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Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.
Not since leo stone's The Psychoanalytic Situation (1963) has a book about psychoanalytic treatment caught my interest as much as Merton Gill's and Irwin Hoffman's Analysis of Transference (1982). Stone's slim volume was like a refreshing breeze of relaxed spontaneity wafting over the rigidly ruled technical percepts that had guided psychoanalytic treatment during the post-Freudian supremacy of Hartmann's ego psychology. Stone's opus was received with much skepticism and only gradually gained a wider hearing. But quiet waters run deep, and the appearance of Gill and Hoffman's monographs testifies to the sea change that is occurring in psychoanalysis and to which the Analysis of the Transference makes an important contribution.
Analysis of Transference is a bold yet carefully thought out, scholarly, and, on the whole, successful attempt to clarify our thinking about transference by a systematic reexamination of current usage in actual practice. Gill and Hoffman (1982), in a companion volume, illustrate the main issues by videotaped transcripts.
Gill finds the general technical quality of much psychoanalytic practice not to his taste. In these volumes he addresses himself primarily