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
Author: Balint Consultancy
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Book Review by Susie Orbach
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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.
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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 >>
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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.
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Olivia Laing & Susie Orbach
DATE AND TIME Wed, 19 May
7:00pm LOCATION Free to Register Online Via Zoom BUY TICKETS
On Bodies, Protest, Gender and Freedom: hear the acclaimed author Olivia Laing discuss her timely new book, Everybody, in conversation with leading psychotherapist Susie Orbach.
Olivia Laing Everybody
Olivia Laing is the author of three acclaimed works of non-fiction, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into seventeen languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Laing writes on art and culture for many publications, including the Guardian, New York Times and
frieze. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2020. She lives in Suffolk.
Susie Orbach In conversation
Susie Orbach is a psychoanalyst and writer. She co-founded The Women’s Therapy Centre in 1976 and is the author of many books including Fat is a Feminist Issue, Hunger Strike, On Eating, The Impossibility of Sex, Bodies, and In Therapy. Susie has a clinical practice seeing individuals and couples.
Author of ‘Deliacy’, Katy Wix, interviews Dr Susie Orbach on her seminal classic, ‘Fat Is A Feminist Issue’.
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N6NnsLjpCg
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Susie Orbach on BBC Radio 4
A Point of View, BBC Radio 4 at 8.50pm on Friday, February 19th
and 8.45am on Sunday, February 21st 2021
and on BBC Sounds
A Sense of an Opening
As a psychotherapist, Susie Orbach spends her working days helping people find words to express their emotional dilemmas.
But the seesaw of the pandemic presents particular challenges.
“We are not simply able,” she writes, “to breathe into a difficult situation, roll up our psychological sleeves or dig ourselves in without the emotional cost of feeling constrained, nervous, watchful, touchy.”
Producer: Adele Armstrong Show less Release date: 19 February 2021
9 minutes
On 5th March, 2020, Professor Brett Kahr delivered his very last “in-person” lecture prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus across the United Kingdom. On that occasion he had the privilege of speaking about “Sub-Clinical Psychopathy” to a group of students on the Diploma in Psychopathology course sponsored by Confer.
Subsequently, he has had to navigate the technological complexities of Microsoft Teams and Zoom and has delivered a number of guest lectures on-line.
In June, 2020, he presented a talk to the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication at Imperial College London on behalf of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, exploring the history of psychotherapy exactly one hundred years ago, in 1920. He returned to Imperial College London in October, 2020, to deliver two more on-line lectures on the history of mental health, the first entitled, “How to Fix a Hole in the Head: A History of Psychotherapy from Trephination to the Talking Cure”, and the second entitled, “Sigmund Freud: Archaeologist of the Mind”, for the course on “Understanding Psychotherapy: A Social History of the Mind”. In January, 2021, he spoke once again at Imperial College, lecturing on “My Very First Patient”, as part of a new course on “Understanding Psychotherapy: Through the Psychotherapists’ Eyes”.
Also, in June, 2020, he presented a live-streamed talk on “How Freud Would Have Handled the Coronavirus: Lessons from a Beacon of Survival” for the Freud Museum London, in which he explored the ways in which Sigmund Freud had to navigate a number of “coronavirus”-type experiences of his own, ranging from the influenza pandemic of 1918 to the German invasion of Austria in 1938. This talk inspired Kahr to write his next book, Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, due to appear in the autumn of 2021. He presented a variant of this talk, based on his archival research, about the ways in which the great British psychoanalyst, Dr. Donald Winnicott, survived both the Spanish flu of 1918 and, also, the Hong Kong flu of 1968. Kahr had the pleasure of presenting this lecture to the Anna Freud Centre Academic Faculty for Psychoanalytic Research, part of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, under the gracious chairpersonship of Professor Joan Raphael-Leff.
Other on-line lectures included a talk on “The Traumatic Basis of Psychopathology” for students on the Diploma in Psychopathology and, also, the Graduation Address to the W.P.F. training organisation on “How to Flourish as a Psychotherapist Amid a Global Pandemic”, based on his recent book How to Flourish as a Psychotherapist (Phoenix Publishing House, 2019).
In October, 2020, he presented his clinical research on ‘ “When Mummy Wants You to Die”: Can Infanticidal Wishes Be Survived?’, to the Wimbledon Guild, part of the Wimbledon Guild of Social Welfare, in London. Also, in October, 2020, and in November, 2020, he delivered two “overnight” seminars on “Sexual Symptoms, Erotic Tumours, and Conjugal Aneurysms: The Traumatic Roots of the Unhappy Bedroom”, and on “Why We Do Not Invite Patients to Move into Our Spare Bedrooms: Donald Winnicott and the Biographical Origins of ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’ ”, to the Couple, Child and Family Psychotherapy Association of Australasia, based in Forestville, New South Wales, Australia. He especially enjoyed sharing his clinical and historical research with these most welcoming colleagues from overseas.
