Psychoanalysis in Transition: My View

In the preface to his final book, Psychoanalysis in Transition, Merton Gill indicates that he has long wanted to write a textbook. I am glad that he did not quite succeed. It is hard to think of Gill's ideas as embalmed, a common fate of ideas in textbooks: The book also fails to demonstrate Gill's view that psychoanalysis is “in a particular disarray as of this writing” (Gill, 1994, p. xiii). What Gill succeeds in doing is writing an important, timely essay that is exactly captured by the title, Psychoanalysis in Transition. The book is surprisingly slender, only 179 pages, well bound, and beautifully produced with a handsome jacket, clear type, quality paper, and a very full and helpful table of contents and index.

I find it apt that Gill's last book is on transition in psychoanalysis. Transition has always characterized Gill's thinking. As Robert Michels notes on the book jacket, “[Gill] once again demonstrates that his is one of the most youthful minds in contemporary psychoanalysis.” Who but Merton Gill would renounce, and overly harshly at that, a psychoanalytic classic, his own 1954 paper, “Psychoanalysis and Exploratory Psychotherapy”?

Although I have known Mert in a variety of contexts for over 30 years, it was not until I sent him my manuscript for my book. Interpretation and Interaction: Psychoanalysis or Psychotherapy? that I fully appreciated what a unique opportunity it was to work with him.

There were ideas in my manuscript about which I had great doubt and some that seemed unduly iconoclastic and deviant. In thinking about who would give the manuscript a fair reading and a frank judgment, I hit upon exactly the right person, Merton Gill. Within a week of my sending it to him, I had 20 single-spaced typewritten pages in response. Before they could be answered, there were 10 more. I responded, and there were 20 more pages and several telephone calls. His ideas kept coming.

We found that, even though we were in no way collaborators, we had arrived at many s