Essex University – 16th March
with Susie Orbach
A free Zoom event from 8.00pm until 9.00pm
Zoom link: https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/98678124075
Categories
PsychoSocial Wednesdays
Author: Balint Consultancy
We talk to Professor Kahr about his new book and his keynote presentation at Wimbledon Guild Counselling Training’s 2022 Conference: Reflections on the Pandemic, Covid-19 and Trauma
Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for more than 40 years. He is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London.
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.
We caught up with Professor Kahr to talk about his new book Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis (Karnac Books, 2021), inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic and to discuss his keynote presentation at our online 2022 Conference: Reflections on the Pandemic, Covid-19 and Trauma, Saturday 12th March 2022.
We are delighted that you will be presenting your new paper, “Unmuzzling Experts While Curing ‘Covidiots’: How Psychotherapists Can Prevent the Next Pandemic”, at our online conference next year. Could you tell us something more about the concept of “unmuzzling health professionals”?
Throughout this heart-wrenching coronavirus pandemic, we have received an overwhelming amount of data from politicians and public health officials about how to manage this dreadful global health crisis. However, in spite of the fact that broadcasters have reported a great deal about the decline in mental health, and in spite of the fact that members of the psychotherapeutic profession have never worked so hard, our insights about the unconscious roots of self-destructiveness and other-destructiveness have not become at all central to the narrative surrounding Covid-19. We know that many people contracted the virus quite unexpectedly, but many others have continued to spread this awful infection as clinical acts of aggression.
I believe that the psychotherapeutic and counselling professions have a great deal of insight to contribute towards a better understanding of the hidden unconscious and behavioural factors underlying what we might conceptualise as “unconscious viral transmission”.
During the pandemic, you have been delivering online lectures for Wimbledon Guild, Confer, The Freud Museum London, and the Viktor Wynd Museum, to name just a few organisations. What has it been like for you delivering your work online over Zoom?
I presented my very first public lecture back in 1979, in front of a live audience, so I must confess that switching to Zoom in 2020, more than 40 years later, proved rather a challenge at first, never having used a laptop before!
Fortunately, the wonderful technologically savvy team at Freud Museum London offered me a veritable masterclass in Zoom and I presented a fund-raising talk to help the museum, entitled “How Freud Would Have Handled the Coronavirus: Lessons from a Beacon of Survival”, which became the basis of my most recent book.
Naively, I presumed that the attendees would consist predominantly of the London “regulars”, but, to my great surprise and delight, we attracted colleagues from India, Iran, Pakistan and all over the world. And no one had to hop on an aeroplane! I have now become quite used to this new form of communication and it has permitted us all to meet some very intelligent individuals overseas with whom we would have had little or no contact in pre-pandemic times.
Please tell us about your new book, Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, which has just been published.
Over the last year, we have heard a great deal about everyone’s “lockdown projects”. Some people have finally learned how to speak Italian fluently or have dusted off their old violin. I devoted much of my time to the writing of a new book on Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, to help inaugurate the new “Freud Museum London Series” in association with the re-launched Karnac Books.
It will not be widely known that during his long lifetime Sigmund Freud endured not one pandemic but, rather six, of many varieties, including the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which claimed the life of his beloved daughter Sophie Freud Halberstadt in 1920.
Freud also had to endure decades of anti-Semitic abuse and professional shaming, as well as 16 years of cancer treatment, not to mention the invasion by the Nazis. Any other person who experienced such trauma might have passed by their own hand, but Freud always maintained great emotional sturdiness.
In this book, based on oral historical and archival research, as well as on a close reading of Freud’s untranslated letters, I have crafted a narrative of his six pandemics. I have also explored how he might have dealt with Covid-19 and, also, what lessons we may continue to learn from this iconic genius.
What are you most looking forward to about Wimbledon Guild Counselling Training’s 2022 online conference?
