Good Goodbyes - by Jack Novick & Kerry Kelly Novick (Hardcover)

About the Book

Life is full of comings and goings, helloes and goodbyes, meetings and partings. Good Goodbyes highlights the crucial importance of how the end of therapy is structured and experienced. Bad endings can destroy good therapies. Good endings can consolidate the work accomplished, ...

Book Synopsis

Life is full of comings and goings, helloes and goodbyes, meetings and partings. Good Goodbyes highlights the crucial importance of how the end of therapy is structured and experienced. Bad endings can destroy good therapies. Good endings can consolidate the work accomplished, transform relationships, and foster growth in both patient and therapist.

Review Quotes

Good Goodbyes is a fitting culmination of the Novicks' esteemed contributions to the literatures on termination, child and adult psychotherapies, and the 'two systems' model of self-esteem regulation. This thorough, practical, and wise volume on how to productively approach the ending of psychotherapies will be a great resource for experienced therapists and an invaluable guide to clinicians in training.

Deciding when to end clinical therapy and how to end it well can be a mystifying process. In Good Goodbyes: Knowing How to End in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Jack Novick and Kerry Kelly Novick share insights from their vast combined experience to diminish the mystery of therapeutic closure. The book, which is firmly based in psychoanalytic theory, uses a question format to explore the many hows, whys, whats, and whens of termination. The authors outline treatment stages along the path to the therapeutic conclusion, all the while fine-tuning a constructive approach for supplying the good in goodbye.As psychoanalysts, teachers, and supervisors, the Novicks bring a refreshing perspective to "endings, beginnings, and the work needed for a good goodbye" (p. xi), filling in gaps not previously addressed. The layout is especially helpful for locating information to apply in practice settings.Fortunately, each chapter includes illustrations that allow practitioners with little training in psychoanalysis to understand keyconcepts without a deep grounding in psychoanalytic theory. Some of the new insights into termination do generalize across theoretical orientations.Although it is comprehensively psychoanalytic, Good Goodbyes presents a solid contribution to understanding theprocess of properly ending psychotherapy. Applying the lessons set forth in this text will enhance thelong-term positive changes that are possible through effective psychotherapy.

Jack and Kerry Kelly Novick have written a very interesting book that grapples with the difficult issue of termination. I highly recommend this book to both beginning and advanced therapists and analysts. It will give them many ideas about many different ways to think about termination.

Nearly every therapist has watched in helpless agony when the good work of a patient's therapy is spoiled by a bad ending. In Good Goodbyes, the Novicks help us to minimize the possibility of such painful occurrences. Through an easy-to-follow series of questions and answers they walk us through the phases of intensive analytic treatment: from evaluation to beginning; from middle to pre-termination; and finally, from the much neglected phases of termination to post-termination. Through vivid and compelling child and adult clinical vignettes, they illuminate the challenges and satisfactions inherent in such work. Moreover, they demonstrate that when a treatment culminates in a "good, goodbye", a patient's system of self regulation can be transformed from one that is joyless, constricted and closed to one that is healthy, alive and open.

The Novicks have produced an excellent and most original book on termination in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy...At last we have an approach that conceives termination so fully, that it includes the concerns, and reasonable preparations for the patient self care after termination.

With generously supplied illustrative clinical vignettes, Kerry Kelly and Jack Novick have assembled a most valuable presentation concerning treatment termination. They demonstrate how the prospect of termination shapes the work of the entire collaboration, from its very onset through and beyond the final day that patient and analyst meet. Their detailed exposition, organized along the lines of a reader's expectable questions, throws clarifying light on an aspect of the treatment enterprise hitherto accorded but meager attention.

About the Author

Kerry Kelly Novick and Jack Novick are child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalysts who trained with Anna Freud. They are on the faculties of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council, the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute, the New York Freudian Society, the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and the University of Michigan Medical School. They have been working with children and families for 40 years and joined other colleagues to found a non-profit psychoanalytic school, Allen Creek Preschool, in Ann Arbor. Both Jack and Kerry Novick have written an array of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, along with two books: Fearful Symmetry: The Development and Treatment of Sadomasochism (1996) and Working with Parents Makes Therapy Work (2005).