7, D.
thinks about his initially passive behavior: it was as if he had been sent to
analysis by others. He thinks that in the beginning he came to analysis and
said: “Let’s see what you’re able to do.”
In the last session of analysis, D. feels anxious and restless. He tells a
dream:
I was in a port; I don’t know if it was of an island or my city.

I was with my aunt, who bought the wrong ticket, because she
went to a place in the port, while the ticket was instead supposed
to be bought on the ship, a flat boat. I saw the sea begin to get
rough; I got angry with my aunt and told her that I didn’t want to
leave with her anymore. I went to my car and found the hatchback
open. I looked inside and found that my radio and CDs had been
stolen. I looked around and saw a group of girls with a stereo, but
it wasn’t mine. I looked at them with a serious, scolding
expression, but then all of us looked in amazement at the
appearance of fireworks or a ship.
The associations regard the separation. D. understands that his model of

separation is based on a rupture and anger, and therefore he feels anxiety,
even if he sees that there is no rupture and, on the contrary, there has been a
long work. Now, however, there is anxiety and regret.
The analyst observes that D. has trouble separating the regret, which
can be natural and helpful in forming experience, from the anxiety. Like his
mother who tells him to avoid suffering. D. says that he realizes that sorrow
has been presented to him as pathological, but that without sorrow it is not
possible to know one’s own desires and to grow. The analyst comments that
the regret is now in recognizing his desire to depend on different parents, a
mother who is understanding but not an accomplice, and a father who
participates but is not authoritarian. And this regret is a result of the analysis.
D. nods: precisely when he recognized this desire and he entered more deeply
into the analysis and into the relationship with the analyst, things had to
Forms of Time 155
finish. This is his remorse. Now he fears precisely this remorse. The analyst
adds that it is due to the strength of this fear that the termination of the
analysis has required all of the necessary time: to feel the regret without
being crushed by it or escaping from it. D. says he feels calmer. He is
consoled by the thought that he can always return if he needs to.
Viewing the oneiric and associative material reported as a whole and in
the temporal sequence described, the case of D. is striking for a sort of logical
inversion: close to the determination of the end date, the first dream stages
the termination of the analysis, representing it in the manifest content as an
event halfway between a final achievement and a leave-taking that takes
place in a friendly atmosphere. Alongside a good atmosphere for termination,
the dream reveals unresolved elements (for example, the ritual, homosexual
sexuality, etc.). The forgotten payment seems to anticipate what might
happen in the last session. Perhaps it is an anticipation that serves to
neutralize the danger that this actually happens, a representation of a possible
termination event which is thereby removed from the domain of behavior.
Moreover, the money-feces association brings the anal element back to the
fore, present in both the patient’s obsessiveness and in part of his relation
with the father figure. The termination of the analysis can thus be read as a
necessity to “settle accounts”, but the accounts do not fully square. The risk
of impasse, of which the difficulty in setting the date was a signal, appears
connected to the difficulty in facing the task of settling accounts with the
separation-sexuality connection in a way that is not based on control and
repetition, and therefore experienced as more diffuse but more dangerous.
The real termination event is identifiable in the last sessions through the
oneiric material, and it bears the traces of a much more evident conflict
which reproposes the theme of seduction (the fellatio of the first dream) and
the many variations on the impulse to avoid “docking with my father”, as D.
himself verbalized it (jumping in the channel before arriving in the port,
renouncing a departure for the problem with the ticket, etc.). The
reappearance of the homosexual theme at the beginning and especially at the
end of the termination process can be traced to a specific problem of D.’s,
and it is certainly not a coincidence that the problem is reproposed in the
termination event, condensing all of its defensive meanings. In this, it is in
fact possible to perceive the passivity-activity dialect, the recourse to a
position aimed at avoiding confrontation and competition with an Oedipal
father, and on the contrary, the compulsion to exhibit a phallic masculinity as
a double defense from oral and incestuous fantasies and from a passive
Oedipal investment in regard to an authoritarian but secretly loved father.
Last but not least, we cite an eroticization of the oral elements of the analytic
relation, re-presented by a dream of drunkenness, a dream which -according
to Oremland’s work - presents the analyst undisguised and at the same time
marks the fear of falling that is a sign of separation anxiety. Can the difficulty
in termination thus be understood in the difficult passage from orality (incest
in a broad sense) to Oedipal sexuality? In this case, homosexuality more than

seduction is the specific figure of the sexuality reproposed by the termination
process.
However, we intend to draw attention to a more general connection. In
all of these patients, whom we consider emblematic of typical analyses, the
horizon of ending – whether perceived in its early delineation (A.), at its
turning point, the indication of the date (C.), or in its final parabola (D.) -
activates a scene of sexual seduction, which has transference meaning. We
are aware that the choice of this aspect is risky, nonetheless, we would like to
pose it as a possible stimulus for comparison. First of all, how to decipher it?
If we give centrality to the separation, understood as an element of
psychoanalysis, we can read in the seduction the index of an inevitable
interpretative violence even when, as our entire hypothesis on the liminal
demonstrates, the opening up of the prospect for ending - for Novick the most
important interpretative act of the entire analysis - limits itself to being the
careful mirroring of a journey traveled. The manifest oneiric scene may
convey the inextricable connection between traumatic aspects of separation
and the sexualization of the defenses, and at the same time the
indistinguishableness of the violence and excitation connected to the parting.
The emergence of the theme of seduction necessarily compels a
comparison with Laplanche’s work, as Luchetti draws from it in the article
cited above, applied specifically to the question of the termination of the
analysis. Luchetti’s more circumscribed point of observation is focused on
some traumatic situations which erupt in an analytic relation nearing its end
in the final sessions of analysis and are seen as the construction of events
which incarnate the Other, screen events in contrast to the screen memories,
because they erase the subject in the other. This fact, similarly to how we
tend to see the seduction scenes, does not get interrogated in the light of
individual analytic journeys with presumably highly specific
psychopathological profiles, but instead as central and constructive paradigm,
though of the analysis, of the origin of the individual as a subject who despite
himself is prototypically traversed by the other, who crosses over him,
configured as both as the bearer of time and of the sexual. Luchetti writes the
following:
It is obvious that the dissolving of the analytic “frame”, with

the movement of re-centering that termination imposes, in this
sense constitutes a strongly mobilizing moment. It reopens the
“subject wound” [which makes] this impossible separation
emerge, a separation alluded to by Heraclites in referring to the
inexorable concatenation of the word that here reveals itself in its
non-representational and non-subject basis
(Luchetti 2000: 19-20).
Forms of Time 157
The thesis of generalized seduction underlies and informs the

conception of the beginning as well as the end of the analysis in significant
moments of that orbital movement which leads, for Laplanche (1997), from
an initial Copernicanism to Ptolomeism, and anew to a decenteredness from
self through the transference into emptiness which is peculiar of termination.
Alongside substantial points of convergence with our discourse (trauma
in termination events, and closing-reopening as precipitate of an infinite
analysis), we feel that the presence of the theme of seduction can be read in a
different way, one that subordinates it to the separation trauma that in our
view occupies the analytic couple in a elaborative process of multiplying the
possibilities. Recalling Freud’s recommendation not to ignore the manifest
meanings, we might say that in a first reading the discovery of a prospect for
ending can be configured as a seduction, a profiling of an attractive goal
which provokes both fascination and repulsion. Faced with timelessness and
the psychic inertia of the primary processes, developmental tasks always
appear forced; on the other hand, the transformative turning points, whether
anchored to the body or detached from it, always entail Eros and Thanatos.
From this point of view, it seems that the joint emergence of these two topoi -
death and sexuality - in the particular variations we observed en route to
ending exemplify the web of the drive economy and the work it permits. In
our view, this is the source of the importance of what we have defined as the
last hurdle visible in the problem of the date, as an attempt to identify and
travel the final route that implies a work of taming directed at representations
of death as well as seduction. Many appear to be the obstructive fantasies,
and among these, in particular, a complex constellation which forms a sort of
“taboo theme”, that is, a fantasy of interdiction of any form of contact
whatsoever with one’s analyst. The taboo is the diametric opposite of the
seduction fantasy; it is its converse and confers a further meaning to the
oneiric seduction scene. The latter probably appears marked by a fantasy of
possession, with the aim of holding onto the object in view of its loss. The
oral element - so massively evident in both C. and D. - is the most primitive
but at the same time most effective mode for maintaining the object, here
deploying its entire function as a bond. More broadly, the difficulty of
making the register of fantasy coexist with the real is made evident through
its inclusion in an intersubjective perspective. All this seems to give, by
contrast, further meaningfulness to the so-called liminal dimension, which as
a guarantee of the simultaneousness of psychic times opens up unpredictable
scenarios for post-analysis.
In a substantial contribution on post-analysis, the Botellas (C. Botella
and S. Botella 1997) identify a fundamental point for approaching the
question of termination in Freud’s idea of simultaneousness in psychic times.
They give us to understand that the task of termination, in continuity with
what follows the end of analysis, must necessarily engage an increased
capacity for tolerating the coexistence of regimes of different functioning.
This task, just like dream work, guarantees infinite and creative possibilities
of assembling psychic material.
Notes
1
According to Haynal (1992), it was Ferenczi who denied a linear causality and
instead supported an interaction between lines of development with a very modern
position.
2
Recall Rangell’s ideas on the analytic process outlined above (Rangell 1982), as
characterized by an ascending phase in which the analytic work is one of discovery
and interpretation, and a descending phase of absorption and working- through. It
seems no coincidence that Rangell identified the second phase as the one in which the
resistance expressed in repetition-compulsion is greatest.
3
This clinical excerpt and the subsequent one were utilized in a prior work (Ferraro
and Garella 1997b).
4
[translator’s note:] In contemporary Italian in the authors’ area (Naples), Lei is the
most formal form of second person singular address. Voi is less formal, but not as
informal as tu, marking social distance or an inequality of age or status. At the same
time, Voi is also you as the second person plural pronoun, and it therefore corresponds
to the first person plural noi [we] .
5
[translator’s note] The least formal Italian pronoun for you; see note 4 above.
6
[translator’s note] Lower case in the original, implying “states of being united”, but
also the past tense plural “were/have been united” (see the lines which follow).
7
[translator’s note] In Italian, rapporto [relation] is also a synonym of the sex act
[rapporto sessuale]. Rapporto orale therefore has the dual meaning of both oral sex
and an oral relationship (such as analysis).
Nine
A Map of Termination
1. In Praise of Incompleteness
In this last chapter, we shall attempt to apply the concepts and

