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The late Merton Gill possessed one of the great minds of modern psychoanalysis. In numerous contributions, he elaborated core concepts in classical metapsychology and the theory of technique. Psychoanalysis in Transition, which appeared posthumously, is neither a summation of Gill's thought nor a final statement of his views. It is an exploration of the latest—and regrettably last—stage in the continuing evolution of Gill's thought: the investigation of the implications of constructivism for clinical theory and psychoanalytic technique.
The perspective on the psychoanalytic situation that Gill presents in this book is that psychoanalysis is a constructivist, hermeneutic science. The facts and meanings with which it is concerned are subjective, unconsciously motivated, and mutually, as well as multiply, determined. This is as true for the analyst as for the analysand, because in all human psychological functioning the experience of the external world is influenced and determined by the internal world and vice versa. That is, internal and external factors are not only mutually interactive but mutually determinative. Each is shaped in part by the other.
The constructivist view implies that a full and proper conceptual- ization of the psychoanalytic situation requires the addition of a twoperson