Interminable Treatment in Patients Who Appear Healthy

Treatment interminability among nonpsychotic psychiatric patients is a subject not well Understood. Those who treat such patients are often nagged by a feeling that they are somehow failing, especially if the patient has a history of personal achievement. The authors describe three such patients and propose that they exemplify a type of pseudeomaturation. Common features in the accounts of their childhood suggest a failure in the separation-individuation phase of development. The authors theorize that this failure first contributed to the development of psychiatric symptoms during adulthood and then to interminability in treatment.