theoretical models previously identified and described. We shall act like
cartographers, seeking to elaborate a conceptual map that also sketches a
typology of termination, treating this book’s subject as a representative and
conceptual topos in which we can situate what we believe to have discovered
or find something whose existence is inferred from clues and allusions. The
work carried out in all of the preceding chapters provides us with instruments
for surveying, models for procedure, categories and even expectations, so we
cannot avoid the final task of summarizing the variety within the theme of the
termination of analysis in an overarching description.
As with every operation of mapping, it will not be possible to make the
map and the territory coincide, nor does it even seem possible to achieve a
high degree of detail, since the territory we attempt to map is much more
mobile than any geographic territory. In its complexity and intrinsic
limitation, the question is nearer to the task placed on research in certain
fields of science, in which the determination of the position of an event
(phenomenon, particle, etc.) often excludes the possibility of simultaneously
knowing the characteristics of the dynamic and vice versa. We will therefore
have to limit ourselves to identifying macroscopic areas, regions which are
relatively homogeneous (or presumed so) of the space of termination
phenomena.
We do not undertake this final operation of the book in order to bring
closure to the issue. Rather, we are representing termination in the form of a
mosaic whose pieces have edges that are not so much juxtaposed as
overlapping or confused, and for this reason they confer a certain imprecision
and indeterminacy to the image. This approach is not simply due to an
inability to advance further in refining the phenomenal and conceptual
analysis, rather, it is a recognition of a condition that became clearer in the
course of our work: above and beyond the question of the terminability or
interminability of analysis as a procedure of discovery and therapy, there is
the level of relations between conscious thought and phenomena to which it
is applied. In the analytic field, this level regards the intrinsic incompleteness
of every attempt that consciousness makes to appropriate what escapes it, and
thus the incompleteness of the analytic process is substantial as well as
theoretical. Known through its derivations, the unconscious is the principal

expression of incompleteness: we can say that it limits itself to existing,
while consciousness is obliged to produce closure, to complete, tracing its
origin from perception and its aim from the reality principle. Analytic therapy
thus can be terminable or not, but it remains fundamentally incomplete
because the analytic process - and transference as its principle representative
- does not reach a completeness that is also an extinction, but can only
continue moving about and leaning on an other (or others) who is no longer
the analyst.
Our essential idea is that analysis cannot but remain incomplete, and
that the individuation of the termination event seems to confirm this through
its unfulfilled and prohibited elements. Even so, from this thesis we gain
something more specific - a stimulus rather than a paralyzing dogma -through
the dialectic between incompleteness and interruption. If all analyses are
incomplete, then those we consider more or less properly terminated and
those instead marked by interruption or interminability all share a basic
feature, and are therefore closer than we tend to think. Their difference is to
be found in something other than the distance with respect to a model of
termination that is both ideal and hypothetical. This means that the nature of
the terrain to be mapped out possesses an underlying homogeneity, and the
differences are to be sought in features which are in a certain sense more
superficial, though no less important.
It will be noted that we have associated interrupted analyses with
interminable ones, and not by chance: analyses that get bogged down,
become overdue, get blocked in an impasse or are not able to be terminated
are all quite close to interrupted analyses, not only because they often end up
in some form of interruption, but also because they represent a refusal of
incompleteness, which is negatively experienced in interruption. In a prior
work (Ferraro and Garella 2000) we proposed the term im-passed for these
types of analyses, aiming to indicate the mixture of the blocked (impasse)
element with the overdue quality of the analytic work on termination, which
extends beyond the time it should respect (and thus it is passed time in the
sense of being surpassed or passed through).
The work of cartography work we propose, in effect, resembles less a
geographer’s rational mapping than that of the aboriginal Australians, who in
their turingas - the “songlines” painted on bark - represent past and present
places and histories of the individual and his ancestral group. The
geographical efficacy of these boards as maps seems greater than Western
ones; however, among the indigenous Australians, they are valued much
more for their explanatory and normative power relative to the psychic and
symbolic reality of their owner and his tribe. The work we present here is not
a fantastic geography. On the contrary, its aim is to shed the light of rational
understanding and orientation on the thematic area of the termination of
analysis. It attempts to unite an informational element, which utilizes
A Map of Termination 161
distinctions to provide a visualization of the terrain, with an element that

summarizes, demonstrating the ties, references and implications that render
each type of termination a multilayered clinical and theoretical reality.
2. Maps for a Geography of Termination
Starting from this basic theoretical premise grounded in the

metapsychological assumption of the inexhaustibility of the unconscious, we
would like to make an additional effort to introduce a fundamental distinction
between the incompleteness inherent in a terminated analysis and interruption
as an outcome of termination to be investigated in its complexity. For some
time now we have been engaged in research and theorizing relative to the
variegated geography of termination, confronting ourselves dialectically with
Novick and the typology he proposes. It is our intention here continue
examining this thematic area, directing our attention to two coordinates: the
explanation of what differentiates our perspective from Novick’s - to whom
we are in any case indebted for numerous ideas - and the adoption of a lens
closely connected to the hypotheses of the preceding chapter to the extent
that it focuses on the prism of temporality inherent in repetition. This is a
multifaceted prism which can function as an explanatory figure of a varied
and unpredictable phenomenology of termination that, at the same time, has
its own cipher of subterranean intelligibility.
As we have said, Novick’s typology differentiates terminated analyses
from interrupted and overdue or interminable ones; our discussion is certainly
also marked by such distinctions in a more than superficial way. But rather
than offering single terminological clarifications, we arrive at the hypothesis
of a substantial unity between the two outcomes that are different from an
actual termination, which would therefore seem to make up the large (and at
the same time neglected) category of interrupted analyses. With a paraphrase
which is perhaps excessive but offers the goad of self-irony, we might state
that the only analyses which actually exist are interrupted ones. This would
provocatively confer the status of a truth to the widely-shared recognition,
which remains clandestine and informal in that it is only confided in private,
that truly terminated analyses are scanty. This is a disconcerting fact, and
though it makes up a constant in the historical development of
psychoanalysis, it has never been the specific and detailed object of
investigation. As for situating all of this in a historical perspective, it is
sufficient to recall how two cases considered emblematic for the birth of
psychoanalysis – those of Anna O. and Dora – were both interrupted analyses
whose undeniable foundational value for the refinement of psychoanalytic
method has probably impeded the perception of features that are no less
instructive for a specific discussion of termination (cf. in this regard Ferraro
and Garella 2000).
In keeping with the remarkableness of this fact, courageously noted by

various writers1, in this concluding part of the book we will enter into the
intricate category of interrupted analyses, which, despite the fact that it
constitutes the most widely represented termination outcome, seems to
escape a reductive possibility of generalization. On the contrary, it urges us to
make the effort of deciphering the logic of interruption, as we shall attempt to
do in light of the psychic dynamic of repetition, whose different faces are
represented as figures of temporality.
As was already shown in the first chapter of this volume, the idea of a
connection between trauma and the terminability of an analysis appears
explicitly in Freud’s Analysis Terminable and Interminable, and we have
drawn upon it with necessary clarifications (Ferraro 1995; Ferraro and
Garella 1998). Indeed, we have shown how within an essay universally
considered to be pessimistic about the prospects of analysis, there is on the
contrary a rather encouraging sound to Freud’s idea of the particular
incisiveness of the analytic method in cases of traumatic pathology with
regard to those cases which can be traced to the strength of the drives and ego
alterations.2 In a certain sense, then, this chapter forms a resumption and
expansion of the idea outlined above, now explored in reverse: that is, on the
side of an impossibility of leading the analysis to an end that requires being
deciphered in its multiple ramifications through the lens of transference
temporality. The theoretical-clinical assumption that identifies interruption as
an acting out, if it can be valid as a point of departure, or as a constant shared
by all of the various forms of interruption which we are setting about to
describe, can at the same time be faulty due to an excessive or simplifying
schematism which obscures the different temporality in action in different
clinical situations.
Acting out as repetition in alternative to memory necessarily invokes
the problem of temporality to the extent that this problem makes an
actualizing memory evident that compresses the distinction between past and
present. Nonetheless, with respect to the drastic alternative of a work like
Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through (Freud 1914), the foundation of
early psychoanalytic theorization, we can certainly state that the conceptual
status of acting out3 has changed through the years, as we have sought to
demonstrate with the effort, no less full of consequences, of distinguishing
between repetition-compulsion and the tendency to repetition (Garella 1991).
This is a crucial point whose heuristic potential has been developed in at least
two directions: a growing awareness of how the theme of acting out is
imbricated with that of trauma, and a finer attention to the meanings of acting
out in relation to psychoanalytic process (Gaddini 1981). From this point of
view, we might say that the interruption of analysis is acting out par
excellence. It is a movement that is simple and complex at the same time, in
an ambiguous relationship with the dynamics of transference; it bears a
possible two-pronged function aimed at the reactualization of the past and a

commitment to the future, to the extent that it can be the sole and
paradigmatic final sequence of an analysis marked precisely by
incompleteness, or instead, of a concluding and repeated sequence in a series
that occupies a broader, prolonged time. Here, then, is how one of the keys
for penetrating the enigma of repetition can be precisely that of temporality
used to discriminate between the blind repetition of fate neurosis and the
“transformative recoveries” which can be hidden behind its apparent identity.
Bibring’s (1943) lucidly argued thesis, which more explicitly valorizes
the libidinal role of repetition, offers an important suggestion for refining our
capacities to find working-through aspects inherent in repetitive acting out.
We might moreover consider this to be a surprisingly up-to-date and
significant point of arrival that merges two crucial aspects of Freud’s
discourse on trauma which are paradigmatically located at the beginning and
the end of his career - that is, the former in Project for a Scientific
Psychology and the latter in Moses and Monotheism.
As is commonly known, Freud’s conceptualization of trauma was from

