400

changed in certain respects on its re-
emergence after two and a half
thousand years. Apart from the limitations imposed upon us by the
biopsychical standpoint, we no longer take as our fundamental elements
the four elements of Empedocles; animate matter is now sharply
differentiated from inanimate and we no longer think of the mingling
and separation of particles of matter but of the fusion and defusion
of instinct-
components. Moreover, we now have a certain biological
basis for the principle of ‘strife’, since we trace the instinct of destruc-
tion to the death-
instinct, the urge of animate matter to return to
its inanimate state. We are of course not asserting that this instinct
first arose with the dawning of life or denying that it existed before.
And nobody can foresee in what guise the nucleus of truth contained
in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to the vision of a later
day.

VII

In 1927, S. Ferenczi read a paper, entitled Das Problem der
Beendigung der Analysen¹⁾, which contained an abundance of valuable
material. He concluded it with the comforting assurance that ‘analysis
is by no means an interminable process. On the contrary, if the
analyst has a thorough knowledge of his business and a sufficient
fund of patience the treatment can be carried to a natural conclusion’.

This paper as a whole does, however, seem to me to convey a warning
not to aim at the shortening but rather at the deepening of the analytic
process. Ferenczi makes the further important point that success
very largely depends upon the analyst’s having profited by the lesson
of his own ‘errors and mistakes, and got the better of ‘the weak
points in his own personality’. This is an important contribution to
our problem. Amongst the factors which influence the prospects of
an analysis and add to its difficulties in the same manner as the resist-
ances, we must reckon not only the structure of the patient’s own ego
but the personal characteristics of the analyst.

It cannot be disputed that analysts do not in their own personalities
wholly come up to the standard of psychic normality which they set
for their patients. Opponents of analysis are wont to point this out
derisively and use it as an argument to prove the uselessness of the
analytic method. We might seek to refute the criticism by asserting
that it makes an unjustifiable demand upon analysts, who are individ-
uals trained in the practice of a certain art and are presumably ordinary

¹⁾Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Bd. XIV, 1928.

401

human beings. Nobody surely maintains that a physician is incapable
of treating internal diseases because his own internal organs happen
to be unsound. On the contrary, it may be argued that there is a
certain advantage when a man who is himself threatened with tuber-
culosis specializes in the treatment of that disease. But the cases
are not on all fours. So long as he is capable of practising at all,
a physician suffering from lung or heart trouble is not handicapped
in diagnosing or treating internal disease. The analyst, on the other
hand, because of the peculiar conditions of his work is really prevented
by his own defects from discerning his patient’s situation correctly
and reacting to it in a manner conducive to cure. So there is some
reason in the demand for a high degree of psychic normality and
correct adjustment in the analyst as evidence of his qualifications for
his work. And there is another point: he must be in a superior
position to that of his patient if he is to serve as a model for the latter
in certain analytic situations and, in others, to act as his teacher.
Finally, we must not forget that the relationship between analyst and
patient rests on the love of truth as its foundation, that is, on the
acknowledgment of reality, and it precludes every sort of sham
and deception.

Here let us pause for a moment to assure the analyst that he has
our sincere sympathy in the very exacting requirements of his practice.
It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’
professions in which one can be sure only of unsatisfying results.
The other two, as has long been agreed, are the bringing-up of children
and the government of nations. Obviously we cannot demand that
the prospective analyst should be a perfect human being before he
takes up analysis, so that only persons of this rare and exalted perfec-
tion should enter the profession. But where and how is even the
most inadequate of individuals to acquire the ideal qualifications for
his work? The answer is: in his own analysis, with which he begins
his training. For practical reasons this analysis can be only short
and incomplete: the main object of it is to enable the training-
analyst to form an opinion whether the candidate should be accepted
for further training. The training-analysis has accomplished its
purpose if it imparts to the novice a sincere conviction of the existence
of the unconscious, enables him through the emergence of repressed
material in his own mind to perceive in himself processes which other-
wise he would have regarded as incredible and gives him a first sample
of the technique which has proved to be the only correct method in

402

ANALYSIS TERMINABLE AND INTERMINABLE

conducting analyses. This in itself would not constitute an adequate
training, but we hope and believe that the stimuli received in the
candidate’s own analysis will not cease to act upon him when that
analysis ends, that the processes of ego-transformation will go on of
their own accord and that he will bring his new insight to bear upon
all his subsequent experience. This does indeed happen and, just in
so far as it happens, it qualifies the candidate who has been analysed
to become an analyst.

