Trauma and termination

The author suggests a particular reading of the thesis put forward by Freud in 'Analysis terminable and interminable' that an effective and more definitive conclusion may be expected in analyses of cases with traumatic aetiology. This reading shifts the emphasis from the patient's history to the possibility of its crystallising in focal nuclei emerging within the analytic relationship under the pressure of the termination. The revival of separation anxieties which cannot be worked through, and their crystallisation in precipitating traumatic events, may give rise to decisive psychic work allowing the analysis to be brought to a conclusion. Two case histories are presented to show how the end of the analysis assumes the form of a new trauma, which reactivates in the present, traumatic anxieties from the patient's own infantile history. In the first case a premature birth and in the second a miscarriage, originally experienced as isolated automatic events without time or history, are relived in the terminal phase as vicissitudes of the transference, so that new meaning can be assigned to them and they can be withdrawn from the somatic cycle of repetition. The powerful tendency to act out and the intense countertransference pressure on the analyst are discussed in the light of the specificities of this phase, which is crucial to the success of the analysis. This leads to a re-examination, in the concluding notes, of some theoretical questions inherent in the problem of the termination and, in particular, to a discussion of the ambiguous concept of a natural ending.