Introduction
Of all the phases of the psychotherapeutic process, the one which can produce the greatest amount of difficulty and create substantial problems for patient and therapist alike, is the phase of termination. It is at this time when the impact of the meaning, in affective terms, of the course of therapy and the nature of the therapist-patient relationship is experienced most keenly, not only by the patient but also by the therapist.In this paper an attempt will be made to examine the nature of the problems that arise about the issue of terminating treatment in one specific setting, that of community outpatient psychiatric clinic. Freud was concerned with the definition of termination, its criteria and associated problems, in the analytic treatment situation. He discussed the use of such criteria as the patient's lack of suffering from his presenting symptoms, the overcoming of his