Listening to the Focus Groups

A fourth phase was added to the Strategic Marketing Project to help interpret the unexpected and worrisome results of the external focus groups (Phase 3). This new interpretative project was conducted in December 2001 in order to discover which behaviors on the part of organized psychoanalysis contribute to the problems discovered in the external focus groups, and which behaviors contribute to the solution. Seven focus groups, representing the Council, the Board, recent graduate analysts, affiliate members, psychotherapy associates, and two local societies, were asked to respond to the preliminary results of the Phase 3 focus groups.

The third phase of the project consisted of seven focus groups conducted across the country during April 2001. The groups, which included three consumer groups and four referral sources groups of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors, produced some challenging results.

While the data from the entire project are still being analyzed, in general consumers reported that they seek referrals for mental health services from family physicians, clergy, and friends. When asked to describe the ideal therapist, they described someone who would listen; someone who would provide interaction and feedback without interjecting their own personal lives or issues; someone who was warm, empathetic, and caring, and who seemed to have common sense; overall, someone in whom they could build a feeling of trust.

Although most of the attributes that consumers ascribed to the ideal therapist are consistent with those valued by psychoanalysis, consumers associated none of those qualities with psychoanalysts. In general, either consumers were unaware of psychoanalysis, or they saw analysis as an obsolete “Freudian approach” for more severely disturbed patients.

Referral source groups said they refer patients to individual clinicians in whom the referrers felt comfort and trust. While crediting psychoanalysis with providing the basis for virtually all forms of “talking therapy,” they almost unanimously described psychoanalysts as intellectual, distant, passive, emotionally flat, impersonal, and rigid. They saw the profession of psychoanalysis as elitist, out of touch, and displaying a condescending attitude toward other mental health professions.

The consumer and referral focus groups were the third phase of a five-phase marketing project. In the first phase, focus groups representing the Board, Council, child analysts, affiliates, associates, and foundation were convened in Chicago in May 2000 to define psychoanalytic messages. In the second phase, our membership took a marketing survey in the winter of 2001 to define our patient population and referral sources. The third phase was conducted to test the messages on the respective populations. The goal was to learn how to increase the number of patients seeking psychoanalytic treatment and the number of mental health professionals referring to psychoanalysts.

Following analysis of the accumulated data from all of these projects, the Strategic Marketing Committee and its consultants will make formal recommendations to the Association, culminating in the adoption of a marketing plan. This report will be presented at the May 2002 annual meeting.