This summary/comment was originally published in the newsletter of the Washington Psychoanalytic Society.

Eric Gann spoke on, "Psychoanalysis: Making the Impossible Possible". To those interested in building analytic practices, he proffered the following wisdom. First, take patient's assertions about time and fee seriously; it's not easy to afford the time or the money. Be willing to reduce your fee if you want to do analysis. Second, if you don't have as large a practice as you want, consider your unconscious. You may be more conflicted about practicing psychoanalysis than you previously considered. Third, he pointed out that not everyone who is trained as an analyst should practice analysis. However, analytic training can inform nearly every professional endeavor including medication, teaching, supervision and psychotherapy. Moreover, he felt that those engaging in these activities should be enfranchised in an array of esteemed roles within the analytic community. Not everyone, he noted, has to practice analysis.

Those wishing for larger practices were not really left with many concrete ideas save more analysis or a recognition and acceptance of the notion that they were not meant to practice analysis. I found myself more than a bit surprised that he didn't offer some thoughts more along the lines of Jim Hutchinson, MD, a member of both our society and the B-W. Hutchinson, raised an interesting and provocative point taken from the annals of the business literature. When the public is educated about a product and its value, when their friends are buying it, they are more likely to buy it and pay what it is worth. For this reason, Hutchinson was less than sanguine about the notion of (further) reducing our fees. Although Gann appeared not to be terribly interested in this point, I thought that it was an intriguing one. For it implies that we would turn our heads in the direction of a more organized, systematic, concerted, outreach (and in-reach) effort. I found myself wishing that Gann, who has been all over the country, might have collected and shared more of the interesting efforts in this vein that have been initiated elsewhere.

In informal discussions, Gann suggested, regarding outreach, that one should do only that with which one was comfortable. I found this notion, that analysts should not reach beyond their comfort zone to be surprising and at variance with how we approach our work with our patients. I wondered, why would we not analyze our own resistance to outreach and self-preservation in the same way that we analyze any other self-destructive behavior? On a more pedestrian note, regarding outreach, what about the old-fashioned notion that "practice makes perfect". Outreach isn't so easy in that it has the potential to bring one face-to-face with public exposure as well as an array of other ethical, professional and social challenges. We don?t always know much about how to handle these issues because we spend little time thinking and talking about them. In fact, we have no forums for examining them more fully. Integrating courses on outreach into the curriculum could lead to a seismic shift in this area.

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