Abstract
The author argues that some long psychoanalyses, especially training analyses and those of healthier people, may proceed past the point of diminishing returns for the patient, whose continued learning becomes offset by a subtle infantilization. This phenomenon is attributed to an unconscious complicity between analyst and analysand to retain infantile fantasies of omnipotence and perfectability. By avoiding termination, both parties defend against guilt, disappointment, anger, separation anxiety and narcissistic injury. Observations and recommendations are made with the aim of alerting practitioners to numerous ways in which psychoanalysis as a profession can be compromised by unconscious grandiosity.