Joyce Slochower 2025 Seminar

Please Note: To preserve and respect both intellectual property rights and confidentiality, the seminar will not be recorded, nor is recording permitted.

Ending, not quite ending, and not ending at all: some thoughts on termination

Seminar description:

I consider the place of termination in contemporary psychoanalytic practice. A more flexible approach to therapeutic endings represents one dimension of a broader paradigm shift away from rule-boundedness and toward clinical flexibility. In any event, final, less-than-final, and absent goodbyes have always been part of psychoanalytic reality despite the power of our termination ideal. The COVID pandemic further intensified that phenomenon. I first describe the broader move toward flexibility within the field and then address its complex implications for psychoanalytic endings. In that context I explore the varied ways in which we don't always end treatment relationships.
The implications of not entirely ending a treatment are also addressed.

About the Speaker:

Joyce Slochower Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Joyce is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, the Steven Mitchell Center, the National Training Program of NIP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies in Philadelphia and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco. She is on the Editorial Boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Ricerca Psicoanalitica and Psychoanalytic Perspectives and is on the Board of the IARPP. Joyce has published over 100 articles on various aspects of psychoanalytic theory and technique. Joyce is co-Editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, of De-idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique from Within and Decentering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique (2018, Routledge).  Second Editions of her two books, Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996) and Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006), were released in 2014 by Routledge. Her new book, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, was released by Routledge in June. She is in private practice in New York City where she sees individuals and couples, runs supervision and study groups.