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Knowing the importance of Merton M. Gill's work in the psychoanalytic field, particularly in English-speaking countries, I feel very honored, as a French psychoanalyst, to contribute to this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. In spite of Franco-American exchanges over the last few years, psychoanalytic research in either language remains relatively little known to the other. This is not due merely to lack of information but also to a disparity at times in how analysis is practiced and views its objectives. It seems to me that where this disparity exists, it stems from a difference in concept of fundamental questions. The way therapy is practiced and the particular questions the analyst poses, or asks himself, depend essentially on how he conceives such notions as the unconscious or the drives. Obviously, in the course of practice, these fundamental notions are not present or explicit all the time, but they act as underlying presuppositions or prejudices, which imperceptibly determine the way the analyst intervenes with a patient or what theoretical problems he chooses to investigate.
Reading Gill and Hoffman's work (1982), I realize it would not be adequate to write the usual book review or compare the theses