the beginning (Freud 1895) centered on the dynamic of temporality though
the model of trauma in two times, containing the seed of the crucial concept
of Nachträglichkeit. It instead appears that less attention has been devoted to
Freud’s late ideas on trauma, outlined in Moses and Monotheism and accused
by some of conservatism (Blum 1987, Chianese 1997, etc.), whereas, on the
contrary, they contain decisive intuitions on the role of repetition. In our view
these can be wedded to Bibring’s innovative thought, which is careful to
make a more explicit space for everything that is not infernal repetition-
compulsion. In this work, Freud speaks of negative and positive effects of
trauma, allowing us to perceive an important role in the tendency to
repetition and something much more complex than the primitive mechanism
of transformation from passive into active. Freud writes the following:
The effects of traumas are of two kinds, positive and

negative. The former are attempts to bring the trauma into
operation once again - that is, to remember the forgotten
experience or, better still, to make it real, to experience a
repetition of it anew, or, even if it was only an early emotional
relationship, to revive it in an analogous relationship with
someone else. […] The negative reactions follow the opposite
aim: that nothing of the forgotten traumas shall be remembered
and nothing repeated. We can summarize them as ‘defensive
reactions’. Their principal expression are what are called
‘avoidances’, which may be intensified into ‘inhibitions’ and
‘phobias’. These negative reactions too make the most powerful
contributions to the stamping of character. Fundamentally they are
just as much fixations to the trauma as their opposites, except that

they are fixations with a contrary purpose.
(Freud 1934-38, S.E. 23: 75-76).
Although he shows that he is careful not to allow himself to be misled

by the halo effect associated with the categories of the negative and the
positive, we may nonetheless note a substantial difference between the two
types of effects: in their indelible inscription in character, the negative ones
evoke a fixity disjointed from representative possibilities, and their intent is
avoidance and elusion; the positive are categorized as efforts to “bring the
trauma into operation once again” (thus avoidance versus undergoing). It is
through this scheme that we set about investigating the wide category of
interrupted analyses in which, borrowing from Apfelbaum-Igoin’s expression
(1995), we can recognize various “faces of repetition”.
In the context of what we have argued above and through a
comprehensive survey of our own clinical experience, we have been
prompted to consider various forms of interruption that, as we shall see, have
wide and significant areas of contact and overlapping. Even so, we think it
useful to distinguish them in order to highlight the complexity of the work of
deciphering imposed by interrupted analyses. The investigation of interrupted
analyses presents a host of methodological problems which are probably not
unrelated to the difficulty of making them a specific and systematic object of
study. To the extent that the field of observation of a single analyst is
considerably limited, the analyses he classifies as interrupted can be the
object of an important error of evaluation, since (strictly speaking) he is not
aware of subsequent developments and in particular of eventual resumptions
likely to influence the psychic meaning of the interruption. Indeed, this point
dramatizes in an exemplary way the dialectic between singularity and the
potential for generalization inherent in analytic relationships and the
necessity of contextualizing the reflections prompted by them. On the other
hand, here we simply render more evident the implicit limit in every
secondary conceptual elaboration of clinical experience, which as Freud
lucidly clarified in Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality (Freud
1920b), can be of a solely retrospective type, forced to abstain from
prognostic, definitional hypotheses.
A further structural difficulty appears to derive from the role that is
necessary to attribute to the analyst’s dynamics – a decisive variable in
producing this outcome - as well as those of the patient. The terminological
distinction adopted by Novick differentiating interrupted analyses in
“unilateral” and “forced” types tends to establish a dominance set against a
background of a transference and counter-transference interconnection, but
he does this limiting himself to descriptively registering what can only be the
final act of a dynamic that has distant origins, identifying the person who
provokes the interruption in the one who pronounces the fateful word “end.”
We will examine four basic types of interruption: interruption as an

irreversible short-circuit; interruption as a time of urgency; interruption as a
sequence that can become part of an intermittent analysis, acquiring the
double or ambiguous status of approximating termination; or, on the contrary,
interruption assuming the figure of interminability. In our effort to
differentiate these diverse configurations, however, we will maintain a
constant reading that aims to emphasize the different temporalities rooted in
the dual concept of Nachträglichkeit and the liminal, as opposed to the dual
concept of impasse and interruption.
2.1 Interrupted Analyses, or “On Awakening from a Nightmare and the

Impossibility of Dreaming”
We begin with a first form of interrupted analyses which we shall

explain though a comparison between nightmares and dreams. We argue that
an interrupted analysis is to a terminated analysis as a nightmare is to a
dream, and we would like to account for how we came to formulate this
hypothesis. We refer to analyses abruptly brought to an end in moments
which are not the ones at the beginning of an analytic approach, which might
justify the hypothesis of “an escape in the cure”, still less those peculiar to a
prospect of termination, for which they would be limited to being an
anticipation.
The reflection prompted by a certain amount of clinical experience of
this type has drawn our attention to some recurrent particularities. A first
element in these cases is the presence of a death or loss in childhood which
appears to precociously mark the subject’s destiny. As Pontalis (1997) says,
these are lives which, in their first interviews, unfold marked by an excess of
history punctuated by traumatic events; perhaps it is precisely for this that
they are deceptive in their apparent explanatory intelligibility. The other
feature which has struck us is the recurrence of a childhood nightmare, whose
context and communicative function must obviously be explained in the
analytic relationship, but which in any case appears to be the sediment of a
primitive anxiety that is useless outside of an affective context of which it is
simultaneously a trace and a sign of a radical breakthrough.
We find this, for example, in a patient whom we shall call Amedeo,
who requested analysis at a rather advanced age, and whose childhood
history was quite dramatic but told with a degree of self-satisfaction summed
up in his self-definition as a “child of tragedy”. With the outbreak of the war
at his birth, this tragedy was epochal, but it was also personal due to the
development of hostility between his parents, culminating in the wife’s
abandonment of her husband and her escape with the patient - the youngest
and only male among the children - who was therefore kept away from his
father permanently.
The recurrent dream consisted in finding himself in a

narrow tunnel between two dangers: Amedeo was fleeing pursuit,
and when it finally seemed that he was safe in his childhood
home, he found a terrifying figure that represented death.
The telling of this nightmare, and above all the patient’s insistent
request at the beginning of analysis that he be explained its meaning, was a
way to avoid being present to the emotions of the analytic relationship. Still,
in the light of subsequent developments, it seemed to capture a central and
problematic theme that was re-presented without being worked-through in
one of the dreams which preceded the interruption of the analysis a year and
a half after its start.
Amedeo was in a tunnel. He turned around to ask for help

from a person who was more experienced, but he realized that get
out he would have to take a road which entailed entering into
holes that were too small.
The fear signaled by the dream of a road backward (infantile

regression?) as an unavoidable passage repeated the final scene of the
nightmare, where the return to his childhood home turned out to be even
more threatening and terrifying than the danger from which he was seeking
shelter. What remained unchanged was the struggle between two alternatives
– to proceed or to turn back – without a real way out. The patient probably
interrupted as a way to get out of a situation of impasse, in this way
highlighting the failure of the analysis in its search to make space for a third
dimension in some way supported by the symbolic meaning of the paternal.
In a second patient whom we shall call Fabio, not long before his
interruption of the analysis and in the context of the transference relation, a
reference reemerged to a nightmare which he remembered having marked, as
a sort of caesura, two totally distinct periods of his life as a boy. His
childhood had been split by the death of his father, which took place
unexpectedly when the patient was four years old. The recurrent nightmare
reproposed his terror over the moon’s imminent crash into the Earth. The
idea of the moon about to crash into the Earth leads to the thought of a threat
coming from the loss of the safety range and of the vital, separating space
introduced in the mother-child dyad by the presence of the father in his
mother’s mind. As an aspect of the anxiety content, the contraction of space
can only have claustrophobic meanings, and it seems extraordinarily similar
to the one present in the preceding case. Here too, then, the flight from
analysis is in transference: the flight from an analyst-mother experienced as
potentially all-embracing and seductive, the search for an impossible
triangulation, and the acted out repetition of a situation which was doubly
traumatic and which did not appear to have a way out.
Let us place these two cases alongside a brief summary of a tormented

analytic experience4 punctuated by three interruptions; it is indirectly able to
shed light on the preceding interrupted analyses as well as on temporality in
action in the interruptions. What the third patient, Silvia, shares with the first
two is the traumatic loss of her mother in childbirth when she was two-and-a-
half years old, and a dream-nightmare which, as in the others, recalls the
traumatic situation. Unlike the first two cases, this case acts as a watershed
between two periods of analysis, becoming part of the temporal dynamic of
interruptions whose function appeared retroactively to be anything but
secondary as the work of repetition.
Indeed, it was only after the third interruption that it was possible to
begin making a more significant connection between the repeated acting out
of a sudden trip which inevitably interrupted the analysis and the patient’s
traumatic nuclei, which had already reappeared in some of Silvia’s analytic
dreams and yet were left “unworkable”. The dream called “the awakening of
the dinosaur” is an example of this:
In the first scene, Silvia was with a foreign boy with whom
she got along splendidly. The scene changed and the patient found
herself with her brother near the home of an aunt [where she
often used to go after her mother’s death] and walking alongside
a path, she saw a glass building. This was a skyscraper, and
inside of it there was a dinosaur with an enormous belly. The
patient realized that something moved in it. At this point she
noticed that her brother was no longer there; he had disappeared,
and everyone was fleeing to safety. She learned that a bomb had
hit the dinosaur on the head; she saw sparks and a blinding light.
Terrified, she looked at the city, waiting for the dinosaur to strike
it.
In some ways this dream forms a milestone in the analysis to the extent
that it was certainly evidence of a work of symbolization that, through the
creation of oneiric thoughts, aimed at representing the annihilation anxieties
provoked by the maternal pregnancy and its catastrophic outcome. Despite
this, the traumatic nucleus had long remained encysted, excluded from the
temporal sequence of events as if immobilized in a repetitive fixity that
reproposed it with the transparency typical of extreme situations, soliciting
no less extreme defenses in denial and falsification. It was only when the
third interruption took place, much longer than the two which had preceded it
and lasting for four years, that it was possible to begin making a connection
between the repeated acting out constituted by the “ritual” trips and the
traumatic experience. Upon resuming analysis after the third interruption, a
dream-nightmare was told whose atmosphere of powerful fascination
suggested a correspondence with the trips made during the interruptions.
In this dream the patient witnessed a strange rite, a cross