And in January, 2021, Kahr spoke about his research on Dr. Donald Winnicott as part of a seminar on the “Winnicotts in National Crisis”, organised by the American social worker and historian Joel Kanter. He also introduced the new seminar scheme organised by the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council, which launched on 29th January, 2021, featuring presentations on the psychology of racism delivered by Ivan Ward, Deputy Director of Freud Museum London, and by Fakhry Davids, a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
In addition to his work as teacher and lecturer, Professor Kahr has continued to publish books and chapters and papers. In 2020, he produced four books: Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy(Confer Books, 2020), as well as Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel (Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group, 2020); Celebrity Mad: Why Otherwise Intelligent People Worship Fame (Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group, 2020); and On Practising Therapy at 1.45 A.M.: Adventures of a Clinician (Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group, 2020). His publishers at Routledge selected him as a Featured Author for 2020 (https://www.routledge.com/go/featured-author-brett-kahr).
His chapter on the “The Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, 1920-2020” has appeared in the special centenary volume, The Tavistock Century: 2020 Vision (Phoenix Publishing House, 2021), designed to celebrate the founding of the Tavistock Square Clinic for Functional Nervous Disorders in 1920 (now known as the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust). A shortened version of this essay has appeared in the journal Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, edited by our colleague Dr. Christopher Clulow. Future chapters, currently in press, include a study of Donald Winnicott’s famous child psychoanalytical patient known as “The Piggle”; a tribute to the great and much-missed British psychoanalyst Marion Milner; as well as a study of forensic disability psychotherapy.
He has also produced his popular annual column of “Brett Kahr’s Top Ten Books” for the Confer website (https://www.confer.uk.com/brett-kahrs-books-of-2020.html).
Quite apart from his teaching and writing, Professor Kahr has devoted most of his time during these challenging months to his clinical practice, extremely grateful that, due to the wonders of the landline telephone, he and his patients have continued to work uninterruptedly. He very much awaits reopening his Central London office in a post-vaccinated world!
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PUBLICATION OF DANGEROUS LUNATICS
y Professor Brett Kahr
Professor Brett Kahr published his fifteenth book earlier this year, entitled Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy (Confer Books, 2020; https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/dangerous-lunatics-trauma-criminality-and-forensic-psychotherapy/95053/).
One of the inaugural titles released by the new psychotherapeutic press Confer Books – Publishers of the Mind – this book examines the nature of criminality across the centuries.
Drawing upon his interest and training in both psychoanalysis and history, Kahr examines the ways in which our ancestors have treated criminal offenders from ancient times until the present day, exploring the growing humanisation of forensic mental health.
In olden times, criminals would be tortured and executed; fortunately, nowadays, many countries have adopted a more compassionate approach to treatment and rehabilitation, facilitated by the developments in the fields of forensic psychotherapy and forensic psychoanalysis, which offer in-depth, ongoing treatment, in an effort to help offender patients to work through the traumata which have propelled them to commit violent crimes.
This book reached the Number One spot on the Karnac Books best-sellers list shortly after its release.
Herewith we include the Table of Contents for interested parties, as well as kindly endorsements from two of the United Kingdom’s leading forensic psychoanalytical specialists:
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Introduction.
The Man Who Shot His Mother and Father in the Face.
Chapter One.
Torture and Execution: Ancient Remedies for Perpetrators.
Chapter Two.
The Medicalisation of Insanity: Hereditary Taint and the Criminal Brain.
Chapter Three.
The Freudian Challenge: Towards a Humanisation of Offenders.
Chapter Four.
The Growth of Forensic Psychotherapy: From Punishment to Treatment.
Chapter Five.
Paedophilia: The Sexualisation of Trauma.
Chapter Six.
Murder: The Castration of Safety.
Conclusion.
Blue-Sky Thinking: The Future of Forensic Mental Health.
ENDORSEMENTS.
“Only Brett Kahr could produce such a masterpiece as Dangerous Lunatics. Written in a stunning literary style, Kahr’s book combines his unique expertise as a clinician and as an historian to tell this vital tale about how we have treated criminals throughout the ages and how we might do much, much better in the future!”
Professor Estela V. Welldon, Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, Portman Clinic, London, and Honorary President for Life of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy.
“What a magnificent book! A carefully researched ‘tour de force’, encompassing a history of criminality and madness through exquisitely described stories. It offers hope that one day we might actually rehumanise the dehumanised, making the world a safer place for all.”
Dr. Carine Minne, Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy, Portman Clinic and Broadmoor Hospital.