Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health field for over forty years. He is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London, and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London.
In 2021, he became both and Honorary Fellow and, also, the Honorary Director of Research at Freud Museum London, having served for three terms of office as a Trustee of both the Freud Museum London and, also, Freud Museum Publications. He also received an Honorary Fellowship in recognition of his lifetime achievements from the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.
Additionally, Kahr is Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health, as well as Consultant in Psychology to The Bowlby Centre, also in London. Professor Kahr holds registration as a psychotherapist of both adults and, also, couples in the British Psychoanalytic Council (an organisation for which he serves as Chair of the Scholars Committee) and in the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (an organisation for which he had served as both a Trustee and as Special Media Adviser).
A former Chair of both the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists and of the British Society of Couple Psychotherapists and Counsellors, he is Series Co-Editor of “The Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis” and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Couple and Family Psychoanalysis.
An experienced teacher, he has lectured on psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychopathology, and related subjects since 1979, and he has held the Richard William Hopkins Memorial Scholarship at Cornell University, a University Fellowship at Yale University, and he has been a Visiting Scholar at Emory University.
Kahr maintains a long-standing interest in disseminating psychological ideas through the media, having served for several years as Resident Psychotherapist on BBC Radio 2 and as Spokesperson for the BBC mental health campaign “Life 2 Live”. In recognition of this work he became Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Roehampton in 2009 and consultant to the Arts and Humanities Research Council network “Media and the Inner World”, and subsequently, he received an appointment as Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University.
A trained historian as well as a clinician, Professor Kahr has published eighteen books and has served as series editor for more than eighty-five other titles on such diverse fields as clinical psychopathology, forensic psychotherapy, couple psychoanalysis, sexology, and the history of psychoanalysis.
His solo-authored books include the first biography of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, which won the Gradiva Prize for Biography, as well as Sex and the Psyche, published by Penguin Books, which became a Waterstone’s Non-Fiction Bestseller, serialised in The Times. Some of his more recent books include, How to Flourish as a Psychotherapist; Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel; and Celebrity Mad: Why Otherwise Intelligent People Worship Fame; and, also, Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy.
His latest book, entitled Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, has been published by Karnac Books as the launch title of the new “Freud Museum London Series” on the history of psychoanalysis.
Over the years, he has lectured at many clinical and academic institutions, as well as cultural organisations, including: BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts), the BBC, the Criminal Bar Association, Glyndebourne Opera, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank Centre, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Royal Opera House, the Science Museum, Tate Modern, and the Wellcome Collection.
He works with both individuals and couples from his private practice in Central London, where he maintains a special interest in effecting long-term characterological change.
You can contact Brett on enquiries@balintconsultancy.com.