As more psychoanalysts in San Francisco recognized the value of expanding our dialogue with the community, the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute (SFPI) retained Bobbi Fischer, a communications consultant, to help us change the ways we present ourselves to the world.
Fischer is an expressive, energetic woman with short white hair, dressed trendily in a long, patterned sweater and black leggings on the day we met. Her office is a gleaming Victorian in Preservation Park, a nest of restored homes in downtown Oakland that have been designated for use by the nonprofit organizations and the businesses that serve them. Fischer works exclusively with nonprofit organizations: medical associations of psychiatrists, family practitioners, and plastic surgeons are among her clients, although she confesses to a particular affinity for her clients in the mental health field. Fischer says she feels that professional societies like our own have a great deal to offer their communities, but that they don't always know how to make the right connections to do so.
As we talked in her large, light-filled work area, Fischer explained, “Professional people don't have the time or the training to convey ideas to the public in ways that are engaging.” She adds, “I see myself as a translator who can convey my client's knowledge to the public and become a link between the organization and the community. As I condense complex material I try to communicate the information in an interesting manner that doesn't lose the essence of what that client has to offer.”
She said lay people are hungry for information but often feel excluded by organizations such as The American, which they perceive as arcane, elitist, and difficult for the average person to comprehend. Fischer said she believes their criticisms are relevant, but that she sees The American's organizational attitudes as changing, albeit slowly. Recently she has expanded her contact with psychoanalysis, developing a national strategic communications plan that will support The American's efforts to implement proactive outreach activities and an expanded media relations program.
Fischer started her position in San Francisco with the support of a few key analysts, but with the tremendous skepticism of many who were unconvinced of the value of reaching out to the community and the media. It has been a slow process of winning us over by gradually drawing us into speaking publicly, writing articles, or being interviewed by the media.
“Analysis is an isolating profession,” Fischer observed, “and it takes patient work to convince analysts of the value of bridging the internal life of office practice with the external life of the community and lay public. That's been my biggest frustration, to persuade analysts that their richness of understanding also belongs in the public eye.”
Fischer has been tactfully pursuing our resistance and gradually drawing in more and more members to take part in the recently developed Public Information Committee and Speakers Bureau.
“Making connections with our community can't happen overnight, but I see a real groundswell of group effort in San Francisco that is quite heartening,” Fischer said. Some months ago Fischer conducted a small-scale random telephone survey of attitudes toward psychoanalysis, and the results were shocking. Respondents were almost vitriolic, appraising analysts as cold, unfeeling observers whose main interest was in extracting large fees over an extended period. Psychoanalysis was seen as the indulgent, self-centered prerogative of the rich. The respondents did not know any analysts or analysands personally and had formed their opinions almost totally from the media.
Fischer said this kind of extremely negative opinion indicates a profession in trouble and out of tune with public need, a profession that is going to continue to have a hard time finding patients unless steps can be taken to reestablish its role in American life. We have been so demonized and deprecated in the media (and our own organizational aloofness has contributed to this) that we seemed to scarcely have a human face to the survey respondents.
Fischer has spent a great deal of time examining possible reasons for this negative public image. The very qualities that make people good analysts tend to make them ineffective public communicators, she said. Thoughtfulness, willingness to wait until many points of view are considered, a scrupulous respect for confidentiality—all aspects of the more inner-directed personalities of most analysts—are not always a fit with expressiveness and accessibility. Yet these latter traits are needed in order to help people understand analysts and analysis. Analysts tend to be private people, and this can interfere with reaching out publicly. Fischer said we take pride in getting the words right, in finding just the appropriate expression, and in producing well-considered statements.
Unfortunately this wish for completeness can be paralyzing. The difficult balance between careful consideration and the need for action can leave our organizations bogged down while urgent issues go begging. Fischer says, “Analysts tend to want to do things the ‘right’ way. It is sometimes hard to convey to such careful people that there are many ‘right’ ways, and many paths that can lead to the desired result.” She said selecting a plan and
Katherine MacVicar practices psychoanalysis in Berkeley, California. She is a faculty member at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and is the current president of the Society. She is also on the board of the San Francisco Foundation for Psychoanalysis, which spearheaded the hiring of Fischer as a media consultant.
committing to action is preferable to organizational paralysis.
The news and entertainment media are almost in complete contrast to psychoanalytic practice. The media is always active, hopping on trends that look good and deserting them just as quickly. They go for what is new, attention-getting, and exciting. To garner attention, points must be presented immediately, simply, and in an arresting way. Complicated information is much harder to get across. Psychoanalysis, which does not use technological innovations or produce overnight results, is not a natural fit. The media doesn't understand what analysts do, Fischer observed. Psychological illness, though fascinating to the media, cannot be seen or quantified, making it much more ambiguous and harder to portray. The one way they can deal with it is through exaggeration, cartoon, or satire. In wanting to make something understandable of us they portray us as self-centered neurotics, negligent charlatans, or out-and-out criminals.
Does all this mean that analysts should change and try and fit the modern mold? Fischer thinks not. Analysts cannot be pop psychologists, she says, and shouldn't try to be. They have to remain themselves and maintain standards in order to offer valuable insights and services to the public. But analysts do need to find a way to represent themselves in an engaging, interesting way. What does she say to the critics in our field who look askance at publicity?
“Analysts are very concerned about both bragging and oversimplifying”, she admits. “They take themselves seriously and don't always see that in talking to the media you can be light without being light-headed. I don't see publicity as bragging. In fact, in our age of rapid communication, it is a kind of arrogance not to reach out to the public.”
