Local Marketing — Off and Running

The APsaA's Local Marketing Project is off and running. After an enormous amount of careful planning by Glenn Good's Subcommittee on Local Marketing Issues, some thirty colleagues spent an entire day during the spring 2001 New Orleans meeting learning about the complex task of marketing psychoanalysis. I represented the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Society (HGPI); more than twenty societies were represented.

The New Orleans meeting filled the bill for the subcommittee. Our local task is to reach out into our many communities, using these newly learned marketing skills to improve the image of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis. For a decade HGPI has been actively implementing the application of psychoanalytic concepts to assist early childhood educators in their work with young children and their families. The Local Marketing Project gave us tools to better sell ourselves to others and to our own members; the workshop gave me more focus and potential to do something similar in Houston.

It was an extremely useful experience. We learned in the morning session about the viewpoints of a cross-section of mental health professionals. It was not pleasant to see and hear the videotapes of “focus groups” asked to give their candid impressions about psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis. We are considered aloof, standoffish, and out of touch. This litany was repeated from four major cities where we are active analytic practitioners, in four different sections of the United States.

I could not continue to deny the negative impression of analysts. I had sensed it in my own community twenty years ago, when a stranger at a party said to me, “I'd never have guessed you were a psychoanalyst. You seem to be warm and outgoing. Usually, psychoanalysts are such cold fish.” It turned out that the stranger was a sociologist at one of our local universities. He also remarked in an offhanded fashion, “Psychoanalysts have a real image problem.”

This exchange took place at the retirement party of a prominent analyst and mentor who spent his retirement involved in community outreach efforts until his death. In a way, I felt he was an analyst before his time; however, he had always noted that Freud had been involved in community outreach efforts. He recalled that Freud was especially interested in the emotional needs of children and adolescents.

If I were not already convinced of the need to address our extremely poor public profile, the morning marketing workshop in New Orleans removed any doubts. The video and audio presentation that morning was riveting. It was clear that it is imperative to communicate with national and local audiences to provide a different impression of psychoanalysts. The negative impressions warrant an organized thrust toward improving our image.

How do we undertake such a task as individuals? The workshop shifted in the afternoon to address this very question. Actual interviews by electronic and print media professionals gave us all a taste of marketing we had never before experienced. We learned how to improve our public image, how to write letters to editors, how to handle interviews with both “hostile” and “friendly” interviewers.

It became vividly clear to me that there was no one who could do this task for us. We must carry our own water. We cannot expect other mental health professionals to do our work in this particular arena.

One of my Texas colleagues was energized by the workshop and by the initiative on local marketing. He has written several letters to the editor of a major central Texas newspaper with success: After one of the letters was published, the paper's editor and a local analyst connected in a useful, adaptive fashion, making future contact more possible. As Leon Hoffman told us at the New Orleans workshop, “You may not make a hit on every letter, but you don't have a chance at all unless you step up to the plate!” The APsaA has elected to step up to the plate, and I for one am pleased.