Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Dear Sir:

I agree very much with Merton Gill that our exchanges of letters have clarified the very substantial areas where we do agree and also the remaining and substantial areas where we continue to disagree. I think that I can respond to his reply to my response to his first letter quite briefly.

To respond sequentially: We are in full accord about the centrality of the interpersonal aspects of the psychoanalytic situation, and I did state in my response to Gill's first letter that the developing redefinition of the transference in this two-body or interactional directive is something that Gill has played a major role in expounding, and has done so very persuasively.

We are equally in accord that I do not now, nor have I ever, felt that Gill has either ever accepted or returned to Alexander's conception of the 'corrective emotional experience' which both Gill and I have seen as an attempted manipulation of the transference relationship which has no place in psychoanalysis proper, whatever place some may find for it in some psychotherapies. I feel that I have been very clear about this in my written comments both about Gill's views as of his 1954 paper and in his most recent papers. I feel, rather, that Gill confused this point at first, thinking that I thought his recent papers represented 'a return to Alexander' on this point; that misconception however has now been clarified.

Where Gill and I still do disagree are on two main issues. First, I do feel that he has returned to Alexander in a different regard, in what I consider a blurring of the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in his most recent writings (and in contrast to his 1954 paper where he tried so hard to counteract Alexander's efforts to amalgamate psychoanalytic psychotherapy to psychoanalysis by clarifying and sharpening the conceptual boundaries between them). The nub of our difference is Gill's current belief that any therapy that tries to analyze the transference as completel