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Dear Sirs,
There is much to appreciate and much controversial ground covered in Henry Smith's (2003) probing, complex and clinically rich depiction of North American trends in the
analysis of transference. In his survey he concentrates especially on the work of four contemporary analysts, beginning with Merton Gill. My objection to his paper is that I believe he fundamentally misconstrues Gill's views and then criticizes him on the basis of that misunderstanding. In doing so he ends up aligning Gill with a point of view about the analyst's objectivity which Gill was actually influential in undermining. Gill's criticism of analytic objectivity helped to pave the way for the more interactive conception of the psychoanalytic process that now characterizes the North American scene. For a historically oriented paper suggesting lines of influence from theorists to current practice, this is an error worth correcting.
Smith begins accurately enough: ‘Gill advocated a particular approach to the transference, focusing on the “plausibility” of the patient's perception of the analyst, which he linked to the analyst's actual behavior …’ (p. 1024). But Smith goes on to conclude erroneously that ‘Gill advocates looking for what is plausible in the patient's transference, which implies that the analyst can judge which of the patient's perceptions are plausible and which are not; in this sense [Gill] relies on the analyst's relative objectivity with respect to the patient’ (p. 1026). He contrasts this unfavorably with Schwaber, who ‘on the other hand, would argue that transference is a perception, not a distortion’ (p. 1026).
This is the opposite of Gill's views on the possibility of analytic objectivity, on the analyst's technical stance, and on transference as distortion. Gill's position in these regards can be seen in two related propositions he developed in his monograph on the analysis of transference: first, that the analyst's claims of objectivity in any given clinical moment