I picked up my copy of TAP [35/3] and was drawn immediately into Glenn Good's article “Putting It Into Words: Developing a Strategic Marketing Network.” I read with heightening interest as he described the tense emotions surrounding the presentation of the findings from the focus groups of non-analyst mental health colleagues. They “gave us something quite surprising and disturbing. … They knew a lot more about psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts than we anticipated. … It wasn't so much that they didn't like psychoanalysis as that they didn't like us.”
Intrigued, I read on. Why didn't they like us? I had my own hunches. By the end of the article, I didn't have any further clue regarding why they didn't like us. But I had a very distinct experience of why I frequently “didn't like us.”
To learn further details from this study, presumably funded with money from my dues and yours, I would have to wait until the representatives from my society brought the information back and found an avenue to pass it on. Very likely I will not be in the right place at the right time to actually receive the detailed information. Why, when my attention was riveted on the issue, did TAP pass up the opportunity to inform me and the rest of the membership who read the article?
My fear is that they felt we were all somehow too fragile to take the news reading alone in our offices, that the information was somehow dangerous if conveyed through a newsletter article. That is my fantasy. I would like to know the facts.
Rachel Z. Ritvo