Unfortunately something else happens as well. One can only
give one’s impressions in describing this second result. Hostility on
the one hand and partisanship on the other create an atmosphere
unfavourable to objective investigation. It does look as if a number
of analysts learn to apply defence-mechanisms which enable them to
divert the conclusions and requirements of analysis from themselves,
probably by applying them to others. They themselves remain as
they are and evade the critical and corrective influence of analysis.
Perhaps this confirms the dictum of a writer who warns us that it is
hard for a mortal who acquires power not to misuse it.¹² Sometimes,
when we try to understand this attitude in analysts, we are irresistibly
and disagreeably reminded of the effect of the X-rays on those who
use them without due precaution. We can hardly be surprised if
constant pre-occupation with all the repressed impulses which struggle
for freedom in the human psyche sometimes causes all the instinctual
demands which have hitherto been restrained to be violently awakened
in the analyst himself. These are ‘dangers of analysis’, threatening
not the passive but the active partner in the analytic situation, and
it is our duty to face them. There can be no doubt how they must be
encountered. Every analyst ought periodically himself to submit to
analysis, at intervals of, say, five years, without any feeling of shame
in so doing. This is as much as to say that not only the patient’s
analysis but that of the analyst himself is a task which is never finished.

At this point we must guard against a misconception. It is not
my intention to assert that analysis in general is an interminable
business. Whatever our theoretical view may be, I believe that in
practice analyses do come to an end. Every analyst of experience
will be able to think of a number of cases in which he has taken perman-
ent leave of the patient rebus bene gestis. There is a far greater dis-
crepancy between theory and practice in cases of so-called character-

¹²Anatole France, La révolte des anges.

403

analysis. Here it is not easy to predict a natural end to the process,
even if we do not look for impossibilities or ask too much of analysis.
Our object will be not to rub off all the corners of the human psyche
so as to produce ‘normality’ according to schedule nor yet to demand
that the person who has been ‘thoroughly analysed’ shall never
again feel the stirrings of passions in himself or become involved in
any mental conflict. The business of analysis is to secure the best
possible psychological conditions for the functioning of the ego;
when this has been done, analysis has accomplished its task.

VIII

Both in therapeutic and character-analyses we are struck by the
prominence of two themes which give the analyst an extraordinary
amount of trouble. We soon come to the conclusion that some general
principle is at work here. These two themes are connected with the
difference between the sexes: one is characteristic of men and the
other equally characteristic of women. In spite of the difference in
content there is an obvious correspondence between the two. Some
factor common to both sexes is forced, by the difference between
them, to express itself differently in the one and in the other.

The two corresponding themes are, in women, envy of the penis–
the striving after the possession of a male genital–and, in men, the
struggle against their passive or feminine attitude towards other
men. In its early days psycho-
analysis defined this common factor
as the individual’s attitude to the castration-complex. Subsequently
Alfred Adler coined the term ‘masculine protest’, which, in the case
of men, is exactly right. I think that, from the beginning, ‘repudiation
of femininity’ would have been the correct description of this remark-
able feature in the psychic life of mankind.

Supposing that we now try to introduce this notion into the struc-
ture of psycho-analytical theory we shall find that, by its very nature,
this factor cannot occupy the same place in the case of both sexes.
In males the masculine striving is from the beginning and throughout
entirely ego-syntonic; the passive attitude, since it necessitates the
assumption of castration, is energetically repressed and often the
only indications of its existence are exaggerated over-compensations.
In females also the striving after masculinity is consonant with the
ego at a certain period, namely, in the phallic phase, before develop-
ment in the direction of femininity has set in. But later it succumbs
to that momentous process of repression, the outcome of which (as