In 1991, in TAP 25/1, Merton Gill “spoke his mind,” welcoming the opportunity to state some of his views informally and more personally than is usual in the standard journal format. Five years later, I find myself turning to that essay, trying to capture the man in my personal homage to him. Merton Gill died November 13, 1994, at the age of eighty, after a long struggle with coronary artery disease.
Gill's TAP essay succinctly outlines his professional evolution. For those interested in a comprehensive review of his remarkable analytic contributions, I recommend Irwin Z. Hoffman's excellent chapter, “Merton M. Gill: A Study in Theory Development in Psychoanalysis,” in Joseph Reppen's Beyond Freud (1985). Here I will simply highlight a bit of the man who in 1963 authored the masterful Topography and Systems in Psychoanalytic Theory (Psychological Issues Monograph 10)—a work that was the organizer of my early psychoanalytic education—and then changed his mind!
Gill was introduced to analysis as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where he also attended medical school. In 1941 he began his residency at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. There he studied with Roy Schafer, George Klein, Margaret Brenman, and—most important—David Rapaport, with whom he enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration. In 1963 Gill was awarded an NIMH lifetime Research Career Award, by which point he had also been appointed training analyst at both the Western New England and the San Francisco Institutes. At the time of his death, he had been at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago for twenty-three years. At last December's meeting of The American, Gill was the posthumous recipient of a Sigourney Award, which his widow, analyst Ilse Judas, accepted on his behalf.
Gill reflected that the single most important theoretical change in his analytic thinking during his career was his abandonment of the classical Freudian metapsychology in favor of a hermeneutic one. “Psychoanalysis is not a natural science…,” he wrote in TAP, “but rather is a science of human meanings.” He also remarked that the single most important clinical change in his views was the increasing importance he ascribed to the role of the analyst as a person and as a participant in the therapeutic interaction. In any analytic process, he insisted, there is continuous interaction between analyst and analysand. Gill in fact has become widely known for his emphasis on the centrality of the interaction in the here and now. Well aware of his reputation as an interpersonalist, he was careful to point out that the interpersonal interaction he spoke of is one that is intrapsychically experienced. Central to his conception, however, is the idea that the psyche is not a closed system. Over the past decade, his work with Irwin Hoffman involved him in social constructivism.
On a more personal level, Merton Gill has been a moving force in Chicago since my early training days. As part of my graduation paper, I interviewed local analytic notables on the impact of the analyst's gender. This was in the early 1980s. In my first meeting with Merton, he reflected that he had never considered the subject of gender, and then proceeded spontaneously to deliver a ninety-minute lecture! In that moment, my idealization became fixed. Quite apart from the impression made by his prodigious intellect, his manner was intense, his voice remarkable. So sonorous in fact was it that in 1982 he was asked to narrate William Russo's Carousel Suite on the life of Erik Erikson.
Then there was his wonderful humor. In the decade following our initial interview, I had the good fortune to know him socially. Whenever we would meet, he would at once ask my husband, “Do you have any good jokes?” Merton would delight in sharing the latest, inevitably recounting one in Yiddish. Only then would it be time for more serious topics. After a conference at which he gave a stunning discussion of a paper, I told him, provocatively, that he was sexist. In mock indignation he informed me that he had been a feminist long before I was born. When one of my analysands suggested that I audiotape her analysis, Merton actively encouraged me, teasing that the tapes would become part of a very small “museum of psychoanalysis.” He was fervent about the need for research on the analytic situation. Hoffman in fact considers one of Gill's important contributions to be his pioneering effort to make the raw data of psychoanalysis available for study by independent observers.
I will always recall the last years at meetings of The American, when Merton and Ilse would sit toward the back for long, long, panel presentations. I knew how ill and exhausted he was, yet he wanted to hear and participate as long as possible. If you were lucky enough to hear Gill comment on your presentation, you could be sure that his remarks, positive or not, would be respectful and thoughtful. He was a maverick, to be sure, and defended his positions with vigor, but he always considered other points of view. In a 1984 volume on self psychology, edited by Arnold Goldberg, Gill observed that he kept changing his mind about his assessments of self psychology, even as he delivered a third draft. “I should also tell you that after a quite conscientious study of both Kohut's and post-Kohutian writing, I emerged significantly more respectful of the theory than I was when I began. Indeed, I changed my mind a number of times during the preparation… . I will essentially present my ideas as they were in that third draft; to do otherwise would be unfair to my discussants. [However,] I may have a chance to express some additional views.”
How we will miss those additional views and his bridge-building role in psychoanalysis. With his death, psychoanalysis has lost one of its giants. We should take heart in his prediction and know that his thinking will live on. “What will happen to analysis…,” he wrote in that TAP article, “is unpredictable. But it will never die. It contains too much truth for that to happen.”