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PARTISAN REVIEW
had experience with a variety of categories of intractible cases that
were not amenable to psychoanalysis, such as character disorders,
homosexuality, addiction, and what today we call borderline and
narcissistic personalities. While Freud's clinical experience certainly
played an important role in the origins of "Analysis Terminable and
Interminable," we must also examine the personal and historical set–
ting in which Freud wrote, to take the full measure of the sources of
his skepticism and dejection in the late 1930s.
The deteriorating state of his health would have been reason
enough for Freud's pessimism in 1937, even if the external world had
been unthreatening and peaceful. The previous year was marked by
an escalation of the frequency of surgical interventions to control his
oral cancer. On July 16, 1936, Freud had his first documented
cancerous recurrence since the initial excision of 1923. The dreaded
diagnosis of epithelial carcinoma had, as Sharon Romm puts it, "a
ring of finality." A surgical procedure under novacaine on December
12, 1936 was a rare instance where Freud could not bear the pain.
His surgeon, Hans Pichler, recorded in his notes: "At the beginning
patient had no pain whatsoever, but toward the end he said that he
could not stand any more, although it is hard to tell just why." Freud
was now in the final phase of his long battle with cancer of the
mouth, and he was aware of it. On April 22, 1937 for the first time
he had an excision performed while under a general anesthesia. This
was the immediate, personal, and painful setting of the composition
of "Analysis Terminable and Interminable." Whereas analysis may
be interminable and Freud's self-analysis lasted his whole life, he
was now, consciously, in the terminal phase of life .
Let us look at the historical setting in which Freud wrote
"Analysis Terminable and Interminable." The mid-1930s were
relatively optimistic, though not quiet, years on the international
scene. It is true that Mussolini successfully waged an imperialistic
war against Ethiopia in the face of world opinion. In March 1936 the
Germans remilitarized the Rhineland. The Spanish Civil War
began in July 1936 with Italian and German support for the Na–
tionalists, and Russian aid to the Republic. The Western powers
followed a policy of non-intervention in Spain . The expectation
among liberals in the mid-1930s was that fascism could be stopped
without a world war and that , when this plague was past, the world
would return to sanity. Many liberals believed that Hitler's influence
could be limited to Germany . The nadir of liberal humanism would
come with Hitler's triumphs of the
Anschluss
of Austria in March
1938, the Munich capitulation of the West to Hitler in September
