I have noted the frequent occurrence of comments that precede prepared presentations and spontaneous contributions from the floor during keynotes and panels at a psychoanalytic conference. Borrowing from conversation analysis, I refer to these comments as “preannouncements” and classify them according to their apparent intent, dynamic meaning, and affective impact on the audience and the organizers of conference panels.
Working in my private office beyond a shared waiting room, I often got shaken out of my reverie by the loud “Hello!” of a colleague's patient. As she is not my patient, I have no opportunity to develop my curiosity into a shared attitude of inquiry about the meaning of this behavior. It serves as a signal of her arrival. I imagine she is saying, “Here I am.” Perhaps she is calling her therapist to attention, as if to say, “Be ready for me. The session has already begun.” But it catches my attention, and I find myself wondering why she does this and who is her intended audience. Is she speaking loudly so that I will hear? Is her message for him—or for me? Or perhaps her message is for both of us, like that of a child of divorce who has to inform both parents of everything to keep the couple intact in her mind. Either way, it always lets me know that she is here to see him. She announces her arrival prior to arriving, as if she is her own herald. She makes a preannouncement.
At a recent psychoanalytic conference, I became aware that many speakers do something similar at the opening edge of the time boundary. Unlike the patient, they do not start early, but, having been introduced formally by their respective chairs and knowing the allotment of time they have been given, they announce themselves. They use some of their allotted time on the program for metacommunications about their being about to speak. As in the situation with the colleague's patient, I am not in a position to engage with them in an analysis of their experience. Without a co-examination of the behavior I am left to wonder if the speakers' comments are consciously purposeful, or unconsciously motivated and if so by which possible factors. My point is that, like the patient, the speakers are engaging in a form of preannouncement—a term taken from the worlds of the stock market, literature and medicine
Preannouncement appears as a conversational format in medicine where the preannouncement takes the form of preparing the patient to receive bad news well (Maynard 2004). The preannouncement has the effect of increasing the medical authority of the doctor and improving the patient's acceptance of the frightening diagnosis. “Such ‘preannouncements’ advertise the kind of conversation that follows, they cancel out distractions and indicate a special need for attention. They also indicate which response is expected. What is interesting is that conversation analysis (Heritage, 2011) shows that such preannouncements co-organize the type of the following ‘empathic moments'“ (Buchholz and Kächele, 2015). Whether in finance, medicine or literature, the tone of the preannouncement is as important as the words in carrying out the speaker's intention and eliciting the desired reaction in the listener.
Preannouncement occurs in storytelling, when narrators tell about the story they are going to tell (Goodwin, 1984; Jefferson, 1978; Mandelbaum, 2013; Stivers, 2008). It occurs in writing an abstract for a journal to let the reader know whether the article is likely to be of interest. In teaching or presenting, it is useful for framing a presentation. In
medicine the physician prepares to communicate frightening information. In literature the writer communicates the premise to the individual reader. In finance the communication is a written statement to warn the public. In these various circumstances the preannouncement is effective.
In another setting, that of a psychoanalytic conference, I have noticed preannouncement may be used effectively as the session chair introduces the speaker and the topic. But I have observed that speakers, chairs and speakers from the floor make preliminary utterances, having nothing to do with the topic and wasting time before delivering the meat of the message. They use preannouncement ineffectively. In this instance, I see preannouncement as a form of defense to defuse anxiety and express covert feelings such as passive aggression. I will describe a short study in which I explore the defensive aspects of these preannouncements, describe their effects on me, consider the impact of the environment, and develop hypotheses about the speakers' conscious and unconscious intentions in making preannouncements. I think of their utterances as perversions of preannouncement.
I became aware of a few examples of defensive preannouncement during the first day of a large conference of psychoanalysts. The program committee had arrived at a democratic design to give many participants time to express their views. Some psychoanalysts were assigned to give 25-minute presentations, others were to respond with 10-minute discussions, and the others were invited to give short comments from the floor. I noticed it was difficult for speakers to use their time efficiently and simply say what they thought about the topic at hand. Curious, I decided to use the next day of the conference to make a more systematic research into this phenomenon.
The sample consisted of speeches from the podium and the floor on Day 2 of a psychoanalytic conference. The method was data collection followed by sorting. The data to be collected would be confined to preannouncements detected and recorded by hand in order of utterance, and later transcribed in Word, and then sorted.
