Brett Kahr
Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for over forty years. A clinical registrant of both the British Psychoanalytic Council and the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, he is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regents University London.
Over the decades, Kahr has worked in the National Health Service and in private practice in Central London with both individuals and couples. He is currently Consultant Psychotherapist to The Balint Consultancy and, additionally, Consultant in Psychology at The Bowlby Centre. He also serves as Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council, as well as Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health.
Professor Kahr is the Honorary Director of Research at Freud Museum London and, also, an Honorary Fellow of the museum. Previously, he served as Deputy Director of the International Campaign for the Freud Museum from 1986-1987 and, more recently, as Trustee of both Freud Museum London and of Freud Museum Publications from 2011-2020.
In addition to his clinical practice, Kahr has collaborated with the media in order to promote mental health knowledge. Formerly Resident Psychotherapist on BBC Two, broadcasting about mental health issues to millions of listeners, he has appeared on over one thousand radio and television programmes. In recognition of his work in this field, he has become Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy recently awarded him an Honorary Fellowship for his contributions to public service.
Professor Kahr is the author of sixteen books and series editor of more than seventy-five additional titles on a wide range of subjects.
His solo-authored books cover a range of topics, including clinical investigations of extreme psychopathology and forensic mental health, such as his titles, Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel, as well as Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy. He has also written on Sex and the Psyche, a Waterstones Non-Fiction Bestseller and a chosen title in the Sunday Times Book Club, based on his study of the traumatic, unconscious roots of over 20,000 adult sexual fantasies, as well as Celebrity Mad: Why Otherwise Intelligent People Worship Fame. His historically orientated books include the very first biography of Donald Winnicott, entitled D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait, which received the Gradiva Award for Biography, as well as the popular titles, Life Lessons from Freud, Tea with Winnicott, and Coffee with Freud. Most recently, he has released Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, the inaugural title in the new Freud Museum London Series of history books, published by Karnac Books exploring not only how Sigmund Freud navigated the tragedies of his own lifetime but, also, how he would have handled the COVID-19 pandemic and what lessons our world leaders might learn from those pioneering psychoanalytical concepts.
Professor Kahr has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Karnac Books and has produced many books with this publisher and has also served as series editor or series co-editor or consultant to four of its monograph series. More recently, he has become Series Editor of the Freud Museum London Series, hosted by Karnac Books in association with Freud Museum London, as well as Advisory Editor-in-Chief to Karnac Books and to its sibling imprint Confer Books.
How to Flourish as a Psychotherapist
How do you develop a truly rich and rewarding career in psychotherapy? How can you find joy in such painful work? How do you develop your skills and capacities in the field? How can you conquer your... (more)
Hidden Histories of British Psychoanalysis: From Freud’s Death Bed to Laing’s Missing Tooth
In this compellingly written and meticulously researched new book, Professor Brett Kahr draws upon extensive unpublished archival sources and upon his four decades of oral history interviews to paint... (more)
Forensic Psychoanalysis: From Sub-Clinical Psychopaths to Serial Killers
Forensic Psychoanalysis examines the traumatic psychological origins of violence and explores the ways in which such disasters can be prevented and treated.
The book encapsulates Professor Brett... (more)
Expanding Psychoanalysis: The Contributions of Susie Orbach
Expanding Psychoanalysis explores the work of the acclaimed psychoanalyst, writer, and activist Susie Orbach.
The book studies Orbach’s multifaceted career in five sections, examining her... (more)
Anxiety at 35,000 Feet: An Introduction to Clinical Aerospace Psychology
Fear of flying is a growing problem among both passengers and airline crews. Recent terrorist attacks have heightened the levels of anxiety and fear when boarding a plane. In this volume, one of... (more)
Sex and the Psyche: The Truth About Our Most Secret Fantasies
What's going on in your head when you go to bed? We talk about sex increasingly openly today, but when it comes to our most private fantasies it's often a different matter.
Here psychotherapist... (more)
D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait
A distillation of painstaking research into the life of Donald Winnicott, tracing his life from his childhood in Plymouth, through his career in paediatrics, to his election as President of the... (more)
Tea with Winnicott
Donald Winnicott is currently the most popular author in contemporary psychoanalysis. His writings are cited in bibliographies even more frequently than those of Sigmund Freud. And yet how many... (more)
New Horizons in Forensic Psychotherapy: Exploring the Work of Estela V. Welldon
New Horizons in Forensic Psychotherapy: Exploring the Work of Estela V. Welldon, edited by Professor Brett Kahr, contains many rich contributions by some of Welldon’s most distinguished former... (more)
Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality and Forensic Psychotherapy
In the pre-modern era, those who committed serious crimes would invariably be treated with extreme cruelty - often punished, tortured, eviscerated, and executed in the most grisly, sadistic fashion. ... (more)
Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu and the Nazis
In this compelling book, the first in the new Freud Museum London series, Professor Brett Kahr describes how Sigmund Freud endured innumerable emotional pandemics during his eighty-three years of... (more)
Celebrity Mad: Why Otherwise Intelligent People Worship Fame
This short book provides a psychoanalytical understanding of fame and celebrity in the early twenty-first century, building upon the bedrock foundations of the Freudian corpus.
The book is... (more)
On Practising Therapy at 1.45 A.M.: Adventures of a Clinician
Although Professor Kahr spends most of his week facilitating traditional psychoanalytical sessions with his patients, in his spare time he has had many professional adventures outside the consulting... (more)
Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel
What does one do when a dangerous paedophile, six feet and seven inches in height, threatens to kill you? How does one manage when a brain-damaged, psychotic patient spits on the office floor two... (more)
Forensic Psychotherapy and Psychopathology: Winnicottian Perspectives
This exceptional book adds to the fast growing area of forensic psychotherapy and shows the relevance of Winnicott's work to therapy with some of the most deprived in our... (more)
Life Lessons from Freud
Sigmund Freud is best known as the father of psychoanalysis. Born in 1856, he was a physiologist, medical doctor and psychologist who spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria. He developed... (more)
Coffee with Freud
This is the second volume in Brett Kahr’s ‘Interviews with Icons’ series, following on from Tea with Winnicott. Professor Kahr, himself a highly regarded psychoanalyst, turns his attention to the... (more)
Publisher of the Mind: Seventy-Five Years of Karnac Books
Karnac Books is internationally renowned as the world’s leading independent psychoanalytic bookseller and publisher. Founded in 1950, it has a rich history now captured in fascinating detail by... (more)
How to Be Intimate with 15,000,000 Strangers: Musings on Media Psychoanalysis
An investigation into how the fields of mental health and media can work together more collaboratively. Brett Kahr is well-known and was previously Resident Psychotherapist at the B.B.C. Explores... (more)