Analysis Terminable and Interminable

Almost from the very birth of psychoanalysis as a distinct method, Freud kept returning to the question of how long it should take. It’s clear that psychoanalytic therapy, understood as “freeing a person from their neurotic symptoms, inhibitions, and abnormalities of character,” takes a considerable amount of time. Every person’s character is multifaceted and unique, which means the approach has to be individual too. Holding to professional ethics, an analyst doesn’t hand down verdicts, doesn’t diagnose, doesn’t give advice or recommendations — and doesn’t set a fixed date for when therapy will end.

Of course, everyone would like their analysis to finish as soon as possible, with the therapeutic effect lasting a long time afterward. Unfortunately, since psychoanalysis calls for a deep exploration of the psyche, its inner conflicts, and its symptoms, it simply can’t be confined to short-term work.

In his paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud asks exactly this question — when can an analysis be considered over? “From a practical point of view, this question is not hard to answer. An analysis is ended when analyst and patient cease to meet for analytic sessions. This happens when two conditions have been more or less fulfilled: first, that the patient no longer suffers from their symptoms and has overcome their anxieties and inhibitions; and second, that the analyst judges that so much repressed material has been made conscious, so much that had been unintelligible explained, and so much internal resistance overcome, that no return of the pathological processes in question need be feared.”

What, then, is meant by a natural end to an analysis — and can an analysis actually be brought to one? Here the analyst has to ask themselves whether a still deeper effect on the analysand is achievable, and whether that would bring about any further change. In every case, the final answer depends on the analyst, the analysand, and what actually happened over the course of that particular analytic process.

It’s worth remembering that an analyst holds no unlimited power over the analysand. And “where external difficulties stand in the way of reaching this goal [the end of analysis], it is better to speak of an incomplete analysis rather than an unfinished one.” Even so, it’s important to examine and understand whether what’s really at play, in a given case, is an unconscious resistance to therapy itself.