The collected data comprised 21 preannouncements, 18 of which began with the pronoun “I” and 3 began with “Here,” “OK” or “Two.” Examples include: (1) I thought of several things to say before I begin here; (2) I will try to be as brief as possible; (3) I am so sorry for my English; (4) I have a long and complicated case to present in the short time I have been given. So I have had to cut it; (5) I would like to begin by…; (6) I'm going to skip over this section, and if there's time maybe we can come back to it.
The collected data were then subjected to a sorting process. I chose categories according to my estimate of the speaker's motivation based on my observation of the preannouncement's effect on me, on the chair of each session and on the audience.
For instance, when a speaker said, “I would like to begin by,” my first response was one of impatience. I thought, “Why not just begin and get on with it, for time is short.” So what is the purpose of this preface? I think it is the speaker's way of orienting herself and waiting for the audience to connect. So I think of it as a comment that asks the speaker and the audience to pay attention. Similarly, the comment, “I would like to read the last part which is the summary,” asks for attention as to the place in the presentation that the speaker has reached, and has the additional intention of orienting the listener. This masquerades as a fair use of preannouncement; a competent summary is obviously a summary and hardly needs to be announced.
When a speaker said, “I will be brief,” I was puzzled. I thought, “If he wants to be brief why take time to say so. It defeats the intention.” Again I wondered about the purpose: “Is he just reminding himself of the conference guidelines, does he want my approval for his compliance, is he securing my attention by reminding me I won't have much to listen to?” How might I sort this? It could go in a bin of superfluous or self-defeating commentary, but I think its main effect is to signal compliance with the expectations of the program.
Other preannouncements serve to express ambivalence about the conference design and the authority vested in the chairs. If the chair creates the framework of the session and introduces the speaker and the title of her talk, she can benefit from that and move smoothly and efficiently into her presentation. On the other hand, she can attack it by preannouncing her intentions and her feelings about the authority of the session and program chairs.
Session chairs can use preannouncement to express aggression against the structure of the conference of which they are an integral part. For instance, when a chair says, “I'm going to play the role of the evil one and tell you your time is up,” he identifies with, and applies, the conference time boundary guidelines but subtly conveys his feeling that timekeeping is a malignant activity. He holds the line with the speaker, identifies with audience disappointment at loss
of opportunity, and tries to fend off any rebellion from the speaker or protest from the audience by agreeing in advance that he is evil for ending the session.
When a speaker said, “I am sorry for my English,” I felt as though I should reassure her that she would be understandable, but I had to reassure myself instead that the apology did not carry either the implication that I thought her English was unworthy to listen to (even though I was attending in order to hear her views) or the accusation that English is unfairly the main language. Either way, the apology has induced an expectation of difficulty and discomfort, possibly even guilt in the listener.
When a speaker said naughtily, “I'm going to say something I shouldn't,” he was warning us of what was to come, of something that might annoy the audience, but might also thrill us. I sensed he wanted to warn us of his wish that we should join him in his pleasure in rebellion.
When a speaker said before continuing his talk, “I will skip a few slides,” I had a strong reaction. Why not eliminate the slides ahead of time so she presents only the right number of slides to illustrate the presentation of that length? Or if the speaker catches himself in a miscalculation, why not simply move to the next relevant slide without announcing those being missed? Knowing there are slides that might be as useful as the ones I have already seen, makes me want to see them. Something is being held in front of me that I cannot have. This type of preannouncement invokes loss and longing, and envy of the full breast that cannot be fully emptied.
A more extreme example comes from the speaker who would have presented a long and complicated case and told the audience she had had to cut it. This tells the audience she has so much more to give and appeals to the audience to ask for restitution. The sense of violence done to precious clinical material induces not only loss and longing but also protest against the conference design. The preannouncement serves to excite the audience to align with the speaker in protesting the time boundaries under which she has to function in order to share the space.
Lastly, one comment “OK. Anyway …” made no sense at all. I originally put it in the category “Unclassifiable.” Then I realized that in its context it had been used as if to connect with the previous speech and quickly move past it. So that thought gave rise to a new category “Preannouncements as Segues.”
