Poetic Closure, Psychoanalytic Termination, and Death

Abstract

Our pull to grasp narrative structures—including beginnings and especially endings—applies not only to the intentional craft of fictions, but to life as lived, as it is in psychoanalytic termination. Remarkable parallels, for instance, exist between thematic closure in poems and the conscious and unconscious signals of closure that develop in pretermination and accelerate in termination proper. A case illustrates this point: the slow crescendo of cues begins months before the first “pretermination dream.” It is the patient's emerging awareness of greater health and freer functioning that likely gives rise to these phenomena, yet this awareness is often warded off because of the grave task of ending that it implies. Literature and psychoanalysis share concerns with how an ending is borne. Fictive closure and apocalyptic narratives allude to or imply finality (i.e., death), and lesser “endings” in daily life may not escape the specter of that linkage. But Kermode asserts that “ending” confers significance on an entire narrative and may thereby console us. Coltart links the realities of mortality and psychoanalytic termination, yet falls short of consolation. Clues to the role of beginnings (in final matters) and how they may help emerge from considering Basho's last days and poems. Nonetheless, the power of narrative has its limits in helping us bear the burden of a real ending, as of an analysis. Joining present to future, as through normal hope, or joining present to past through normal nostalgia, works toward a “bearing of the burden”—but only within the context of health achieved through the analysis.