Peter Loewenberg
ANALYSIS TERMINABLE
AND INTERMINABLE
Freud's late paper, "Analysis Terminable and Intermin–
able," written two years before his death, is the place where he is
most skeptical regarding the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis,
where he recommended reanalysis "at intervals of every five years or
so" for every analyst. He suggested that when analysis has not
achieved its goal of curing neuroses by ensuring control over instinc–
tual drives, it is nevertheless "always right in theory but not always
right in practice." This is the pessimistic piece in which Freud con–
siders and rejects the efficacy of prophylactic analysis . Conflicts
must be current and active to be treated . Potential conflicts , which
are not at the time manifest, should not be stirred up in the name of
"therapeutic ambition."
If
a conflict is not currently active, if it is not
in evidence , it cannot be influenced by analysis . Freud firmly sets
limits to the therapeutic power of analytic therapy. Here , he explic–
itly settled accounts with Otto Rank and the pretensions of brief
psychoanalysis . He also , gently but firmly , dismissed the "thera–
peutic experiments" of Sandor Ferenczi , "which, unhappily , proved
to be [in] vain ."
In this essay, written in early 1937 and published in June,
when he was eighty-one years old, we again appreciate Freud the
great stylist, who, in phrases which ring in the mind of every
analyst, gives us lessons in technique and wisdom for life . I will cite
only a few . In a discussion of the subtleties of fixing a time limit in
analysis , he used vivid kinesthetic imagery of the hunt and the kill:
"A lion only springs once." We hear also a comforting stoicism,
which serves as reassurance, in his reminder that analysis is the third
of the "impossible" professions - the others being education and gov–
ernment - in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatis–
fying results . His healthy skepticism regarding therapeutic ambition
should serve as a warning to those who must idealize psychoanalysis :
Editor's Note: T his essay was fi rst presented to the Thirty-Fifth Congress of the In–
ternational Psychoanalytic Association in Montreal , July 30 , 1987. The author has
dedicated it to Fritz Stern .
