A Personal View of Terminations and Endings

There are many myths about how a psychoanalysis ends. In reality, there is no one way. In this paper, I describe what I learned from interviews with eighty-two analysands who volunteered to tell me about how they ended their analyses. Their experiences illustrate many different ways in which analyses end-some very satisfactory and others in disappointment. I also describe many different ways I have concluded psychoanalyses with my patients. I try to end each treatment to fit the needs of each patient and the nature of our work together. There are no formulas to how we end. I consider and explore the issues of being an older analyst: the risks and responsibilities of continuing to treat analytic-or any-patients. I discuss what we psychoanalysts gain from our work with patients-how it is sustaining and how we learn about ourselves as well as our patients. In doing psychoanalytic work with our patients, we stretch our own capacities and change. We, like our patients, though not to the same degree or intensity, mourn our endings.