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This volume of the series is dedicated to Merton Gill, and its first section is devoted to him. The volume begins with memoris of his life, work, and character by four close friends and collaborators whose collective friendship with him covers most of his long psychoanalytic career. These are followed by five essays on his final book, Psychoanalysis in Transition, and finally by a bibliography of his work. The individual chapters are brief and somewhat repetitive, but a vivid and remarkably consistent picture emerges from them of this brilliant, original, courageous, and troubled man, whose ideas for some fifty years not only reflected, but often led, the major developments in our field. Gill was not only willing to consider (and occasionally adopt) other peoples' views, however opposed to his own, but several times rethought his own contributions and revised or replaced them in a way that few others—Sigmund Freud comes to mind—have been able to do. Reading these accounts makes one envy those fortunate to have been his friends and hope for the day a full-length biography will appear.
The following two-thirds of the volume cover other subjects, but poetic unity is provided by essays on Henrik Ibsen and Vincent van Gogh, whose heroic struggles to create great work, in spite of and even as a result of personal suffering, echo Gill's life and work. The other chapters deal with theory and practice, including two brief contributions by Japanese nonanalytic authors who provide glimpses of neuropsychological thought in that country. A serious psychoanalytic reader will find here much that is interesting, if nothing that is momentous.