This work takes as its starting point the author's "opinion that psychoanalysis as it is generally practiced is not of good quality technically. In particular … the analysis of the transference, allegedly the heart of psychoanalytic technique, is not pursued consistently in practice" (Vol. I, p. 1). Gill maintains that analytic technique has been uniformly of poor quality from the beginning (i.e., since about 1895) and that it can be made of good quality only if his ideas about analysis of transference are accepted and applied.

These ideas may be summarized as follows. First and foremost is the recommendation that the transference aspect of everything a patient says and does should always be at the center of the analyst's attention. This is not to say that every intervention need be exclusively