Response to Dr DeLaCour

Dear Sirs,

I want to thank Edmund DeLaCour for giving me the opportunity to clarify what may be ambiguous both about my position and my depiction of Merton Gill's position. Gill and I had a number of conversations over the years about the very issues Dr DeLaCour raises, and I do not wish to misrepresent his point of view.

Gill was a man who so loved to argue that, in a real sense, it seems unfair that we should now be arguing about his views in his absence, although I am sure he would wish no less. As I suggested in a memorial volume on his legacy (Smith, 2000), he argued not only with others, but constantly with himself, changing his perspective when he was persuaded to a better way. In 1954, for example, he was a firm believer in the objectivity of the analyst's position (Gill, 1954). He later said he disagreed with everything he wrote in that paper, as he adopted and promoted a perspectivist and constructivist point of view, arguing strongly that there is a continuous interaction in the analytic work, that the analyst is influencing the patient at all times, and that these influences on the patient's transference must be pursued and understood ‘relentlessly’, as Dr DeLaCour points out. It was, in fact, on the matter of this very relentlessness that his collaborator and friend Irwin Hoffman began to diverge from Gill, suggesting that there is a dialectical movement in the work between interpretive and non-interpretive interventions and that not everything need be put into words.

As Gill himself later acknowledged, he was a man who went ‘to extremes’ (1997, p. 216), and he often had to backtrack from those extremes when others persuaded him they were excessive or that his own clinical work belied them. He was ready to admit as much, as when he acknowledged to Roy Schafer that his 1982 monograph was too single-mindedly focused on the here and now interpretation of the transference.

It is this latter work (Gill, 1982) to which I am referring in my article, when I speak o