When A Patient Want’s to End Therapy

The analytic method, of course, does not involve telling people what to do but rather helping them understand themselves. The analogy is timeworn: Give a person a fish and she’ll eat for a day; teach her how to fish and she’ll eat forever.

But the truth is that people are sometimes very hungry and their hunger needs immediate attention. Sometimes a person must eat before she has the energy to do anything else. (And anyway, maybe the fish aren’t biting that day, or she has no money for bait.)

Muriel Dimen, a psychotherapist in New York, is the editor, most recently, of “With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories.”