I believe that the 2022 conference will be my sixth lecture for Wimbledon Guild over the last 20 years. I have always had a wonderful time speaking to colleagues at this esteemed organisation. No two institutions attract the same type of audience, but those at Wimbledon Guild always respond with tremendous compassion and wisdom, and I hope that we can all learn a great deal from one another. The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated much of world thought due to massive traumatisation; therefore, no one can claim true expertise about the psychological impact of this awful illness or about the best ways in which to promote psychological prevention, but I do hope and trust that we can all pool our well-analysed minds at this conference and begin to craft a plan about how psychotherapists and counsellors can share our skills and insights even more fully in years to come.
Wimbledon Guild Counselling Training’s 2022 online conference: Reflections on the Pandemic, Covid-19 and Trauma is on Saturday 12th March 2022. View the programme and book tickets.
Categories
Susie Orbach
Recent article and book reviews
The Observer:
Working from home: how it changed us forever – Relationships The Observer 23 January 2022
Book chapter:
Eco Revenge in This Book is a Plant – How to Grow, Learn and Radically Engage with the Natural World, Wellcome Collection, Profile Books 2022
https://web.archive.org/web/20230602004644if_/https://profilebooks.com/work/this-book-is-a-plant/embed/#?secret=x1jcSQgDRw#?secret=NEzQquViO7
Book reviews:
Susie Orbach review of How to Do Things With Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures by Owen Flanagan – Don’t shout, let it all out The Observer, 9/1/22
Susie Orbach review of Something Out of Place by Eimear McBride – a satisfying feminist polemics The Guardian, August 2021
Categories
Susie Orbach Talks
PESI – International Women’s Trauma Conference – 18/19 November 2021
Categories
Professor Brett Kahr
NEW BOOK BY PROFESSOR BRETT KAHR.
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 life, ranging from unsubstantiated accusations by medical colleagues to anti-Semitic abuse, the loss of one daughter to Spanish flu and the arrest of another child by the Gestapo, to his own painful cancer treatments and his final flight from Adolf Hitler’s Austria. Freud navigated these personal and political tragedies while simultaneously creating a method of healing which has helped countless millions deal with unbearable trauma and distress.
Kahr argues that, by having created psychoanalysis, Freud not only saved himself from destruction but also provided the rest of the world with the means to achieve a form of psychological vaccination against emotional and mental distress.
The Freud Museum London and Karnac Books have joined forces to publish a new book series devoted to an examination of the life and work of Sigmund Freud alongside other significant figures in the history of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and depth psychology more broadly. The series will feature works of outstanding scholarship and readability, including biographical studies, institutional histories, and archival investigations. New editions of historical classics as well as translations of little-known works from the early history of psychoanalysis will also be considered for inclusion.
REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS.
“A vivid account of how Sigmund Freud coped with the great ‘pandemics’ of his time, from the Great War and Spanish Flu to cancer and the Nazis. By assessing how my great-grandfather might have addressed COVID-19 – the pandemic of our own times – Professor Kahr opens up a series of insights into the life of the man who championed the radical innovation of actually listening to people suffering from mental affliction. Meticulously researched, and written with real pace, this book is a timely reminder of the psychological roots of our response to national trauma.” – Lord Freud, great-grandson of Sigmund Freud and President of the Freud Museum London
“Never has there been a time when Freud was needed so badly. Post-pandemic blues would not have been new to Freud as Brett Kahr describes in his phenomenal book, which I feel was sent to save us from confusion and turmoil. A must read!” – Jane McAdam Freud, artist, and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud.
“Brett Kahr’s immersion in Freud – the gift that keeps on giving – will help us survive the trauma of pandemics in our own lives. Kahr draws insightful parallels from Freud’s own struggles and serves as a timely and fascinating reminder of the ubiquitous nature of pandemics and why suicide isn’t the answer.” – Professor the Baroness Hollins, Past President of the British Medical Association, Past President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Professor Emerita at St. George’s Hospital Medical School, University of London.
CONTENTS OF THE BOOK.
Prologue: Fundraising for Freud
Introduction: “Wouldn’t it be better if we all killed ourselves?”
