Reading Freud’s “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937)

I.

The first sentence introduces us to the context: Freud is interested in opening up a question of time within the clinic. He claims that psychoanalytic therapy teachings us that it is a “time-consuming business.” My immediate inclination is to question this additional word, ‘therapy.’ Why does Freud add the word “therapy” to the other word, which is fine on its own, “psychoanalysis?” And he continues by claiming that it is a “time-consuming business,” which means that part of the cure involves an operation in time. Freud is resistant to attempts — rather, they seem to be demands springing from “medical science,” which imbues treatment with an “impatient contempt” — to expedite its conclusion, that is, to shorten its duration. We have therefore a juxtaposition: on the one hand, there is the preservation of a cure that involves a cure of time — the duration of time, which installs patience rather than patients — and, on the other hand, the well-known Lacanian practice of the “variable length session.”

First of all, what is the difference? It seems to me that one key difference, or rather, one key implicit point of agreement is that time is part of the cure. Or, put another way, time is a part of the treatment or analysis. There are therapeutic effects that come from the establishment of the proper mode of time as an intervention. This is no doubt particular true today, all the more in the era of urgency and quick-fixes. After all, there was already during Freud’s time, and even in Lacan’s, a sort of pre-established patience that followed the literary culture of the time (e.g., to be literate, in the McLuhanian sense, is to be prepared for the time it takes to reach the concluding chapter of a book). Thus, it is not a question of the short session versus the long session but rather a question of the function of time itself within the establishment of an analysis. Freud seemed already quite aware of the coming urgencies when he wrote, as his response to Otto Rank’s call for a short session focused on merely deploying “one small piece of analytic work […] and a few months should be enough to accomplish this.” Freud’s response, prophetic as it was: “[this is] designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life.”

One detects here also Freud’s contempt for the American way of life. We should highlight this because it is announced at precisely the moment when the question of time as a treatment regiment is raised. He writes of the “haste of American life” and the falsity of “American ‘prosperity’ itself.” Freud’s early intuitions about the American practice of therapy, particularly psychoanalytic therapy, should really be drawn out as a litmus test for contemporary American psychoanalytic treatments. Today, of course, in America, it is popular to do ‘walk-and-talk therapy,’ zoom sessions, and anything else that responds to the demands of the patient for less patience. I, myself, have witnessed this while speaking with New York analysts. It is no joke, and it has everything to do with the pragmatic — that means ‘practical’ and non-abstract, and, therefore, supposedly “non-dogmatic” and ‘oh so open minded’ — mindset of its practitioners. Freud confessed that he even tried to “speed up analytic treatment” once upon a time, and he proceeds to provide us with some examples.

What is interesting about his first example is that it seems to be related to a man who approached him “in a state of complete helplessness.” Well, this is not exactly a phrase we expect to read about an obsessional neurotic. We have no way to ascertain the measure of these words — what is this helplessness? — but I would suspect that the helplessness is the place from which urgent demands are made: helpless precisely because confronting a hole, not, essentially, a symptom. But what happened next was that the quickness of the therapy produced an attitude of comfort later which inhibited any further depth, any further analysis: the man was comfortable now in his ways and did not “wish to take any step forward which would bring him nearer to the end of his treatment.” This was “a case of the treatment inhibiting itself: it was in danger of failing as a result of its — partial — success.” Perhaps what we see here is the emergence of a very important distinction that would be taken up later by analysts: therapy versus analysis. On the one side, therapy, as a goal, is a cure without time, it is a response to a demand, and it is perfectly attuned to the quick fix and the haste of American life. Thus, therapy is a booming market in America. On the other hand, perhaps we can claim that analysis is a cure with time, a cure which endures in time and thinks time deeply.

It is precisely at this point that Freud makes the case that one should “fix a time limit for the analysis.” This is important because the fixing of a time limit was precisely to install time as a measure of the cure, and not, it seems to me, to proclaim a particular time of a treatment in advance. Thus, there is every reason to justify a thread from Freud’s position to Lacan’s on the variable length session. The variable length session is nothing but an awareness of this dimension of time and its importance to the cure. Freud used the function of time as a mode of the cure instead of subjecting time to the function of the cure; it was by informing the patient in advance of the limit of time that haste set in, the quickening of the work, and the birth of an analysis. Finally, the man’s resistances receded and Freud concluded that, as a result, “his cure was radical and permanent.” This all seems fine except Freud was not at the time convinced of the interpretation I am now providing, since, in 1923, he added a footnote to indicate that he was mistaken: new unresolved issues emerged later and were brought to Freud’s attention. Once again, the man was helpless: he was, this time, “a refugee and destitute.”

