You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
With the death of Merton Gill, Psychoanalytic Inquiry has lost a wonderful contributor and supporter. In 1984, Merton worked with Mel Bornstein to turn out a stellar Commentary on his and Irwin Hoffman's Analysis of Transference. Speaking at the American Psychoanalytic Association Meet-the-Author, Merton acknowledged that through responding to the essays in the journal issue, he reconsidered some of his points of view. The brilliance of Merton lay not in his conceptualizations, great as they were in ego psychology and later in social constructivism, but in his reconceptualizations. Merton could carry an idea to its logical limits and recognize when he had exploded the boundaries of its worth. That is a rare form of brilliance—a true follower of Freud.
At a meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association held in New York many years ago, I was asked to chair a discussion group on reconstruction. I ran into Merton at a cocktail party the night before and he told me he was coming to my workshop. In my instant awe I said, “Oh, no, Merton! You should be running it.” “No,” he said, “Joe, you run—I heckle.” Our field will dearly miss so remarkably constructive a heckler.