The sorting process for the 21 comments led to the following proposal for a system of classification of preannouncement according to the following categories:
1. Catching Attention
I would like to begin by…
I would just like to say that…
I have a question:
I have a comment:
Two comments (I hope they're graphic):
I thought of several things to say before I begin here
2. Orienting the Listener
I would like to read the last part, which is the summary.
Here are my concluding remarks:
3. Apologizing for Discomfort
I am so sorry for my English
I must confess an inhibition in discussing this paper because I read an earlier paper just before Easter and screwed up my email and never received the paper I should discuss.
I just want to mention that I am here because my colleague has a family problem. I just have some improvised notes and they're not linear either.
I'm going to say something I shouldn't:
4. Identifying with the Conference Guidelines
a. compliantly
I will be brief.
I'll be quick with this.
I will try and be as brief as possible.
I have prepared some short comments.
b. aggressively
b 1) Aggressively identifying with the guidelines to fend off aggression
I'm going to play the role of the evil one and tell you your time is up.
b 2) Identifying with the guidelines but in ways to excite loss and longing
I will skip a few slides.
I'm going to skip over this section, and if there's time maybe we can come back to it.
I will just finish up here and read the last two paragraphs.
b 3) Identifying with the guidelines but in ways to excite loss, longing and protest
I have a long and complicated case to present but I can't present it all in the short time I have been given. So I have had to cut it.
5. Manufacturing a Segue
Ok. Anyway.
What preannouncements have in common is their apparently perambulatory quality. A perambulatory clause should be informative about the topic under consideration, but without suggesting any action. But in the preannouncements I have described, there is no introduction to the topic and there is an attempt to create an action in terms of audience reaction. Why would speakers do this? At the conscious level, there must be adult anxiety about reception from the audience. But what is happening at the unconscious level to create the type of preannouncement I have described? What fantasy is operating singularly or in concert? An apt metaphor from an infant observation specialist comes to mind. Martha Harris, describing an adult patient who had trouble taking in interpretations, wrote: “It seemed that here was a baby who needed some preamble, some holding, comforting, talking, who needed to be thought about, to feel contained and accepted by the mother before it could open its mouth to grasp the nipple and taste the food” (Harris 2011). Certainly the talk “gets tailored for a target audience and the space that they inhabit” (Goodwin 1996). Perhaps the speakers feel they must delay their message until sure of the audience's willingness to take it in. Perhaps they are too anxious about their own competence to assess the audience's level of attention. Perhaps they are being condescending to the audience and the program chairs in not trusting the participation framework.
In general, these preannouncements appeal for empathy as Heritage described, but I do not see that they influence the ensuing conversation favorably, as Maynard suggests of preannouncement in medicine. A preannouncement seems to serve to locate the comment entirely with the speaker, whose idea has been brewing for some time while waiting for the chance to speak, and does not therefore follow on from the comment that went before. Perhaps preannouncement is a way of bridging a felt gap and finding segue where none exists. It may be not only an attempt to insert the speaker into the conscious mind of the audience members but also to individuate the speaker (indicated by the predominance of the pronoun “I” as the first word of the preannouncement). In this way preannouncement may be an attempt to connect the subject to the audience but actually serves as a defense against joining in the weaving of thoughts that can occur in a freely responsive large group discussion. An alternative choice for speakers would be to color their opening remarks with distinctive intonation contours to draw attention to their message (Goodwin 1996). At an individual level, preannouncement stems from the need for defense of the speaker's narcissism. At the level of a psychoanalytic conference, preannouncement speaks of a discomfort with boundaries and time limits, and thus attacks the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis itself.
Ending with a preannouncement of my own, I propose expanding this small study, extending the sample to include three or four days of a full conference with a team of observers who collect data and subject it to triangulation by discussing how to bin it into the same or new categories. Or the one-day sample could be compared to a one-day sample from a conference of medical specialists or literature professors to see whether preannouncement is a feature of speaking up in a large group or is more prevalent when encountering the primitive material of psychoanalysis. However, devoting more observers and more energy to such a small (yet intriguing) point could detract from attention to the
substance of the conference presentations. So I withdraw my proposal. Otherwise the study of preannouncement would itself become a perversion of preannouncement that fails its subject.
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