Chapter 1: The Fraudulent Jewish Pervert: Navigating Decades of Collegial Hatred
Chapter 2: The Great War and the Spanish Flu: An Imprisoned Son and a Dying Daughter
Chapter 3: From Compulsive Cigar-Smoking to Deadly Carcinoma: Freud’s Battle with Physical Pain
Chapter 4: Death Wishes and the Nazis: How Freud Escaped from Austria
Chapter 5: Freud’s Recipe for Creativity and Survival: The Writing Cure and the Role of Penetrativity
Conclusion: If Sigmund Freud Could Have Supervised Anthony Fauci
Acknowledgements
Scholarly Clarifications
Endnotes
References
Index
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: September 2021
Format: Paperback
Pages: 300
Dimensions: 15.6 x 1.73 x 23.4 cm
DISCOUNTED PURCHASE OF THE BOOK.
Karnac Books Shop.
Freud Museum London Shop.
Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu and Nazis – Brett Kahs
Psychotherapist Susie Orbach and broadcaster Jeff Brazier discuss the power and limitations of resolve in managing grief and mental health.
to listen to the podcast, visit: https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/YT-D8hAAACUAOlM5
Categories
Book Review by Susie Orbach
Categories
Dr Susie Orbach on EXPeditions
EXPeditions brings the world’s leading intellectuals to video
Resisting the exploitation of our bodies https://www.joinexpeditions.com/exps/314
The problem of body image and the construction of a false body https://www.joinexpeditions.com/exps/312
How our relationship to our bodies has been constructed https://www.joinexpeditions.com/exps/310
Also:
The Hidden Spring – Mark Solms in conversation with Susie Orbach
https://www.freud.org.uk/event/on-demand-the-hidden-spring-a-journey-to-the-source-of-consciousness/
Mark Solms in conversation with Susie Orbach
Available On Demand at https://www.freud.org.uk/event/on-demand-the-hidden-spring-a-journey-to-the-source-of-consciousness/
Please note: this event has already taken place therefore booking is for recording access only. On booking, your unique access codes will be included in your Eventbrite confirmation email and will have access for 30 days.
Tickets are offered on a pay-what-you-can basis, with a suggested donation of £10. Thank you in advance for your support of the museum at this very difficult time.
Booking closes at 11.30pm on 31 July 2021.
————————————————————————————————————
The era-defining book that will forever change the way you understand your mind.
‘To say this work is encyclopaedic is to diminish its poetic, psychological and theoretical achievement. This is required reading’ – Susie Orbach, author In Therapy
‘Truly a remarkable book. It changes everything’ – Brian Eno
Join psychoanalyst, neuropsychologist and author, Mark Solms as he discusses his latest publication, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness with psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, writer and social critic, Susie Orbach.
The neuropsychologist who discovered the brain’s mechanism for dreaming returns with a jaw-dropping insight into human consciousness that reframes everything we know about the workings of the mind.
How does the mind connect to the body? Why does it feel like something to be us? For one of the boldest thinkers in neuroscience, solving this puzzle has been a lifetime’s quest. Now at last, the man who discovered the brain mechanism for dreaming appears to have made a breakthrough.
The very idea that a solution is at hand may seem outrageous. Isn’t consciousness intangible, beyond the reach of science? Yet Mark Solms shows how misguided fears and suppositions have concealed its true nature. Stick to the medical facts, pay close attention to the eerie testimony of hundreds of neurosurgery patients, and a way past our obstacles reveals itself.
Join Solms on a voyage into the extraordinary realms beyond. More than just a philosophical argument, The Hidden Spring will forever alter how you understand your own experience. There is a secret buried in the brain’s ancient foundations: bring it into the light and we fathom all the depths of our being.
The Hidden Spring is available to purchase via the Freud Museum London online shop >>
Categories
NEWS FROM PROFESSOR BRETT KAHR.
June, 2021.
NEW ROLE AT FREUD MUSEUM LONDON.
The Balint Consultancy is delighted to announce that Professor Brett Kahr has recently been appointed as Honorary Director of Research at the Freud Museum London. Professor Kahr has maintained a long-standing relationship with the museum, having worked there as Deputy Director of the International Campaign for the Freud Museum during its first year of operation and, subsequently, having served three terms of office as Trustee of both Freud Museum London and of Freud Museum Publications. In this new role he will help to support the museum and its scholars with the development of historical-archival research on the life and work of Sigmund Freud and the growth of psychoanalysis.