between a Mass and an Egyptian mummification. There was a
close-up of an enormous sarcophagus with a mummy whose feet
stood out. In the dream, she anxiously struggled in the dilemma
over whether it was a real situation or a symbol - a representation
repeated many times, a sort of incessant creation or a repeated
filmic sequence. The thought of a baby in her mother’s womb,
both dead (which formed the first association with the
sarcophagus) was immediately neutralized by the idea of a
resurrection which actually made the death a fiction. The entire
scene was characterized by a marked rituality of gestures and a
sacred aura similar to her travel experiences.
What should be emphasized is that despite (or perhaps precisely

because of) the presence of the traumatic situation in the dreams - only
slightly altered, as in Freud’s dreams of traumatic neurosis - it is certainly not
the interpretative work on the dream that makes an opening in the
unthinkable. Rather, it is a certain type of repetition present in the
interruptions which, unlike what we might say about the incessant and
automatic repetition in the dream of the sarcophagus, conveys an attempt to
make the traumatic experience dynamic and introduce it into in the temporal
warp of the analytic relationship.
What the patient improperly calls a symbol in regard to the oneiric
thoughts about the sarcophagus dream is actually precisely the opposite: a
compulsive and immobile presentation, an archaic and actualizing memory
which in fact blocks the symbolic potential of the representation and the vital
contact with inner and outer reality. Moreover, if the interruptions
reactualized the traumatic extinction of the relationship in transference, at the
same time, they also staged its embalming. The nucleus of experience
repeated in analysis was the action of magical thought, containing both the
feature of repudiation - enacting a fantasy of detachment - and the no less
vital need to recreate a fusion between self and the lost object in a mythical
place. The moving work of poetry that the patient submitted to the analyst
upon her return spoke of the incessant search for experience of ecstasy and
fusion based on an intense sensoriality and an acute need for contact,
probably a mnemic trace of the experience of a relationship (her first two and
a half years of life) forcefully resuscitated in the analytic relationship, and yet
sought outside of and apparently against it, before being able to be lived
inside of it. In agreement with Bibring, we might recognize in this tendency
to repetition a tendency of the ego toward restitution that seeks to restore the
pre-traumatic situation, together with a more properly reproductive tendency
to repeat the traumatic situation.
Only much later, Silvia compared the violent breaks produced in the
analytic relationship to a past strewn with deaths, like all of her other
relationships, which she felt incapable of keeping alive for very long. Vice
versa, this highlighted the analytic relationship as a fragile continuity of
experience which had held up in the challenge coming from her destructive
omnipotence. We may presume that for Silvia, the repeated experience of
annihilating and regaining united the double function of testing a limit to her
destructiveness and discovering the external nature of the object, which can
in this way also convey a reassuring dimension of the time that resides in the
capacity to mitigate a nameless terror and annihilation anxiety. The acting out
of the interruption can thus contain not only patient’s nuclear problem but
also the hope for a different outcome.
In an attempt to the unravel the cryptic connection suggested at the
beginning between nightmare and dream as a means to understand the
difference between interruption and termination, we may start by observing
that a nightmare is by definition finding oneself submerged in a highly
distressing situation that can only be interrupted with a reawakening ending
the nightmare. And yet viewed from another point of view, a nightmare is
already an attempt, however awkward, to master an annihilation anxiety
through the mechanism of repetition. The interruption in the context of the
cases described can be likened to reawakening from a dream to the extent
that we may suppose that the transference dynamic reproposes - not in
absentia or in effigy, but in praesentia - an original traumatic situation from
which the patient seeks an escape without actually finding it. We find it
important that the first patient’s nightmare stages the agonizing and desperate
passage between two threatening situations, one more terrifying than the
other. The interruption therefore takes on the triple meaning of escaping from
a nightmare, ending an impossible choice between two alternatives, and
translating itself into an avoidance strategy aimed at preventing that a
different path is followed. Here, temporality appears stopped and blocked.
2.2 . Temporality at Work in Intermittent Analyses
In Silvia’s case, the alternation between interruption and resumption

can be described as a modulation of the analysis that takes on its definitive
form as an intermittent analysis. Ekstein must be credited for the important
revival of the concept of intermittent analyses coined by M. Mahler to
explain a peculiar feature in the analysis of adolescents. It is necessary to
understand the recurrence of an outcome such as interruption for adolescents
as the rule rather than an exception. Braunschweig (1975) has proposed a
model of analysis in two times, following the hypothesis of “an analogy
between the interval separating the two periods of analysis and the period of
infantile latency”. Two aspects should be noted in this comparison: a insistent
reference to the second time as postpubescent, and Nachträglichkeit as the
keystone of the process unifying the two periods. If we seek to explore the
analogy further, we might question these developments and the silent

equilibria inherent in the interval periods, which - like latency - are
catastrophically upset by the emergence of a second time.
Our understanding of intermittent analysis is characterized by both a
greater range (thus it is applicable not only to adolescent patients) and a
keener focus on the dynamics of temporality. In spite of the rather precise
characterization outlined for this category of analysis, we may distinguish
quite different forms of it, capable of attributing diametrically opposed
meanings to the concept of intermittence (as, for example, toward termination
or interminability) and also indebted to complex methodological problems
for their intelligibility. The latter, for example, is the case of interrupted
analyses with an analyst and resumed with others, sometimes included under
the ambiguous heading of “re-analyses.”
We therefore thought it appropriate to begin with the simplest clinical
phenomenology visible in analyses in phases conducted by a sole analyst. We
must not neglect the methodological requirement of persistence and
constancy of the same observer and co-participant to the relationship during
the various periods, which allows us to focus more easily on the path or
passage between one periods and another.
The lived experience of counter-transference typical of some of these
interruptions may form an incisive trace for approaching the psychic reality
of what appears as a sudden and unquestionable pause in the analytic process.
Indeed, it seems to come about ex abrupto and often surprises the analyst for
its occurrence in the thick of a ongoing, rapid work (of a work in progress,
we might say) rather than in a phase of calm and impasse. The conceptual
work that accompanied the elaboration of a concept like “Negative
Therapeutic Reaction” must not be extraneous to such clinical events, though
this work nonetheless turns out to bear little significance for the attempt to
understand the situation described here.
Novick’s terminological clarification distinguishes “unilateral”
interrupted analyses from “forced” ones, according to whether the initiative is
to be attributed to the patient or the analyst. However weakly, this distinction
grasps something of the counter-transference tumult induced by the patient’s
unilateral initiative, which is often imperious and irrevocable. There is no
interpretative effort that is valid, however often it is possible to continue to
rely on oneiric production, as we saw in the preceding cases cited. In these
situations, the work of counter-transference lies between a Scylla and a
Charybdis, forced to gauge itself on the one hand with a vigorous signaling of
conflict, and on the other – a task which is to some extent more important –
with the equally marked signaling of an unscathed availability for a possible
resumption, despite everything. What normally happens is that it is only the
subsequent resumption which allows for perceiving and making sense of the
interruption, inserting the analysis in a dynamic of processuality,
paradoxically due precisely to the interruption that has taken place. In fact, in
a retrospective examination the interruption reveals a double meaning, in that

it took place under the double sign of an automatic anxiety and a signal
anxiety. This seems to replicate a traumatic separation (as in our example, the
loss of a parent in the early years of life), functioning in this way as a
primitive and active mode of mastery and at the same time expressing a
certain degree of signal anxiety aimed at heading off the repetition of an
identical loss and separation.
In the light of the subsequent resumption, then, we may assign to
interruption an intermediate meaning between a first time of trauma -
understood in Baranger’s (1987) sense of “pure trauma” or as a break in a
protective shield lacking the possibility of mentalization - and a second time
in which what happened attempts to become, through repetition, a
representable experience. In this way, we draw from the essential part of
Freud’s model of trauma, detaching it from the dual-phased quality of sexual
development, but maintaining the crucial temporal dynamic inherent in the
Nachträglichkeit: a dynamic that establishes a particular dialectic between
two times, a first one and a second one in a relationship of reciprocal and
cogent connection. In this way, Freud’s intuition regarding terminability
takes on concreteness and meaningfulness. This intuition assigned a
particular role to traumatic clinical histories, to which we have proposed the
important addition, “provided that they are reproduced in the context of the
analytic relationship”, thereby giving rise to a double history - the infantile
history and the analytic history - undoubtedly imbricated and nonetheless
featuring decisive areas of divergence.
The importance of the economic aspects of traumatic situations can
account for the different role of signal anxiety in blocking, and thus
functioning as a promoter of inhibitions, rather than stimulating by pressing
for possibilities of working-through. We may then suppose that if the
interruption as a first time in the analytic history has come about as an effect
of an automatic anxiety which repeats an unrepresentable trauma, due to the
very fact that this outcome has been produced in an analysis, it can take on an
intermediate status of a signal anxiety aimed at avoiding the repetition of the
catastrophe. It should thus be understood within the cogent psychic economy
that informs its genesis, but at the same time driven out with respect to the
temporal equation governing it. As Winnicott (1974) puts it, the breakdown
has already taken place, and the threat of something which regards the past
but is not a psychic occurrence gets placed in the future because there was
not a subject who could make experience out of it. Returning to the initially
proposed comparison between nightmare and dream, we may say that it is
precisely the repeated acting out of interruption which allows for a passage
from nightmare to dream. Here we can employ Grinberg’s concept of acting
out as a undreamed dream (Grinberg 1987), not in order to ratify a clear and
ubiquitous antagonism between the tendency to act and the work of
symbolization, but rather to show the duplicity inherent in some acting out,
such as the urgent need to interrupt the analysis. As we have shown, this
acting out sometimes repeats the inherited scenario of the trauma
substantially unchanged, reproducing its arrested, immobilized time in
impracticable alternatives. At other times, instead, we can perceive in its
apparent identity (as in certain repeated miscarriages which constitute a slow
and imperceptible march toward one’s own generative potential) the effort to
dismiss the trauma, substituting forgetfulness (or a tamed memory) for
reminiscence, which can only prelude a different scenario.
2.3 Interruption: A Time of Urgency
We would like to devote our attention here to exploring interrupted

