ABSTRACT
Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, classical Freudian analysts in the United States began to embrace ideas that had been associated for many decades with interpersonal psychoanalysis. A number of psychoanalysts from the William Alanson White Institute wrote to Gill at that point, drawing his attention to the literature on interpersonal psychoanalysis. Gill preferred a term for the analyst's work that laid more emphasis on the analyst's participation and less on his observation. Gill went so far as to conclude that participant-observation was not a sufficiently radical term to capture the considerable degree of unwitting participation on the analyst's part. Embracing many of the contributions of Edgar Levenson, Gill underscores both the inevitability and the therapeutic power of mutual enactments and the necessity to urge patients to articulate consistently their experience of the analytic relationship and of the participation of the analyst.
