Myths of Termination

Judy Leopold Kantrowitz is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and an Associate Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is on the Editorial Board of the Psychoanaltyic Quarterly and has a private practice in Brookline, MA.

"This landmark book makes an invaluable contribution to the field of psychoanalysis. Undertaking a pioneering survey of the termination experiences of a sizable number of former analytic patients, Judy Kantrowitz has done us a most important service by dispelling a number of myths and false ideas concerning termination and the way that analyses are supposed to end. By providing us with fresh insights into the diverse ways that good treatments can end, Kantrowitz has essentially rewritten our understanding of the termination phase of analysis and analytic therapy. This book is must reading for therapists of every persuasion". – Ted Jacobs, Training and Supervising Analyst, The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and The Institute forPsychoanalytic Education."Through scores of direct quotes from articulate ex-analysands, Judy Kantrowitz gives us a constantly fresh series of snapshots of the remembered subjective experience of 'termination' - its delicacy, its gainful, and, especially, its disruptive potential. Because 'there but for the grace of God' go each one of us as working analysts, there are worlds of eye-opening lessons to be found here - not only in the quotations but in the author's categories of analysis themselves. The book will be of value to all clinicians, and is likely to find particular value in small peer discussion groups. By reporting raw material in close-up detail, Kantrowitz gives us a work-in-progress in a best sense: the work and the progress regarding termination is left in the hands of each one of us, now better informed. I found it absorbing". – Fred Pine, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine."In her work Kantrowitz contributes to that current of psychoanalytical thought that privileges the careful study of what ‘we really do’ in our clinical practice, that is not always synonymous with what we believe or we say we do. However, as the author clarifies, "my point is not that anything goes". The conceptualization of experience and of its comprehension is what characterizes our psychoanalytical proposal to our patients. Because we believe that conceptualizations help them and us "to organize and contain intense emotional experiences" and to trace a pathway between the particular and the universal, we have privileged this type of practice. Reading this book helps us to get in touch with the vicissitudes of the emotional reality of experience without abandoning ourselves to the ineffable and the unutterable that sometimes insinuate themselves into our texts". - Jorge Canestri, M.D. Psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Association (A.I.Psi) and the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), former President of the Italian Psychoanalytical Association, Professor of Health Psychology until 2008 at Rome 3 University and Invited Professor at the Université Paris X, Nanterre 2009.

• Acknowledgements. Introduction. A Short History of Termination: The Ideal Versus the Real - it Ain’t Necessarily so. Developments in the Ending of Psychoanalysis: Insight, Loss, and Mourning. Non-Mutual endings.The Effect of Post-analytic Contact. As Time Goes By: Ways of Keeping Analysis Alive. Afterwards: What we Learn. Reflections and Reconsiderations. Appendix.