A day with Professor Brett Kahr: “Bombs in the consulting room"

Brief summary of the day

Although the majority of patients or clients who attend for psychotherapy and counselling will comport themselves in a decent and appreciative manner, quite a number of these individuals will, from time to time, project their deepest traumas and their most petrifying anxieties onto the clinician and will often hurl a “psychological bomb” into the consulting room, sometimes even engaging in a physical assault.

Strikingly, one need not be overtly mentally ill in order to perpetrate an emotional or physical attack; often, the more robust and resilient of our patients will also do so, trusting in the psychotherapist’s ability to refrain from retaliation.

In this special one-day seminar, Professor Brett Kahr will draw upon his long clinical career of working with both forensic patients and non-forensic patients and will discuss the complex vicissitudes of troubled and traumatised individuals and couples who unleash their deepest primitive rage onto and into the consulting room.

Professor Kahr will begin by sharing a series of case histories of extremely dangerous patients and will describe how he has drawn upon the essential life-saving insights of Sigmund Freud and others in order to navigate this complex clinical territory. He will then examine the ways in which a creatively formulated interpretation will often prove to be the most containing and transformative of interventions.

A trained historian as well as a clinician, Kahr will also share some of his unpublished archival and oral history research, conducted over many decades, and will reveal what we can learn from the clinical “mistakes” of some of our most distinguished forebears; in particular, he will describe how, during the 1940s, Donald Winnicott, in spite of his brilliance, often facilitated gross acting-out from some of his patients, resulting in life-threatening consequences.

Biographical notes

Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for more than forty years. He is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London, and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health in the Regent’s School of Psychotherapy and Psychology at Regent’s University London.

He is a Consultant in Psychology to The Bowlby Centre and a Consultant Psychotherapist at The Balint Consultancy, providing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to both individuals and couples. He is also Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council.

After serving for many years as Trustee of Freud Museum London and of Freud Museum Publications, he has now become the museum’s Honorary Director of Research.

Professor Kahr has worked for many years in the forensic mental health field and currently serves on the Executive Board of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy and, also, as Consulting Editor of The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy, as well as Series Editor of the “Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series” for the publishers Routledge.

Kahr is the author of 16 books and series editor of over 75 additional titles. His publications include D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait, which received the 1997 Gradiva Award for Biography, as well as the popular Tea with Winnicott, chosen as a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian newspaper in 2016.

His most recent books include: Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel (Routledge, 2020) and, also, Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy (Confer Books, 2020). He has also written a study of Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis (Karnac Books), due for publication in September, 2021

For more information and to book your place, visit tickettailor.com.