analyses from another point of view, one that is also centered on temporality
and to a certain extent on an irrepressible drive to act out. Nonetheless, we
feel that this does not apply tout court to the clinical situations described
above, which would risk homogenizing them. The fundamental key to
accessing the temporal particularity underlying the situations we intend to
describe is the developmental reference of adolescence as a turning point and
emancipating process that engages separation dynamics in a specific way.
Once again, we are indebted to Novick (1988) for his remarkable
theoretical-clinical perspicacity in having pointed out the common
denominator of an adolescent pattern in interrupted analyses, underlining
their premature termination. This pattern is characterized by the regression of
an object transference to an externalizing one that compellingly induces an
abandonment of the analyst, not as a support for identification relations with
the parental figures, but rather, as the receptacle of an infantile and dependent
part of the self from which the subject wants to drastically separate. A
particular affective coloring of the separation from the analyst is typical of
these situations, one imbued with excitement and triumph and especially the
urgency for the subject to liberate himself from the other, perceived as the
person who opposes his vital impulses and represents an unbearable reference
to his dependence.
As we have noted elsewhere (Ferraro and Garella 2000), this intuition
by Novick – certainly ensuing from his practice working with adolescents –
took shape as he saw the repetition of an adolescent acting out in the abrupt
interruptions of adult patients, for example, in running away from home, the
sudden breakup of an affective relationship or a suicide attempt. From this
efficacious clinical intuition, we have instead drawn a stimulus and an
incitement to elaborate a more general hypothesis that identifies such a
movement in every analysis, even if the moment in which it appears and its
destiny obviously substantially diversify the function and psychic
significance it ends up assuming. We cite from our article:
It seemed legitimate to wonder if what Novick described as

typical of premature terminations, and in particular of interrupted
analyses, might not equally be considered as a movement within
every analysis, inevitably exposed to the impulse of separating
oneself actively and with a certain violence. This is an impulse
which can be traced to the crucial point of the emergence and
integration of aggressiveness aimed at defining the adult subject.
In every case the impulse to interrupt, which can then take various
paths, signals a critical point of emergence of the complex
interconnection of needs posed by the treatment process, to which
the patient attempts to give an independent solution. “Self [Auto-]”
is the key word in this context, designating a semantic area
which refers simultaneously to self-analysis, self-healing, the
autarchic, autonomy, author, etc In any case, it is a movement in
which what counts is the active production by the subject alone.
The associative reference of termination to adolescence as a
revivification of traumatic developmental residues loses its
character of factual nexus to rise to being a decisive turning point
in the rearrangement of the drives and in the dialectic between
inner and outer worlds”
(Ferraro and Garella 2000: 40).
Although we have drawn from Novick’s discussion in several instances,

we intend here to dwell on two aspects of his hypothesis in particular which
in some ways intersect our own initial hypothesis that - as we recalled in the
opening of the discussion - identified the reactualization of traumatic nuclei
as typical of the termination process. Novick’s clinical experience seems to
suggest to him a form of privileged repetition connected to the model set in
adolescence. Here, by following this precious path, our inquiry can lead in at
least two directions: an attention to the adult development preluded by
adolescence, and an attention to the prior orders needing a configuration
which can no longer be postponed. To deal prevalently with young adults, as
in our case, consequently entails that adolescent scenarios are reconstructed
in the course of the analytic processes or else are reanimated in the dynamics
of the interruption-terminations, with an additional complication due to the
consideration that in no other phase so much as in this one the distinction
between acting out and action is blurry and implies in response a suspension
of judgment and a long-range view.
A patient who had suspended analysis to follow her partner and attempt
an adult project of living together was nonetheless aware of having only
completed a stretch of road. Indeed, every time she came to town she made
sure that the analyst received news of her, until, with the failure of the project
of living together, she asked to resume the analysis. The analyst was struck
by what the patient had to say with regard to the emotional resonance of the
city’s “open-door monuments” project, which during her time out of town
had acted as a powerful call to reconnect the thread of her analytic work. The
name of a service for adolescents5 came associatively to the analyst’s mind:
this is a service which aims to suggest and encourage a coming and going
based to a freedom of request and self-referral, and it is supported by the
willingness to embrace these in an effort for constancy and continuity of
investment which are kept alive despite the apparent discontinuity.
Retroactively, it appeared meaningful that the dream which had sanctioned
the suspension of the analysis after five and a half years had staged a leave-
taking which led the patient back to age eighteen and her high school
graduation examination, a period in which she had developed an eating
disorder. We might suppose that in the dynamic of transference the patient
had attempted to operate the separation from her mother which at the time
she had not been able to carry out, rendered impracticable by a painful
oscillation between the impulse to disappear and the expectation of inducing
a catastrophic depression in her widowed mother. Her life had protracted into
a sort of perpetual adolescence whose end had been postponed; an indicative
sign of this was an amenorrhea that disappeared along with the actuation of
the project for independence and reappeared with the failure of this project.
The resumption of the analysis some years later, which witnessed a
regularization of her menstrual cycle, allowed her to focus on the central
theme hinging on her difficulty in working through the primal scene. The
specific difficulty centered on the impossibility of representing the parental
couple without being forced to sacrifice one of the couple’s two members, a
powerful phantasmatic nucleus that was articulated in a untimely and tragic
death event.
But from where does adolescence get this primacy in appearing as a
point for the emergence and clustering of traumatic nuclei? From being, as
we well know, a moment of destructuring and crisis in an identity that is
undergoing the catastrophe of bodily change, a potential activator of a
breakdown (M. Laufer and E. Laufer 1984), and that period of a working-
through of residual trauma within a definitive life project (Bloss 1962). As
Bergeret (1994) effectively points out, this is also the period which sees a
reemergence of that primary violence which is the expression of self-
preservation instincts whose diachronic integration will allow for
combinations of the drives that serve for development. Bergeret’s perspective
is quite compatible with that of Winnicott (1968), who recalls how in
adolescence “somewhere in the background there is a problem of life and
death” and who spoke of “death and homicide in the adolescent process”, a
view which places greater emphasis on the aggressive aspects, and not only
sexual ones, of the increase in the drives. We should recall here how in the
first formulation of Nachträglickeit in Project for a Scientific Psychology,
Freud locates the second time of trauma in puberty, to which he implicitly
assigns the character of a turning point and highlighter of latent traumatic
aspects. It is no coincidence that what would become the key concept of

Nachträglickeit emerged in reference to a first time - we might say
prematurely sexual, or in Laplanche’s terms, the sexual-presexual - which
requires the second time represented by pubertal development to unfold its
implicit traumatic character, undergoing various destinies due to the increase
in the drives. Of this original conception, it is important to maintain the
double sense of the intensification - if not the origin - of psychic trauma and
transformative reorganization inherent in the second time.
Interruption as a time of urgency is also suited to another recurrent

dynamic to which we have already drawn attention above. We can see this,
though with less striking traits, in analyses frequent in women patients who
have an impulse to end their treatment upon pregnancy. As we have written:
We may advance the hypothesis that this is actually the

same dynamic as outlined above, which this time has the body as
its elective scenario. The impulse which consistently introduces
the “temptation to end” analysis is almost never lacking in women
who are about to become mothers. But what sense should we
attribute to this temporal short-circuit disguised as a triumphal
cure? In some cases, this goal coincides with the conscious
motivations which led them into analysis (for example, in
situations of psychogenic sterility), or else it is symptomatic of a
significant change in the relation woman’s relation to her body, as
when for example, in anorexic patients an established pregnancy
or one led to term is already per se a remarkable result with
respect to their pathology. Yet most of the time this merging of
life goals with analytic ones rather than a movement in the
opposite direction (Ticho 1978) is, from the analyst’s point of
view, an acting out that shares with adolescent ones a fantasy of
magic healing marked by experiences of autarchic omnipotence.
In these cases, it is the transference relationship that often reveals
a gap and a disjunction between the “bodily cure” and the trauma
of transference which reproposes an unaltered scenario of rivalry
imbued with persecution, with the analyst-mother whose creature
is to be compellingly removed.
(Ferraro and Garella 2000: 42-43).
Paradigmatic in this sense is, in the case of an anorexic patient, the

dream that preceded the interruption of analysis once, after a miscarriage, the
gestation seemed to head toward its desired outcome.
Sonia was under a tent full of oxygen with a newborn girl in

critical condition. An operation to save her life was urgent, but it
was not clear whether the danger came from within or without
and if salvation consisted in remaining inside the tent or leaving
it.
This dream long occupied the unconscious and preconscious thoughts

