Late Middle Phase and Termination

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

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May 6, 2022 — Relational Approaches Part 1: Not all Termination Work is Re-work

[43 pages]

The following three weeks are largely new material and largely relational.

Davies, J.D. (2005). Transformations of Desire and Despair: Reflections on the Termination Process from a Relational Perspective. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 15(6):779-805.

Here Davies is writing from the perspective of dissociated self-states. Unlike some other relational writers, she does hold to the ideas that termination (relinquishment) of the analytic relationship must occur, that there is a return to earlier work that occurs during termination, and that there is work specific to a termination phase that must be done. She also makes room for countertransference messiness.

Cooper, S. (2009). Familiar and Unfamiliar Forms of Interaction in the Ending Phases of Analysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19(5):588-603.

Cooper also writes about work that occurs during termination, from the perspective not of a return of symptoms or a regression, but of relational configurations that haven’t been worked through or have not had the occasion to emerge outside the context of termination. The article includes a transcript of an analytic session, which we rarely get to see. He attends to the analysand’s future, which is often only implicit. He also references the challenges of countertransference.