Response

Dear Sir

The sentence of my paper J. Schachter refers to—‘that the reduction of transference to interaction … impoverishes rather than enriches the capacity for psychoanalytic investigation’ (p. 259)—must be completed by the parenthetic clause ‘as might be deduced from some of Gill’s radical arguments’. I mention the sentence in full because in my reading of Gill—whom I very much admire for his lucid, precise and profound investigation into psychoanalytic concepts—I have at times felt puzzled by a usage of the concept of interaction that in my opinion is often absolute and radical; this is particularly evident when Gill brings his theoretical and methodological speculation close to the clinical and technical field. While maintaining that the analytic situation, including interpretations, is an interactive one, and while demonstrating that interaction is intrinsic to the analytic procedure and that the decisive criterion of psychoanalysis is the analysis of transference (i.e., in his words, that the patient’s experience of the interaction is made explicit), it seems to me that he is pushing his