of the analyst, who after some counter-transference work conjectured that the
oxygen tent represented the analytic relationship which, from being the
appointed place for gestation and life, was perceived (or perhaps even made
into) as a “gas chamber” from which to quickly flee to safety. Once again, we
see here the reappearance of a salient aspect of the dynamic of interruption,
identified in the dilemmatic and confusing nature which assumes the
representation of the terms of the conflict (it seems impossible to discern
what can help from what can harm).
As we have already noted, given that we have felt that there has never
been sufficient attention in the psychoanalytic literature to the recurrence of
such an event as an outcome of termination, we have learned to recognize at
least two possible versions. In some cases, it is used in more or less as a
pretext for interrupting the analysis, whereas in other situations coinciding
with advanced analyses, it represents a critical point of acceleration which
can be configured, not so much as an actual interruption as a anticipation and
a contraction of the termination process.
The first type is exemplified by the case of a patient who interrupted
when she learned she was pregnant; this happened after three years of
analysis characterized by an enormous number of absences and by the lived
experience (in the analyst) of stagnancy and extreme interminability. The
patient left the impression that the pregnancy was an acting out destined to
create the interruption of the analysis, and that the interruption in turn was an
acting out aimed at defending herself from the internal analytical meanings of
the pregnancy, among these being the recognition of the difference between
the before and after of the beginning of analysis, as a process and as single
sessions, and the admission of the existence of an unconscious planning that
strongly conflicted with acute separation anxieties.
The other type of case is in some ways more insidious, to the extent that
it not infrequently slides into the configuration of a shared termination which
sees the analyst in a position of colluding acceptance. We have learned to
recognize the problematic aspect of this dynamic retroactively, for example,
in the course of second analyses where a contrast emerges between the
mental experience of magic and autarchic omnipotence of gestation and re-
explosion of conflicts activated by the comparison with the newborn child.
Our hypothesis is that premature termination of analysis interrupts not only
the analytic process, but also, especially at certain levels, the “work of
maternity” which marks the temporal gap between the pregnancy as a
biological event and the birth as a mother as a complex psychic experience.
From this point of view, we might say that as in all moments of
“developmental crisis”, the body’s time precedes that of the mind, which is
always late, but which - precisely by virtue of this temporal disjunction - is
urged to carry out a difficult work of mastery.
2.4 Interruption as a Figure of Interminability
Here we would like to examine the interruption of analysis as another

face of interminability. This is in a double sense, as a forced termination
which attempts to move a blocked and interminable analysis, and as a
recursive vicissitude in a process dominated by timelessness. What these two
diverse configurations have in common is an evasion of the work of ending,
an unconscious avoidance strategy which from one case to the next can strike
the patient as well as the analyst.
We turn first of all to a clinical example which is widely known and
treated in the psychoanalytic literature; it is clear that we utilize it as a
pretext-screen for demonstrating the complexity of questions inherent in the
problem of the termination of analysis. The case of the Wolf Man is, from
this point of view, a veritable goldmine for cues, some of which are “classic”,
so to speak, such as the lively debate over the “heroic measure” of setting a
definite end date in order to force a floundering analysis. Other cues have
neither been received nor commented, as we sought to do in another recent
work (Ferraro and Garella 2000). On the contrary, we insist here on
maintaining our expression of “intermittent analysis” to demonstrate how,
unlike preceding ones, it is a prototype of an interminable analysis which
unfolds over at least forty years, to the point of becoming in some ways a
real, fateful project for existence.
We propose to investigate this complex analytic event once again,
attempting to reread it in the light of the particular perspective of the work of
temporality, which can be made visible through Nachträglickeit and through
the emergence or absence of the liminal dimension. As we have already
stated, we repropose utilizing some details inside in the various terminations
of this analysis to conduct a passage to more common and recurrent analytic
situations. In this view, we argue the centrality of the question of the
relationship between the first analysis – the “master” analysis with Freud, so
to speak – and the subsequent ones. As is in fact well known, Sergius
Pankejeff did a first period of analysis with Freud from February 1910 to July
1914, and then resumed in a second period from November 1919 to February
1920. We find a similar division in two periods in the first supplement with
Brunswick from October 1916 to February 1927, followed by a second
period which extended irregularly over a period of several years.
Subsequently, Gardiner treated S.P., but here we limit our focus to the
dynamic of the first two analyses, which appear closely connected by the
very modalities of their beginnings. We must necessarily start with the

Freudian citations relative to the first and second termination:
I parted from him, regarding him as cured, a few weeks

before the unexpected outbreak of the Great War; and I did not
see him again until the shifting chances of the war had given the
Central European Powers access to South Russia. He then came to
Vienna and reported that immediately after the end of the
treatment he had been seized with a longing to tear himself free
from my influence. After a few months’ work, a piece of the
transference which had not hitherto been overcome was
successfully dealt with. Since then the patient has felt normal and
has behaved unexceptionably, in spite of the war having robbed
him of his home, his possessions, and all his family relationships.
It may be that his very misery, by gratifying his sense of guilt,
contributed to the consolidation of his recovery.”
(Freud 1914b, S.E. 17: 121-122; Footnote added 1923).
As we have already said elsewhere (Ferraro and Garella 2000), here

Freud provides his unitary version of the two periods of analysis carried out
with him, attributing the return of the symptoms to transference residues to
be eliminated. He appears rather optimistic in declaring the game over, when
it was not at all so, and he was forced to return upon it in A.T.I:
Fifteen years have passed since then without disproving the

truth of this verdict; but certain reservations have become
necessary. The patient has stayed on in Vienna and has kept a
place in society, if a humble one. But several times during this
period his good state of health has been interrupted by attacks of
illness which could only be construed as offshoots of his perennial
neurosis. Thanks to the skill of one of my pupils, Dr. Ruth Mack
Brunswick, a short course of treatment has on each occasion
brought these conditions to an end. I hope that Dr. Mack
Brunswick herself will shortly report on the circumstances. Some
of these attacks were still concerned with residual portions of the
transference; and, where this was so, short-lived though they
were, they showed a distinctly paranoid character. In other
attacks, however, the pathogenic material consisted of pieces of
the patient’s childhood history, which had not come to light while
I was analysing him and which now came away - the comparison
is unavoidable - like sutures after an operation, or small fragments
of necrotic bone. I have found the history of this patient’s
recovery scarcely less interesting than that of his illness.
(Freud 1937a, S.E. 23: 218)
Freud’s last consideration is quite enigmatic, and as such it is open to

multiple interpretations. In it we see an implicit recognition with which we
are in profound agreement: there are some analysis which take on special
meanings for us, and which continue to represent milestones in our history,
analyses to which we have devoted much of our energy and investment and
which, nonetheless, may not correspond to a real reciprocity. We do not
always recognize this, and yet it is often the “question of the end” which
makes a tragic disjunction clear between the analyst’s point of view and that
of the patient. In the passage in question, despite its modest tone we note a
difference between the indisputable interest of the history of the illness and
that relative to the history of the treatment, and it is probably the accent on
the recurrent word “history” which reveals an investigative path. How did
this history of treatment that Freud suggests becoming a particular object of
interest proceed and unravel? The two Freudian citations, however much
characterized by different tones, nonetheless maintain the centrality of the
original transference as a common element, of which the supplement
requested of Freud and the additional periods are residual phenomena. Even
so, the trace which basically marks the entire case seems to get lost as a
means of reading the subsequent events.
The first encounter with Brunswick took place twelve years after the
end of the analysis with Freud, in quite singular circumstances. It was due to
the compelling pressure of an over-determined anxiety traceable to an
apprehension over Freud’s illness and the idée fixe of a nose injury. Among
the latter’s innumerable meanings, there was one that was clearly
transferential, of revealing S.P.’s secret that his financial situation was no
longer so desperate as to justify the collection among analysts zealously
promoted by Freud.
As it emerges from Brunswick’s (1928) description, the new analysis
seems to get bogged down in the patient’s praise for the merits of the second
analyst and accusations against the unrestrained doctor who had handled his
nose so roughly. If we listen to the latent text hidden behind this manifest
one, this says a great deal about how much the second analysis is still
encumbered by the first, much more than either Freud or Brunswick is
willing to admit.
In the meantime, in the second analysis we see the reappearance of a
script which is not new to us: the unpredictability of a prospect for ending
and the recourse (which we have called “therapists’ repetition-compulsion”)
to expedients capable of getting the analysis moving.6 But the scenario of
repetition does not end here. We have been struck by another singular
recurrence centered on the famous dream of wolves. As is almost too well
known, it was precisely with regard to the Wolf Man that Freud was able to
develop the most elaborate and complex version of his theory of trauma in
two times. This was applied to the exposure of the child S.P. to a hypothetical
primal scene, an event taking place at an age between six months and a year
and an half, and reactivated (“not remembered” as Freud insists on
specifying) traumatically at age four, as inferred from the dream which to a
certain degree condenses its entire pathology. It is of extreme interest that we
reexamine what Freud said in this regard in commenting the double potential
of the dream and the patient’s preferred solution. Among the effects produced
by the oneiric reactivation of the primal scene, there is the discovery of the
vagina and the difference between male and female which could have led the
patient to genital organization. The learning, instead, of an unbearable truth
regarding the female organ gets rejected, pushing the child back along the
slippery line of passivity and anal organization.
If in staging the unrepresentable the dream constitutes, on the one hand,
a remarkable transformative passage, it nonetheless receives a pause that
ratifies the S.P.’s retreat in the face of a crucial leap of knowledge. This leap
was capable of influencing and orienting his sexual disposition, which as
Brunswick had correctly understood, could never settle on a homosexual or a
heterosexual orientation. As Green notes (1990), she had also keenly
understood this to be the pattern of the intellectual inhibition which interfered
with the patient’s desire to dedicate himself to literature. Through the famous
dream, the analytic work thus appears to be receive and reconstruct a crucial
junction in which a potential for growth and development was bogged down
and instead flowed back on itself in a condition of suspended animation.
We find this same indecisiveness in the last brief period of analysis
with Brunswick. As with Freud, this is followed by the introduction of what
we may define a “parameter,” an illusory movement of the analytic process, a
(misleading?) signal of a turning point which will not be brought to
completion and underlying an opposing and regressive movement. The two
dreams of the turning point have been labeled the dream “of the broken holy
pictures” - interpreted as the destruction of the defensive role of religious
fantasies - and the “landscape” dream, a dream which cannot but recall the
master dream par excellence – that of age four.
The patient stands looking out of his window at a meadow,

