The question of when a psychoanalysis ends, how it ends, whether it ends, what prevents its conclusion, whether it achieves its purpose, the treatment - 'relieving a person from neurotic symptoms, inhibitions, and character anomalies' - and for what reasons it might fail, exceeds the realm of technique, because for Freud neither the maneuvers nor any particular interventions are the subject of finite and not finite analysis.

Whether it concerns illness, healing, or ultimately health, as Freud notably emphasizes in a footnote, it is essential to be able to describe these states 'metapsychologically, with reference to dynamic relationships among the levels of the mental mechanism, which we have recognized or, if you will, discovered or hypothesized.'

This particular study, therefore, constitutes a theoretical text in which Freud decides, within the framework of metapsychological psychoanalysis, as it has developed since 1915 - with the introduction of the death drive in 1920 and the distinction between the Id, Ego, and Superego in 1923 - to focus on the question of what obstacles impede analytical healing.

As Freud believes that 'it has been sufficiently clarified how analysis brings about healing,' he now turns - and calls on other analysts to do the same - to failures, when what we 'aim for, expect, and assert' based on our theory is contradicted by experience.