Fischer said analysts can remain who they are yet position themselves so the public can see what the profession has to offer. “It's terrific when psychoanalysis is showcased in The New Republic or The New Yorker, but it would be even better to reach out to many levels of society,” she said.
She said she looks to the day when analysts interested in film would be asked to write for Entertainment Weekly, or when analysis is featured on a regular basis in the general press. In San Francisco recently, the Sunday magazine section of a local paper printed a reasonably positive article about the three other psychoanalytic institutes, pointedly leaving out SFPI because our institute was seen as the most established, the benchmark for newer institutes. We wrote a letter complimentary of the article that highlighted the importance of our institute without complaining about the article itself. In fact, Fischer said, most readers of the publication didn't get beyond the cover, which featured an illustration of Sigmund Freud and the headline, “Freud Lives!” “That headline bespeaks a thriving atmosphere for analysis in San Francisco, and that's the message the public received,” Fischer said.
“I don't see publicity as bragging. In fact, in our age of rapid communication, it is a kind of arrogance not to reach out to the public.”
Last summer, Fischer served as media liaison for the IPA Congress in San Francisco. IPA officers are famously alarmed about bad press, and Fischer had to tactfully take all their concerns into account while adapting their technique of careful control over press exposure with the needs of American and international journalists. She was very impressed by both the caliber of interviews given by analysts and the widespread interest in psychoanalysis in the American and international press. Selected topics in which the media would be interested, such as the Elise B. Heyman lecture on the Holocaust, were opened to the media while panels of experts on other topics were preselected by IPA for private interviews. Fischer worked with IPA officials in searching through the program to find analysts with expertise in areas with public appeal, and the association hosted a special press briefing on the roots of violence. Providing the press with immediate access to areas both interesting and digestible to them seemed to be effective and addressed members' concerns over issues of confidentiality.
Fischer has also been involved in helping San Francisco communicate our interests and expertise through Newsroom, a psychoanalytic newsletter that she sends bimonthly to over six hundred representatives of newspapers, television and radio stations, and wire services. The publication contains short interviews with local analysts on subjects of interest. The media are invited to interview analysts if they want to pursue a topic.
Fischer said she also believes analysts can be taught the art of the TV, radio, or newspaper interview. In a series of workshops she has instructed dozens of analysts in being expressive by using hand and body language, projecting emotions, and controlling an interview in order to make a point.
Fischer said the media training sessions we've conducted for analysts in San Francisco have been very useful as our organization reaches out to the community. She noted that analysts speak to each other in a kind of shorthand the public doesn't understand; that our language excludes others rather than explains our point of view. The training sessions help analysts speak the public's language.
Fischer has helped analysts in San Francisco enjoy successful interviews by the press. “We're all taught to answer questions correctly. What I try to teach is that we can take a reporter's question and bridge to a point we want to make.”
We can be in control of the interview once we learn how. Initially many of us resorted to the analytic “poker face” on screen; we were then horrified to see how wooden and dead we looked, and worked on learning to give it up. Over the Christmas season a group of us appeared on local television, manning a holiday-stress hotline. While this was not without stress for the participants, we could certainly see from the barrage of calls what a need it met for the public. And when a local analyst gave a radio interview, she received forty calls from listeners interested in analysis!
I asked Fischer about the importance of recent highly publicized incidents, such as the Frederick Crews article in the New York Review of Books or the canceling of the Freud exhibit by the Library of Congress. “These are blessings in disguise,” she said, “since they have given a platform for many analysts to be interviewed or to write letters, and so to bring analysis more out into the open.” She said they are also wake-up calls, reminding us that we can not be complacent about acceptance. But
since the media are quick to pick up on any trend that leaps out, even unfortunate events give us an opportunity for publicity that we can use positively.
I asked about managed care, which has swept through many states, destroying therapists' ability to do long-term psychotherapy. Fischer said analysts should not try to fit in with such “quick fix” attempts but should define themselves aalternatives to managed care. This is another example of a stumbling block that can be transformed into a stepping stone. The public is fast becoming disenchanted with brief, biologically oriented solutions to psychological conflict, and Fischer said we can educate the public to become more receptive to a treatment where time, careful listening, and empathic interventions allow for much more meaningful contact.
“I am also concerned that the public doesn't realize how much of their privacy has been breached by managed care, and I'd like to see psychoanalysts become vocal champions of confidentiality,” she said.
Many of us in San Francisco have become more comfortable with the print and electronic media as a result of Fischer's training and encouragement. Newspaper and television interviews are not easy, as Fischer readily admits. “You have to say your piece clearly and succinctly, and you have to try to say it in a relaxed, friendly manner. On television only a few minutes of your interview will by shown; four minutes is a long segment in this arena.
“In a newspaper interview many of your statements will be left out, broken up, and used in whatever way the interviewer thinks will fit the article. Afterward you have to endure the criticism of colleagues who think you're being simple-minded or self-promoting, but we can respond to those naysayers by emphasizing that psychoanalysis as a profession may not survive—in fact will not survive—if it becomes invisible.”
If psychoanalysis is to flourish, Fischer said, we must reach out to the media rather than treating the press as though it were the enemy.
Fischer has begun to show us how we can adapt our knowledge and viewpoint to the public's needs and communicate the value of psychoanalysis.
“The analysts I have met in my work in San Francisco and with the IPA, as well as the many members of The American I met in New York last December, have confirmed my commitment to work with the organization. I guess you could say I am passionate about opening the doors of analysis and expanding the possibilities for communication,” she said.