In previous columns I have supported the strategies and plans that enhance local outreach to communities, potential candidates, and patients. These grassroots programs are diverse and evolve from the specific needs of the community. Participating in teaching and seminars, holding discussions at art festivals, being involved in community services, hosting parent-child seminars, designing scientific meetings to be more inviting to other professionals, and providing room under our psychoanalytic umbrella to accommodate those interested in understanding the mind—these are just a few examples of these efforts.
John Blamphin, an expert communication consultant and former public affairs director of the American Psychiatric Association, advised us,
Your outreach must be both national through “The American” and local through societies and institutes. You are known nationally as a profession and an association. But as “all politics is local,” individual psychoanalysts don't exist nationally; you live and work in cities and towns and communities. In the end, it will be grassroots psychoanalysts as individuals who make the case for psychoanalytic theory. This means that individual analysts … have to get out of the office and mix it up with other professional colleagues, the media, with politicians, and school teachers, lawyers, clergy, and the family next door.
“In the end, it will be grassroots psychoanalysts as individuals who make the case for psychoanalytic theory. Individual analysts … have to get out of the office and mix it up with other professional colleagues, the media, with politicians, and school teachers, lawyers, clergy, and the family next door.”
As I travel and meet with our societies, I feel encouraged, and I sense a new vigor and creativity Our membership is increasingly aware of how important it is to emerge from splendid isolation and to make a clear statement about what we can offer, our unique analytic perspective and understanding, and how psychoanalysis can help people attain a greater degree of personal freedom and a richer life. Mystification may temporarily attract attention, but it does little to enrich our profession, and aloofness serves to further isolate us as clinicians.
I see growth and I experience progress in our efforts to “mix it up” with our communities and to let it be known that analysts are thoughtful, knowledgeable, and humane professionals who make important contributions.
I would like to turn, however, to a few old habits that undermine these efforts.
Confidence in ourselves and conviction in what we can offer as psychoanalysts are essential. Arrogance and grandiosity, however, continue to be harmful. Such traits find expression in various forms. Not infrequently, we pontificate and are unable and unwilling to listen or learn. In efforts to highlight our analytic work, we somehow feel the need to depreciate other forms of therapy. We may proclaim unreal and wish-fulfilling goals. We condescend and isolate ourselves from other mental health professionals. We draw unfair, demoralizing, and judgmental divisions between “real analysis” and “analytically oriented” work. Commenting on the defensive and self-aggrandizing nature of these behaviors and attitudes seems superfluous for this readership.
We are drained and depleted by internal organizational struggles. This is clearly evident on the national scene but is equally visible at the local society and institute level. It is very difficult to invest in outreach if one is angry with and disillusioned by the local or national group. A few examples from my travels may illustrate this.
A town meeting with Society/Institute X seemed to go quite well. The discussion was lively and “flowed.” There were some innovative ideas. I noticed, however, that most of the participants were “preaching to the choir”—relating the value of psychoanalysis and analytic thinking—and I found myself working to focus on the question, “What are we going to do locally to increase practice, to attract more candidates, and to improve the tarnished image of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts?” There were only a handful of younger members present, and they seemed unusually quiet. Several days after the meeting, I received a letter from one of the more junior members: “Our energy and outlook [are undermined] by an unreflected-upon patrimony…. The ‘Seniors’ did not only not ‘take care’ of psychoanalysis as our shared property they did not teach those of us coming after them how to ‘speak it’ to the community, and they failed to nurture the continuing flow of new recruits—candidates.” The writer went on to describe how the local society's membership criteria are so narrow that there is no place in the group for therapists who had completed most but not all of the training, or the local psychoanalytic psychotherapy program graduates.
A senior training analyst wrote,
Unfortunately our Society has become, in a … smaller way, a reflection or a clone of the American, regarding bureaucracy, attention to legal details, administrative complexities, etc. It is as if structure has
Newell Fischer is president of APsaA.
Page 3replaced the original function from which the structure was created … If we continue in this path we are going soon to end up analyzing each other.
An advanced candidate from another society/institute wrote,
I read the [Open Line e-mail forum] occasionally … and continue to be amazed at the ranting and raving of a few. I have been tempted to post my own message, “You people are nuts!!” … I would agree that unless we significantly change psychoanalytic education it will die. It has taken great stamina on my part to participate in an educational system that focuses on keeping me in a regressed, paranoid position when the reality is that I am … [an] extremely well regarded and professionally competent psychiatrist in the community. As I am ready to graduate, I am seriously considering having nothing more to do with the Institute … Thank you for visiting us and for speaking what the rest of us are thinking.
At one society/institute I visited, after about ten minutes of cordiality, it became apparent that the agenda in my head about outreach would have to be abandoned. It clearly did not speak to what the thirty members in attendance wanted to talk about I put away my ten-minute video about the Strategic Marketing Study; it would have been inappropriate and insensitive. For the next ninety minutes I was confronted with a heated and angry barrage of comments and questions about the rigidity and elitism of the Association, its insensitivity to the real needs of the local group and its members. This steady and impassioned flow was occasionally interrupted by “We know, Newell, you are only the messenger, but …” Before I left, the group insisted I take some sandwiches back to my hotel for an evening snack.
Does this sampling of my experiences on the road represent the majority of our members? I personally doubt it. Does it reflect a sizable number of people and perhaps a significant number of our societies/institutes? I believe it does. My focus in our town meetings has been on outreach, and in these meetings we have not fully addressed these internal struggles. I am concerned that unless we put our full energies into these outreach endeavors—into marketing and candidate recruitment—and start doing business differently, we are going to shrivel up and our place in the therapeutic and intellectual world will become trivial. There is a strong sense of movement and renewed vigor in APsaA. The Association has recognized that its job at the national level is to support societies and institutes in their grassroots outreach with resource materials, training, and counsel. APsaA's public affairs efforts have blossomed and grown nationally. The strategic marketing workshops have been well attended. At the local level, where the action really is, we are increasingly “mixing it up.”
There is ferment and growth, but our time frame is short. We need growth in the profession. Time is of the essence; we need the dedication and energy of every member at the local level, and of APsaA at the national level, if we are to prevail.