OBJECTIVES: This article aims to review the definitions of treatment dropout in psychotherapy literature, discuss the difficulty of defining dropout in various psychotherapeutic approaches, reflect on the criteria used in different definitions and propose a dropout definition for psychoanalytical psychotherapy. METHOD: A review of articles on treatment dropout involving different psychotherapeutic modalities was conducted in the following databases: SciELO, Lilacs, Medline and PsycINFO. RESULTS AND DISCUSS: Definitions of treatment dropout are presented in three figures and divided by the theoretical framework of the psychotherapeutic process. Criteria used in definitions are discussed. CONCLUSION: In order to build a standardized definition of psychoanalytical psychotherapy dropout, three definition categories for termination of psychotherapy are proposed, based on the critical discussion of the reviewed literature.
Dropout; psychoanalytical psychotherapy; definition