The limit of time had perhaps served precisely the opposite function, as it does for the obsessional neurotic in the Lacanian clinic: to provide shelter and refuge for the symptom rather than to have it engaged and worked through. Thus, when the hour comes near, the patient shows his best intentions, demonstrates his mastery of the cure and the symptom, and renews the trick in a purer form. Yet, what Freud remarks next is fascinating: “thanks to the skill of one of my pupils, Dr. Ruth Mack Brunswick, a short course of treatment has on each occasion brought these conditions to an end.” Indeed, it was the infamous short session (not individual sessions but the short course of treatment), in this case, and not the long session, which brought this to some progress. Thus, the limits which were once set were dislodge. Freud nonetheless fixed a time-limit to other cases and he realizes its limitations: “it is effective provided that one hits the right time for it.” What does this mean? It means that the time-limit only works if it operates within a wider clinically specific — which means individually specific — understanding of the cure of time within an analysis.

II.

It is, in this way, that the question of time is opened up for Freud. At some point, beginning here in section two of the essay, Freud realizes that the question of having a time-limit on analysis is too restrictive and hence he must change the question: what is the place of time itself for an analysis? He asks the question in the following way: “is there such a thing as a natural end to an analysis?” It is a difficult question because an end to an analysis implies something of a punctuation, something of a conclusion, something of a moment outside of the long delay of time itself. The question finally resolves itself in the following way: what is the “end of analysis?” Already I feel myself interested in exploring this within the context of the Freudian — that is, the symbolic — unconscious. The end of analysis is approached from the position of an unconscious which may be interpreted or deciphered, which may have, throughout the process, some constructions on the part of the analyst, and so on. An end to analysis, in this conception, means, does it not, an end to the unconscious as a mode of interpretation, an end to the analytic deciphering process itself.

Thus, I feel obliged to suggest that this leads us toward what today we refer to as the real unconscious, a fundamental confrontation with that which resists those interpretations, that which is not linked at the level of the latent and manifest dream content, or, in other words, that which remains fundamentally opposed, in some radical and perhaps even traumatic way, from meaning. The end of analysis is hence an end to the analyst’s enjoyment, an end to the process of interpretation. It is therefore the end of the cure of time: “an analysis is ended,” wrote Freud, “when the analyst and the patient cease to meet each other for the analytic session.” It is, in other words, a moment of the loss of time itself. Yet, the loss of time is perhaps the very definition of trauma — there is a timelessness — such that Freud perhaps felt the need to add the following: “two conditions have [to be] fulfilled: first, that the patient shall no longer be suffering from his symptoms and shall have overcome his anxieties and his inhibitions.” Thus, the confrontation with the real unconscious, with the loss of the time of analysis, comes also with a reduction in the suffering of the individual. Hence, we can say that something has been accomplished in the analysis, since, by confronting this limit and passing through it the suffering that once characterize the patient’s turn toward analysis, that is, turn toward interpretations and deciphering, ceases to exist as a form of suffering.

Second, “the analyst shall judge that so much repressed material has been made conscious, so much that was unintelligible has been explained, and so much internal resistance conquered, that there is no need to fear a repetition of the pathological processes concerned.” We can read this now as a moment of passing through and beyond the analysis, and approaching a new iteration which is not a repetition of previous pathologies, since they are no longer characterized by the return of the repressed or by the suffering of the patient. When these conditions are not met then we can speak of an incomplete analysis. In summary, what is an incomplete analysis? It is, finally, a moment in which the patient remains within the phase of an analysis, that is, within the phase of interpretations, and, even at its limit, a phase of timelessness, but without having passed through to the other side of this cure by time. This is one end of analysis, then — and it is one that comes close to what some psychoanalysts today call the ‘pass.’

The rest of this section is dedicated to examples where an apparently astounding success or completion of analysis suddenly, at another time, seems activated once again by troubling circumstances, by new traumas, and so on. Freud here believes that the pathology is removed, but it returns. He seems unable to speak further about this because he did not yet have a notion of sinthome, that is, of the real unconscious, or, rather, of that which continues, in its own way, even after an analysis comes to completion. Hence, in one of his examples, he writes: “I am inclined to think that, were it not for the new trauma, there would have been no fresh outbreak of neurosis.” We can therefore discuss the iteration of the symptom since “even a successful analytic treatment does not protect the patient, who at the time has been cured, from falling ill later on of another neurosis …” All of this returns Freud to a claim that this return of the symptom, return to the pathology, at a later time, implies that one should be very cautious about shortening the duration of treatment. But what he did not conclude, though it seems to me implied, was the very function of time as a treatment.

III.

Freud begins by arguing that it is precisely abstraction — metapsychology, or, in other words, theory — which can help us move forward to understanding the question of the end of analysis. We must examine the primary and secondary processes. What is most interesting here is not at all the discussion of the ego and the id but rather the discussion of dreams. Why does Freud turn to dreams? He claims that dreams are irrefutable proof that the drives satisfaction nonetheless produces substitute satisfactions: we keep dreaming. Hence, the dream can be a litmus test of the cure and of the end of analysis. This is implied already in Freud’s words. The dream will perhaps take on a different shape at the end of analysis. For example, in a striking passage from Freud, we have the following: “[our nightly dreams] react to the sleeping attitude assumed by the ego with an awakening of instinctual demands.” What is the “sleeping attitude” of the ego? Well, if the ego is the place of interpretations, where instinctual demands can be formed into a body of thought, that is, where, in Lacanian thought, S1 can link into S2, or, put yet another way, where there can be understanding and meaning, deciphering and interpretations, then, finally, this is the dream. The ego sleeps for Freud.

