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Psychoanalysis in Transition: A Personal View is a lucid meditation on the psychoanalytic frontier. Merton Gill's death shortly following its publication last year lends a particular reason to be grateful that he chose to speak so frankly. The 10 succinct chapters—the last is a brief conclusion—illuminate the central controversies in psychoanalysis by tracing the philosophical pluralities from which they arise to consulting-room posture. The reader becomes a fly-on-the-wall witnessing decades of lively discussion and debate with Gill and his colleagues, notably Dewald, Gedo, Goldberg, Kanzer, Mitchell, Modell, Pine, Sandler, Schafer, Stein, Wallerstein, and his close collaborator, I. Z. Hoffman, among many others.
The first chapter, “Constructivism and Hermeneutics,” painlessly places psychoanalysis within a philosophical tradition, then quietly serves as a backdrop for the major arguments to come. Gill concludes that all science is constructivist—“a construction rather than a direct reflection of external reality as such” (p. 1)—that science can be hermeneutic, and that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic science. Constructivism, which Gill sees as superordinate to hermeneutics, nevertheless does not mean radical constructivism: “that narratives differ only in their aesthetic appeal” (p. 6).
The next three chapters, “The Internal and the External,” “One-Person and Two-Person Psychology,” and “Neutrality,” flow from the constructivist paradigm and, in essence, address the relative dichotomies between classical psychoanalysis/ego psychology (internal, one-person, drive focus), object relations schools (external, two-person, relational focus), and self psychology, which is identified as a one-person, driveless hybrid. Gill views the dichotomies as “epistomologically untenable” (p. 16); constitution and experience, self and object, and conflict and deficit each shape