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.
The honor of being asked to discuss a chapter by Merton Gill, whose prodigious contributions to psychoanalysis I have been studying since I was a young graduate student during the mid-1960s, has led me to reflect on my psychoanalytic heroes, that is, those analytic theorists who have been most influential in shaping the development of my own thinking. There are five. First, of course, is Freud, without whom there would be no psychoanalytic theory to be dialoguing about. A second is Winnicott, whose remarkable insights into the psychology of the self and human intersubjectivity were expressed more in the form of evocative poetic imagery—for example, “There is no such thing as an infant” (1965, p. 39)—than in systematic theory. Third is George Klein (1976), whose incisive proposals for a “radical theorectomy” for psychoanalysis have not received the attention they deserve, largely, I believe, because he did not accompany his theoretical revisions with detailed clinical exemplification of their therapeutic implications. My fourth and fifth psychoanalytic heroes are Heinz Kohut and Merton Gill, both from the Chicago Institute, both initially steeped in classical metapsychology, and both eventually proposing radical alternatives to traditional theory. Over the years I felt upset whenever I learned, more from hearsay than from published criticism, of significant dissonance between the views of Kohut and Gill. How could there be disharmony between my two most current heroes?
Gill's chapter in this volume has enabled me to form a much clearer picture of the nature of this discordance and of the historical reasons for