The ego is the place of sleeping, it is the place of a “sleeping attitude” for Freud because it is the place of the time of analysis, it is the place of analysis itself, since, after all, these interpretations are done via the work of an analysis. But what is this “awakening”? The awakening is on the side of the drives, it is on the side of that which is not interpreted, not consolidated into the ego through the work of analysis. It is not therefore on the side of the dream. It is the nightmare, obviously. It is the place of the trauma which has not been touched by analysis, and which, through the work of analysis, inevitably, approaches us as the end of an analysis: the end of time, the timelessness of the real unconscious. Everything for Freud in this section revolves around this tension between the ego and the drives, which demonstrates, essentially, that the disjuncture, the conflict, is central and that it is not, finally, about the consolidation of the drives by the ‘taming’ of the ego.

Hence, there is no conflict in reading Freud on the question of analysis in the following way: analysis is the space in which the ego tames the drives, but the end of an analysis is something further, something beyond this symbolic unconscious, something which touches the enigma of the drives. It is at this point that Freud places the drives close to what he names ‘nature,’ and produces the following analogy: “we know that the first step towards attaining intellectual mastery of our environment is to discover generalizations, rules and laws which bring order to chaos.” I wonder if there is an intuition here of suggesting that there is nonetheless a taming of the drives by rules and laws rather than by interpretations and knowledge. In any case, I move forward.

IV & V.

This section largely focuses on the usage of frustrating the demand in order to bring about therapeutic gains, particularly those that might not reveal themselves as modes of suffering until the future. Thus, by frustrating demands the suffering may be brought to the fore in the time of analysis rather than after its incompletion as an analytic treatment. Yet Freud doubts this approach, and notes that it may actually cause harm. I forego any further analysis of this section. Freud concludes that the best approach is the simply inform the patient that there will be other conflicts in order to arouse within him/her a desire to work through them. This is interesting because in the analysis, if analysis is actually ongoing, there might in fact be a desire to continue to interpret and find meaning there. Thus, one remains suspending within the time of the cure.

Another important aspect of these sections concerns Freud’s account that analysis, just like the EGO’s defences, serve to ward off defence. Yet this, precisely, is also the work of an analysis during its time of the cure: it is to tame the drives by the ego and hence to maintain the sleep of interpretation. Thus, analysis is a continuation of the dreams of the ego. No wonder analysis is the space in which the patient brings his or her dreams. It is precisely the very space of dreaming. But this leaves open Freud’s prior question of the awakening of the drives. But there is another portion here that should concern us: there are ‘small awakenings’ within an analysis, nonetheless. These are important — one wakes up during the analysis only to continue dreaming, that is, to move onto the next interpretation, or, rather, to tame another portion of the drives: “during the treatment our therapeutic work is constantly swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum between a piece of id-analysis and a piece of ego-analysis. In the one case we want to make something from the id conscious, in the other we want to correct something in the ego.” But, since one wakes up to continue dreaming, “the ego treats recovery itself as a new danger.” Hence, one remains suspended within the time of analysis, once again. Analysis is, in of itself, a defence or a resistance to waking up.

VI. & VII & VIII.

There is in this section an interesting exploration of the “resistance from the id.” There is a fixidity and rigidity of the forces of the id. For older people, it is there, but as a force of habit. Here, within the resistance of the id, there is a real repetition, one that is caught, purely, in its cycle. This is the repetition of the nightmare, the repetition of the real, the repetition of the trauma. It is perhaps what is most singular to the real unconscious, but Freud’s mistake is to find it only in a small portion of his patients, without recognizing that it is a pervasive aspect of the psyche. It is at around this time that Freud begins to discuss the curious basis upon which a heterosexual man “will not put up with any homosexuality.” I think Matte Blanco helps to understand this logic through his discussion of the “symmetry” of the unconscious. It is the timelessness of the unconscious that is most closely aligned with symmetry, since, the sameness of the unconscious implies that the signifier is not taking root as a cut of separation. Isn’t it the case that Freud continues to circle around the question of the real unconscious?

Freud begins to close his essay by discussing the case of analysts who are “themselves human beings” with their own modes of suffering. There are, he maintains, unjustifiable demands on analysts to be “normal” or role models to their patients. But this is not what analysis is about. It is closer to the practice of “a particular art,” which means, in a sense, that analysts deploy a particular style in their technique. Yet, what makes an analyst, is, rather, the fact of his or her passing through the time of an analysis itself, which means, in other words, the passage beyond the love of interpretation. This seems to me to be essential. Yet, fundamentally, one must also confront the question of lack since, the entire final portion of Freud’s essay concerns a confrontation — though not an overcoming — of the inability to have the phallus, terms the masculine complex in women, and the feminization or passivity of the man. In other words, a confrontation with the real of sexuation.