Category: Publications

During the last month, Professor Brett Kahr has published two new books, Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel (Routledge, 2020) and, also, Celebrity Mad: Why Otherwise Intelligent People Worship Fame (Routledge, 2020).

The first book, Bombs in the Consulting Room, describes Kahr’s work with challenging and dangerous patients and explores some of the complex situations that often emerge in clinical psychotherapeutic practice (https://www.routledge.com/Bombs-in-the-Consulting-Room-Surviving-Psychological-Shrapnel/Kahr/p/book/9781782206606).

The second book, Celebrity Mad, derives from the talk that he delivered some years previously at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, as the Lionel Monteith Memorial Lecture, in honour of one of the founders of the British psychotherapy movement. This book explores not the psychology of the celebrity, but, rather, the psychology of the crowd, and what infantile factors propel us to become so preoccupied with the intimate lives of others (https://www.routledge.com/Celebrity-Mad-Why-Otherwise-Intelligent-People-Worship-Fame/Kahr/p/book/9781782206675).

Professor Brett Kahr certainly knows something about the art of authoring books. Over the years he has written or edited twelve volumes, and has served as series editor of some fifty further titles. Earlier this year, he published New Horizons in Forensic Psychotherapy: Exploring the Work of Estela V. Welldon (Karnac Books, 2018), and, most recently, How to Flourish as a Psychotherapist (Phoenix Publishing House, 2019), a “cradle to grave” portrait of the working life of the everyday psychotherapy practitioner.

Please visit the Confer website to see Professor Kahr’s recommendations of the ten best psychotherapy books of 2018.

This latest book from Susie Orbach, published in January 2018, is a comprehensive and expanded edition of her bestselling, In Therapy: How Conversations with Psychotherapists Really Work.

From the back cover of In Therapy: The Unfolding Story.

Worldwide, an increasingly diverse and growing number of people are seeking therapy.  We go to address traumas, to break patterns of behaviour, to confront eating disorders or addiction, to talk about relationships, or simply because we want to find out more about ourselves.

Susie Orbach has been a psychotherapist for over forty years.  Also a million-copy bestselling author, The New York Times called her the ‘most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud’.  Here, she explores what goes on in the process of therapy through a series of dramatised case studies.

Insightful and honest about a process often necessarily shrouded in secrecy, In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an essential read for those curiouis about, or considering entering, therapy. This complete edition takes us deeper into the world of therapy, with 13 further sessions and a new introduction.

Brett Kahr has published Coffee with Freud, part of the Karnac Books “Interviews with Icons” series, in which he resurrects Sigmund Freud for a “posthumous interview” in which he discusses his life and work.  The book contains a great deal of unpublished or little-known historical material about Freud derived from Brett’s interviews with some of the last surviving Freud students and associates and from archival information contained in the Sigmund Freud Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

http://www.karnacbooks.com/blog/post/coffee-with-brett-a-conversation-with-brett-kahr-about-his-new-book-on-freud/210

His earlier book in this same series, Tea with Winnicott, has now appeared in Spanish translation as Tomando el Té con Winnicott.

Brett’s essay on “Sexual Cruelty in the Marital Bed:  Unconscious Sadism in Non-Forensic Couples” has appeared in French translation in the psychoanalytical journal Dialogue.  The English version will appear in the forthcoming book on Sadism:  Psychoanalytic Developmental Perspectives, edited by Balint colleague, Amita Sehgal.

Brett has also written an historical essay for the Oxford University Press website on “Winnicott’s Banquet of 1966”, to mark the publication of The Collected Works of D.W. Winnicott in twelve volumes, edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson on behalf of the Winnicott Trust (http://blog.oup.com/2017/01/winnicotts-banquet-of-1966/).

Susie Orbach’s books of the year for The Guardian.

“It is hard not to put Han Kang’s Human Acts (translated by Deborah Smith, Portobello) at the top of the list. Her way of telling about the events of a 10-day insurgency in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980 and its psychological, spiritual and political aftermath opened my eyes to the cruelty and viciousness perpetrated on the youth of that city. Her writing is spare and yet clotted with emotion. I had to stop, and then I had to carry on.

Looking at human acts from another perspective, I greatly enjoyed Brett Kahr’s Tea with Winnicott(Karnac), an imagined encounter with the psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, after his death. Formal yet playful with beautiful drawings by Alison Bechdel – a brilliant present for anyone interested in the life and work of this great clinician and thinker.

In light of the US election, a read of Andrew Samuels’ A New Therapy for Politics? (Karnac) wouldn’t go amiss.”

During the last several months, Brett Kahr has had three journal articles accepted for publication. His paper on “ ‘How to Cure Family Disturbance’: Enid Balint and the Creation of Couple Psychoanalysis” will appear in the next issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. His article on “Ursula Longstaff Bowlby (1916-2000):  The Creative Muse Behind the Secure Base” will appear in the next issue of Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis. And his clinical essay on “A Psychoanalytical Approach to Profound Disability” will be published in the next issue of the British Journal of Psychotherapy.

He has also served as Series Editor for two publications which have appeared in his monograph series and for which he has written forewords.  Dr. Anna Koellreuter’s book What is This Professor Freud Like?: A Diary of an Analysis with Historical Comments – the publication of her grandmother’s hitherto unknown diary of her analysis with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s – represents a crucial publication for Freud Studies. And Dr. Alan Corbett’s book on Psychotherapy with Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse: The Invisible Men, has already received recognition as a useful clinical contribution to this important area of psychological practice, following Corbett’s interview on Woman’s Hour.  The former title appears in “The History of Psychoanalysis Series” from Karnac Books and the latter title in its “Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series”.

Professor Kahr’s latest book, Coffee with Freud, which is part of the “Interviews with Icons” series, and a sequel to his well received book Tea with Winnicott, will be published by Karnac Books in time for Christmas!

“Sigmund Freud pays another visit to Vienna’s renowned Café Landtmann, where he had often enjoyed reading newspapers and sipping coffee. Freud explains how he came to invent psychoanalysis, speaks bluntly about his feelings of betrayal by Carl Gustav Jung, recounts his flight from the Nazis, and so much more, all the while explaining his theories of symptom formation and psychosexuality.”
 
 
 
 
 
In therapy: How Conversations with Psychotherapists Really Work by Susie Orbach will be published by Profile Books at the beginning of November.
“In the UK alone, 1.5 million people are in therapy. They go to address past traumas, to break patterns of behaviour, to confront eating disorders or addiction, to talk about relationships, or simply because they need to find out more about what makes them tick. Susie Orbach, the bestselling author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Bodies, has been a psychotherapist for over forty years. Here, she explores what goes on in the process of therapy – what she thinks, feels and believes about the people who seek her help – through five dramatised case studies. Replicating the improvised dialogue of the radio series as a playscript, Orbach offers us the experience of reading along with a session, while revealing what is going on behind each exchange between analyst and client. Insightful and honest about a process often necessarily shrouded in secrecy”

The new In Therapy series will air on November 7th for 10 weekdays on BBC Radio 4. Watch out for two london events about the book and popular radio series taking place at The Freud Museum with Jane Haberlin on November 1st www.freud.org.uk. And one at the Wellcome on October 29th www.wellcomecollection.org