Late Middle Phase and Termination

Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2021-22, 3rd Trimester — Fridays, 3:30-5:00pm
Christopher J. Keats, MD

View Whole Syllabus

Introduction

[Note: This class will be held at 3:30-5:00pm for the first 6 weeks, then from 1:45-3:15pm for the last 4 weeks.]

Predicting what will happen in an analysis is very like predicting the weather:  it’s much easier to predict with confidence the next few days, or even the next week (though surprises do occur); the further out from the present that you project, the more difficult is it to predict and prepare for.

Our aim is to introduce you to a variety of theoretical and clinical issues around termination.  Our intention is less to prescribe a particular approach to termination than to facilitate your own thinking about it, as you approach termination (or not) with each individual analysand.

As we travel through the course material, we will be holding the tension between the ideas of how termination should be achieved according to different schools of analytic thought, and also the tension between how analyses are “supposed” to terminate and how termination often actually occurs.

Since you are completing (“terminating”) the didactic portion of your analytic training, we will be emphasizing the development of your own reflections and ideas about analysis and termination.  As a preface to your own continued learning in the field and your transition to teaching, we will be asking each of you to generate three questions for class discussion based on the topic and readings for a pre-assigned class date, which you will provide to your cohort during class on that day.  We will have sign-ups during the first meeting, so please have a look at your calendar and the syllabus overall in advance so you have dates in mind.

We will be holding your own termination of didactics in mind throughout the course.  We anticipate that the last two weeks of class meetings in particular will provide an opportunity to reflect on and discuss your current and future processes of completing didactics, control cases, training analyses and your experience as a cohort.

The skills associates learn in this course will enable them to co-create termination experiences that consolidate and protect the prior work of the analyses and deepen the analytic experience, producing more durable changes in their analysands.

Learning Objectives

At the completion of this course, associates will be able to:

1. Recognize analytic material that suggests a readiness for termination,
2. Identify a variety of criteria and procedures for termination from different schools of analytic thought,
3. Better anticipate potential resistances to and avoidances of termination, fostering their ability to analyze and weather the affects that are often stimulated and the conflicts which emerge during termination, and
4. Begin reflecting on and developing their own philosophy of, criteria for, and approach to termination.

March 25, 2022 — Considerations related to Pre-termination

[40 pages]

Please read the introduction to the course and learning objectives before the first class.  We encourage you to read the summaries of each week’s reading as we progress through the course.

Dewald, P. (1990) Conceptualizations of PSA Process. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 59:693-711.

This article provides a good overview from a classical perspective.

Atlas, G. & Aron, L. (2018) Ch2, “The Prospective Function” in Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice, pp21-41.

This article introduces the shift from fate to destiny, from being acted upon to becoming an agentic subject, and includes a case example in which a termination enactment is conceived of as a “rehearsal for the future.” It offers a somewhat different perspective from the re-enactment/regression focus of Dewald. The intention of the article is to introduce the prospective function—the presence of the analysand’s future in the work, not just their past and present. It also expresses an attitude toward termination that tolerates more indeterminacy than Dewald’s writing seems to suggest, and thus presages the relational material and approach that we will get into in more detail later in the course.