Merton Gill and the Genesis of a New Psychoanalytic Paradigm

In his book Psychoanalysis in Transition: A Personal View (1994c) Merton Gill sets forth a hermeneutic–constructivist–complementary model of psychoanalysis. This model invokes, in Gill's words, “an essential recasting of every significant psychoanalytic dimension.” It also lays claim to being a new paradigm for psychoanalysis. In this chapter, we will discuss the evolution of Gill's model as outlined in his book; we will provide an overview of the features of this model and how, in the assessment of the authors, this is indeed a new paradigm for psychoanalysis. In the final portion of the chapter, we will place Gill's work in the context of earlier theoretical developments in the physical sciences.

Gill (1994c) develops three main themes in his book. First, he distinguishes between natural science and hermeneutics and argues that psychoanalysis is not a natural but, rather, a hermeneutic science. Next, he distinguishes between positivism and constructivism, arguing that the analyst is neither a neutral nor a privileged observer and that the patient and analyst are mutually shaping codeterminers and cocreators of the transference and countertransference. Gill's view of constructivism incorporates perspectivism. Gill's thesis is not only that multiple views of the same event are inevitable, but that the different views of each (both) observer are continually and mutually shaping each other's construction (s). Finally, Gill's work distinguishes between supraordinate psychologies and complementarity, arguing that supraordinate psychologies (classical drive, relational, or self) offer critical, but only partial, descriptions of the psychoanalytic process. Gill came to believe that the previously sacrosanct dualities such as one-person–two-person, subjective–objective, internal–external, literal-metaphoric, and intrapsychic-interpersonal were false dichotomies that psychoanalysis should disavow. In formulating