Obituary

MERTON MAX GILL (1914-1994)

Merton Gill occupied a unique place in my intellectual and emotional scheme of things. As close friend and colleague, as scientific ideal and moral gadfly, and as research mentor and supporter, albeit—despite mutual wishes that would have had it otherwise—we never worked collaboratively in the same setting. I first met Merton in the early ’50s—now more than four decades ago—when I, at the very start of my career as a psychotherapy researcher was fashioning, together with some colleagues, what evolved into the very massive and ambitious 30-year-long Psychotherapy Research Project of The Menninger Foundation, and was applying to the Foundations’ Fund for Research in Psychiatry for my first extramural grant funding. Merton, whom I knew then only through his early writings on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, which had indeed played a signal role in the conceptual organisation of our project, came as one of the site visitors. He was then, at our first meeting, his characteristic incisive, lucid, probing, at times acerbic and uncomfortably probing, but always at the same time, curiously respectful, self. After the visit none of us could be sure of Merton’s intellectual take on the project but in due course we were informed that we were awarded the grant which helped launch our project on its long career.

It was this show of confidence by Merton in what I could produce that continued to mark and helped to sustain my whole future research career, as when years later, in 1966, I left Topeka and my active directorship of the still ongoing research programme, in order to take up my continuing career in San Francisco, and yet somehow still carry out my commitment to the final clinical accounting of the work and the results of this psychotherapy research project. That is, my book, 42 Lives in Treatment, the chronicle of this 30-year-long research programme, was at that time only a dream for the future, and it was Merton’s continuing faith that I would