beyond which is a wood. The sun shines through the trees,
dappling the grass; the stones in the meadow are of a curious
mauve shade. The patient regards particularly the branches of a
certain tree, admiring the way in which they are intertwined. He
cannot understand why he has not yet painted this landscape
(Brunswick 1928 [1971]: 29).
By changing the primal scene from distressing to aesthetic, the

comparison with the pathology’s key dream seems to prefigure a
transformative passage which would not be followed, but instead erased by
the dream of the skyscraper which Brunswick describes as follows:
The next day he brought in a dream in which he is lying at

my feet: a return to his passivity. He is in a sky-scraper with me,
whose only means of exit is a window…from which a ladder
extends dangerously to the ground. To get out he must go through
the window. That is to say, he cannot remain inside, looking out,
as in the other dreams, but must overcome his fear and go out. He
awakens in great anxiety, looking desperately for another way of
escape
(ibid: 292).
.
This dream has the detail of the window in common with the other two;
like the first, it converts to a dream of anxiety. To the extent that the dream
work in an analysis can offer the precious opportunity to follow the
vicissitudes of some underlying themes, we can state that S.P.’s effort to
work through a traumatic nucleus of the primal scene once again fails,
leading it back to that situation of indecision (neither male nor female) which
constitutes a particular feature of his pathology. Here, too, as in the case of
the first patient described above, Amedeo, the manifest content of the dream
stages a narrow and dangerous escape route, a transformative passage
perceived to be impracticable. At the same time, it is not clear to what extent
the development of anxiety is to be connected to the perception of a situation
with no way out.
With regard to these turning-point dreams, we can find ourselves
dealing with dreams that have an opposite function to those described by
Quinodoz (1999), who assigns to some apparently regressive dreams a
progressive meaning due to their emergence in particular moments of the
transference that reveal the passage from projective to introjective
identification. These are dreams that signal the subject’s capacity for
representing his own order of resistance in the moment in which it is about to
abandon him. In this type of dream, the anxiety developed - though not to the
degree that it transforms the dream into a nightmare - signals the perception
that the ego feels of the danger of a threat to the integration and coherence of
his self. On the contrary, in the case of the Wolf Wan, we are faced with a
failed attempt at transformation.
In reexamining the dynamic of Nachträglichkeit in this canonic case,
we hypothesize that the second time, coinciding with the crucial dream of
wolves, though certainly constituting a very considerable effort of
representing the unrepresentable, does not acquire the transitive properties for
making it the basis of subsequent retranscriptions and resignifications. What
is stabilized is a block which probably immobilizes and consolidates the
original traumatic configurations. After some time this analysis ends with a
dream whose object is a mistaken identity, a dream which is to say the least
alarming as a sign of termination:
In the final dream of this analysis the patient is walking in

the street with the second dermatologist, who with great interest is
discoursing about venereal disease. The patient mentions the
name of the doctor who treated his gonorrhea with too severe a
medication. On hearing his name, the dermatologist says no, no,
not he – another
(ibid: 295-296).
It is difficult not to think that S.P. is attempting to communicate

something significant with regard to his two therapists, Freud and Brunswick,
and the interconnection between the two analyses, in which it is as if the
second would never be able to free itself of the cumbersome presence of the
first. But in both therapists it is as if at some level a disturbing deafness
reappeared which has affinities in the discourse of mistaken identity: Not
him, but another person…. Twice they had reached an agreement to place an
end to the analysis, which nonetheless could have been carried out under the
sign of mutual misrecognition.
2.5 Impasse: The Negative of Interruption?
Our reflection on one of the most famous cases in the psychoanalytic

literature, which even today has not been exhausted, has been motivated by
two basic needs: that of insisting, as Freud had done, on the methodological
priority to be assigned to analyses marked by failure – and in the case in
question, it is indisputable that the analysis managed to survive its atypicality
– and to give emphasis to the close relationship between interruption and
interminability, the former viewed as a “negative” of the latter, so as to form
a sort of disturbingly ambiguous double. We have emphasized several times
how the interruption of analysis, whether desired or acted out, can be based
on a fantasy of interminability and therefore translate itself in reality, in its
manifest as well as latent outcome, in a denial of the work of termination.
On the other hand, the effectively instructive aspect that we can
extrapolate from the lengthy clinical case of the Wolf Man is how the placing
of a limit (interruption or termination?) can be the most seductive way on the
analyst’s part to create movement in a analysis at an impasse - what Novick
called an overdue analysis, which we translate as “expired” [scaduta] in the
double sense of going beyond its time and in the degradation of its function
of visibility of a process. Here, we are obviously referring to a particular
configuration of impasse, that is, not to impasse as a stabilization of a
rampart or as a constant modulation of the analytic process, but rather to
impasse as the block and paralysis which can express resistance to facing
termination. Among the various perspectives from which Ferro (1993) looks
at impasse in analysis, he underlines two particular forms that seem specific
and related to our discussion: impasse as avoidance of mourning and impasse

as a prelude to change. These two forms can in some ways be considered
opposites. Indeed, in the former Ferro refers to a paralysis of the process due
to the analyst’s incapacity to recognize thrusts toward separation present in
the field, having lacked - in Laplanche’s terms - the opening of a temporal
window, just as on the other hand it can be the patient who comes to a
standstill when faced with the task of termination. The avoided mourning is,
on the analyst’s part, that of his own therapeutic ambitions in pursuing the
“myth of perfectibility” (Gaskill 1980) and of a “complete rather than
feasible” analysis (Ferro 1993).
When Ferro speaks instead of impasse as the prelude to a change, he
refers to the need for the analyst to accept and respect the apparent slowing
down of the process in which there might be some changes incubating,
among which the paradigmatic change of termination. In this context, as we
understand from the author’s clinical description, the impasse is the patient’s
response to the analyst’s acceleration, which foresees and prospects a
terminability, in order to not face catastrophic anxieties and thus skip some
significant phases which are a precondition to a true termination.
It is likely that in every analysis, as the end draws near a tendency to
impasse is activated that, to the extent that it conveys a hidden project of
interminability, can entice the analyst with an irresolvable dependence. The
work of counter-transference in these situations carries out a crucial role,
testing the difficult capacity of abstention from considering the other a
personal possession and the effort to decipher how ready he might be to
terminate the analysis. As we have already argued elsewhere, there is a
striking difference between interrupted and im-passed analyses: the former
feature clearer signs of evidence, whereas a blocked dynamic can instead
evasively and insidiously slide into a project of interminability. This is
compounded by a difficulty in deciphering when - and in a certain sense why
- the block has been established, and with regard to the termination process,
if it is for example at its beginning or its end, as precipitated by the
determination of the end date. In this context, though, what we are most
concerned to point out is the paradoxical character of some blocked analyses,
whose temporal logic can be read in light of Freud dual concept of perversion
as the inverse of neurosis and vice versa. This dynamic is more easily
recognizable in those analyses in which there is an agreement as to the
necessity of terminating, and yet it is as if we witnessed a dissociation
between having admitted the content to consciousness and then negating it in
fact, relegating it to a sort of theoretical virtuality of an indefinitely
suspended thing to come. We propose an analogy with the antimonial pair
neurosis-perversion in the sense that we believe that impassed analyses with
a vector of interminability imply the impossibility of carrying out the
repression of a desire for a perfect analysis; they are translated into a sort of
perversion of transference, eroticizing some moments of the process, if not
obviously the preliminaries, in place of its highest, culminating point,

represented here by termination. The phantasm of interrupted analysis hovers
over it: the implicit and yet unyielding conviction that since the ongoing
analysis is rather far-removed from expectations, the termination can instead
be a stopping, without having really utilized its full potential. In this way, the
space of the phantasm of interruption lies in a inverse position to the
recognition of the inevitable incompleteness inherent in every analysis, and
on the contrary, as the former gradually gets reduced through working-
through, we can perceive its re-absorption in the latter.
Another typical form of interminable analyses that relates them to the
case of the Wolf Man is that of being immobilized in a irresolvable dilemma
which is maintained as such, in an indefinite suspension, for the fear of being
faced with an option-choice. It might happen in this way that the analysis
becomes an integral part of the block, because sometimes on the conscious
level the end of analysis gets deferred to getting out of the dilemma, and
because it is continuously insisted that the analysis itself is impotent to
develop a decision in one direction or the other.7 From our own experience,
the analyses of two young women are emblematic: they were bogged down in
a state of stalemate and impasse which for both had led for a certain time to
the impossibility of envisioning the termination of the analysis. In a
somewhat surprising manner some common features may be found in them:
both had experienced previous analyses in adolescence in their respective
hometowns, and in both, the dilemmatic nature of the conflict was centered
on which city to choose (where to live) and which partner (with whom to
live). In this context, the analyst was the receiver of a message which
discouraged him from pursuing a prospect for ending until the dilemma had
been resolved; the dilemma took on a typical form characterized by a
constant equilibrium between two scales of a balance and by an observing
disposition ready to rebalance possible disequilibria arising from new events
which almost always turn out, at second glance, not to be new. The
oscillation between two alternatives, neither of which fundamentally
convincing, seemed to evoke an energetic regime marked by weak
investments and by an impossibility of accessing a third. There was a
remarkable difficulty in identifying a mental place, even prior to a physical
and relational one, which identified an existential reference point [ubi
consistam] as a definite, finished form inseparable from the simultaneous
possibilities of opening. We cannot simply describe this mental state as one
of remaining in a pre-Oedipal dynamic, but rather as the persistence of a
logic based on drastic alternatives implying the elimination of the discarded
option (as for example, the total loss of one’s home world or the definitive
renunciation of one of the two parents), in jarring contrast to what we have
defined as the liminal dimension characterized by the tolerance of paradox
(and/and in place of either/or) and also, precisely because of this, by the
revealing of the virtually infinite potential itself. From another perspective
suggested by Faimberg (1994), we may describe this as the prevalence of a

