Tribute to a Serious Man

As the outpouring of affection at the meeting to commemorate his death demonstrated, Merton Gill ended his career as a beloved figure. He earned our admiration and loyalty through his generosity to all persons of good will, his infectious good humor, his profound commitment to psychoanalysis as an intellectual discipline, and his courteous regard for views different from his own. Although he loved a good argument pursued with passion, Merton was always ready to acknowledge error. He was a modest person, mildly surprised by the esteem he received for his published work: he once told me that he did not regard himself as a theoretician. On another occasion, he said he wished he could espouse his views with greater self-confidence.

I believe Merton was most comfortable when he could champion another contributor's ideas; over the years, he performed that task on behalf of David Rapaport, George Klein, Samuel Lipton, and Irwin Hoffman. Following the deaths of Rapaport and Klein, he edited collections of highly important papers by these friends (Gill, 1967; Klein, 1976). In collaboration with his friend Philip Holzman, he put together the most significant volume of theoretical dialectic in the past generation (Gill and Holzman, 1976).

Over the years, Merton's psychoanalytic views kept evolving under the impact of fresh clinical experience and cogent critiques of ill-conceived theories. Has any major contributor to psychoanalysis traveled a greater distance than the span separating Gill's (1963) ego psychological monograph, through his volume on transference (Gill, 1982), to his ultimate credo (Gill, 1994) Psychoanalysis in Transition? Of course, Merton did not intend this work to be his last testament; had he been granted additional time, I am confident that he would have subjected these views to the same process of revision that led him to alter his previous statements of position.

Psychoanalysis in Transition marks a nodal point, not only in the development of our disciplin