Transference Analysis: Means or End?

Over the years psychoanalysts have invoked different organizing frameworks as vehicles for theoretical and clinical discourse. The concept of “identity” was a prominent theme in the 1960s, to be supplanted by a focus on the “self” in the 1970s. Now, in the 1980s, preoccupation with the self and its vicissitudes is giving way to a revived interest in the psychoanalytic process per se. In part the result of a growing disillusionment with proliferating alternative theories, this renewed interest may have been kindled as well by the debate over Kohut's “self psychology” and its attentiveness to the role of empathy in the analytic transaction. Schafer's The Analytic Attitude (1983) and Anton Kris's Free Association: Method and Process (1983) exemplify this new focus on the psychoanalytic process. It is in this emerging tradition that Merton Gill's two-volume study, The Analysis of the Transference (Gill, 1982; Gill & Hoffman, 1982) must be situated as well. Like Schafer and Kris, Gill seeks to explicate the methods and goals of psychoanalysis by concentrating on a particular dimension of the analytic process. What narrative content is to Shafer and free association is to Kris, the analysis of transference is to Gill.

Gill's position is informed by the conviction that the analysis of the transference, which he considers “the heart of psychoanalytic technique,” has not been consistently pursued in practice. By and