time and a narcissistic space that antagonizes, as in the story of Laios – the
antecedent foreshadowing the Oedipal tragedy – the existence of the subject
short-circuiting it in the tragic filicide-parricide alternative. The features of a
loss of value which we have meant to imply in the expression “expired”
analyses is essentially relative to two angles: one regarding the predominance
of a narcissistic time obstructing the emergence of an Oedipal time, a time
marked by a limit uniting incompleteness with an area of the possible; the
other concerning the avoidance of the responsibility of proposing a date, a
step which in our opinion empowers the patient by making him feel the
author of his own destiny.
Finally, we believe it worth reflecting on the fact that that we find
ourselves proposing the figure of seduction to indicate the two opposite
scenarios of interrupted analyses with some form of the heroic measure or
rendered interminable by a strong attractive nucleus which makes the
dissolution impossible. This motif leads our discussion to the heart of the
theme treated in this last part: time. Indeed, the imposition of the violence of
a time on the other which is not his own is precisely part of the scenario of
seduction, in some cases catastrophically precocious and in others confusedly
late. Given that separation always implies “an immense dismay for the loss of
omnipotence” (Winnicott 1971), we have been led to rethink a quality of the
experience of the end of analysis which, however rare, merits investigation
because it illuminates by contrast the numerous experiences that, as we have
sought to demonstrate, are instead defined by a disjunction or gap between
the analyst’s time and the patient’s time. We believe that this quality is
identifiable in a lived experience of “coincidence”, an expression we borrow
from the two post-analytic messages sent by a young patient, the first a few
months after the conclusion of analysis, and the second, two- and-a-half years
later. Both repeated the expression “happy and surprising coincidence”, in the
first with reference to her amazement about a passage read at her wedding
felt to be profoundly congruent with the final moments of her analysis, which
she had left behind a short time earlier. The second message instead was
instead written on a postcard depicting Freud in an affectionate pose with his
chow chow. The patient wrote: “From Bergasse 19…another nice
coincidence…I adopted a chow chow… I didn’t know that Freud had one,
too.” In the two messages separated by a stretch of time, the insistence on
“coincidence” grew from a faint trace to gradually take on a consistency of
its own, and it led us to wonder if this insistence drew impetus precisely from
the fact that in this analysis there had been two interruptions, and that perhaps
she was alluding, on the contrary, to a separation which might have taken
place at the right moment, a coincidence in the unconscious fantasy between
feeling ready to leave and be helped to do so.
Curiously an identical communication, but this time coming from a person
whose analysis had not had any interruptions, reproposed the same motif of
the “coincidence”, forcing us to look at it from another perspective. In a

telephone call a couple of years after the termination, an event was
communicated to the analyst that was once again presented as the product of
a “strange coincidence” and experienced as (his exact words) as a “sort of
completion and seal of the end of analysis, now truly terminated.” As a
backdrop to the arduous and never-ending work of mastering time, we
believe that in this insistent recurrence of an experience of “coincidence” we
can perceive above all two aspects: the imaginative conjecture of “events”
which give a punctiform texture to the restarting of a capacity for research,
and the intuition - with more intersubjective qualities - of parallel trajectories
which can have rare, and yet precious, points of intersection. It seems to us in
fact to allude to the continuation of interior journeys that the analysis has put
in motion, configuring them - for both members of the couple - as the object
of discovery and infinite re-signification.
Notes
1
Just to name a few, cf. Balint (1952), Glover (1954), Firestein (1978), Gagliardi
Guidi (1992) and Usuelli Kluzer (1996).
2
See Chapter 1, Section 2.
3
The two most significant changes in the theory of technique in the last decades can
be considered the reduction of the role of interpretation as the sole therapeutic agent
and the attitude toward acting out.
4
Already described elsewhere (Ferraro 1992), this experience is recounted here with
special reference to the specific dynamic of the three interruptions.
5
The Walk-in Clinics for Adolescents is the name of the service for adolescents at
London’s Brent Consultation Centre.
6
The death of Professor X, curiously presented as “the aid of destiny” is announced
point blank to S.P., provoking the immediate reaction: “Oh my, I can no longer kill
him!” All this appears to create movement in the analysis, and starting with the newly
discovered desire to emasculate the father-analyst, to draw nearer to the persecutory
nucleus at the basis of the hypochondriacal anxieties of the patient who, in this time
too, responds with a rich production of dreams.
7
In Buxbaum’s paper at the 1949 symposium, an analogous situation is presented
with regard to block in proposing a date for termination.
Ending
A modern evolutionist turns to Darwin's work again and

again. This is not surprising, since the roots of all our evolutionary
thinking go back to Darwin. Our current controversies very often
have as their starting point some vagueness in Darwin's writings
or a question Darwin was unable to answer owing to the
insufficient biological knowledge available in his time. But one
returns to Darwin's original writings for more than historical
reasons. Darwin frequently understood things far more clearly
than both his supporters and his opponents, including those of the
present day.
An analysis of almost any scientific problem leads
automatically to a study of its history. The many unresolved
issues in evolutionary biology are no exception to this rule. To
understand the history of a scientific problem, however, one must
appreciate not only the state of factual knowledge but also the
Zeitgeist of the time. Any investigator's interpretation of his
observations or experiments depends mainly on this conceptual
framework. For many years a major objective of my historical
studies has been to discover the concepts- or sometimes, even
more broadly, the ideologies- on which the theorizing of certain
historical figures was based.
(Mayr 1991: VII).
If we substitute the words “Freud”, “psychoanalysis” and so on for

“Darwin”, “evolution” and “biology”, this preface to a recent book by the
leading evolutionist of our time appears quite appropriate as a conclusion to
our work. The “lengthy reasoning” – as Darwin defined his principle work,
The Origin of the Species – required an interminable series of reflections of
its author, but equally, lengthy hours of observation and experimentation;
judging from his biographies, these were hours imbued with powerful moods
and feelings. This volume, too, is a lengthy reasoning: it covers a long stretch
of time – the entire twentieth century – and extends throughout the space of
psychoanalytic theory. But at the same time, it has been a “lengthy lived
event” of writing and experience regarding the mode in which analyses
contend or clash with their end.
Darwin’s “wonderful idea” required the elaboration of a network of
conceptual and personal relations that was subtle and intricate, yet solid and
lasting. With much less ambitious objectives, we have sought to give form to
a network of relations offered, on the one hand, by study and reflection, and
on the one hand, by the hours spent with our patients. Our point of departure
has been Freud - with his counterpart Ferenczi - to whom it is necessary to
return each time we look for clarification or a stimulus. The termination of
analysis is a narrow and sometimes technical subject, but often, behind the
particulars, lie more general conceptions. For this reason, metapsychology
and even the ideologies of therapy and cure are inevitably the backdrop, and
without a knowledge and awareness of them, analytical action cannot
proceed.
Here we draw our work to a close. We do not know what its outcome
will be, and we are hopeful for the future as we are for our patients. But just
as the theory of evolution is a gesture of love for the variety of biological
nature, our attempt here hopes to be equally so for the variety of psychic
natures.
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Endings

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies

Editor Associate Editors

Editorial Advisory Board

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies (CPS) is an international scholarly

Fausta Ferraro and Alessandro Garella

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann

Part One A Century-Long History

One The Beginnings: Freud, Ferenczi and Analysis Terminable and

Two After Freud: The Theme of Termination in the Mid-1900s

Three Theoretical Developments and Modern Orientations

Part Two Process and Event in the Termination of Analysis

Four The Psychoanalytic Process 71

Five The Termination Process 87

Six The Termination of Analysis as a Psychoanalytic Event

Seven The Liminal

Eight Forms of Time

Nine A Map of Termination

What's all this have to do with termination in analysis? In their far-

In between living and dreaming

In between living and dreaming

The object of this book is thus marked by an apparent marginality, which it

The Beginnings: Freud, Ferenczi and Analysis Terminable and

The historical exposition we intend to offer is neither pedantically

position of those who privilege “lived experience”, the “present”

Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through (Freud 1914a), the authors

particular attitude of the analyst toward the patient), as the expression of an

possible to arrive at a more productive hypothesis of the relation between

2. A Long-Distance Dialogue with Ferenczi

A.T.I. is unanimously considered the mandatory point of departure for

reflection in which Freud looks back, reconsidering the procedure he

My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an

Let us begin with a first consideration which aims at substantiating the

the role of this dichotomy in the Freud-Ferenczi controversy (Haynal 1987):

exclusion from the transference concept of a certain range of relations

…I take Rank’s suggestion regarding the relation of patient

Such a conception of transference had led Ferenczi to discover the

the postulate relative to the transformation of culture in nature and, even

There is no doubt that an aetiology of the traumatic sort

decisive considerations regarding the organization of personality at the

In this field the interest of analysts seems to me to be quite

This methodological hallmark is present and appreciable from the start

well as evidence of an opposition to change in the course of analysis. At the

few lines. In examining certain paradoxical resistances to change, vividly

paradigm, in which the analyst plays the role of a neutral scientific

opposite ends of a path, we may gather the reproposal of an unchanging

The analyst is certainly able to do a great deal, but he cannot

This definition emphasizes the unpredictability of the analytic process

Is the analytical cure a 'natural' or an 'artificial' process? i.e.

We have quoted Balint at length because we find that the citation

After Freud: The Theme of Termination in the Mid-1900s

1. The first reactions: M. Schmideberg, O. Fenichel and E. Glover

If there were any immediate reactions to Freud’s essay, they were

example, reaching genitality or full object-relationship). Schmideberg

According to Fenichel, the length and termination of analysis -

Two distinct issues are involved here. The more general

Glover’s words point to a connection between three important aspects

2. The Resumption of the Debate in the Postwar Years

As some of the panels in the various psychoanalytic societies at the end

Analytic Society were respectively entitled On the Termination of

2.1 The English Panel

The symposium of the British Psycho-Analytic Society was held in