Book Launch: In therapy – how conversations with therapists really work.
In November, Balint Consultants Brett Kahr and Susie Orbach spoke to a jam packed event at Daunt Books in Marylebone. Brett interviewed Susie about her work and career to a rapt audience who were there to celebrate the publication of Susie’s new book, In Therapy.
Susie Orbach and Ian Rickson, who worked with her on the Radio 4 series In Therapy, are joining a group of actors at the National Theatre rehearsal rooms to see if they can extend the work to make a theatrical piece. Susie said “On the radio I’m on a high wire act as I don’t know what’s coming at me from the actors who play the characters who are coming to therapy, though the actors have previously worked with Ian Rickson to create their story which they then “brought to therapy” and enacted it on the radio. This time around we are considering scripting something out of improvised sessions. We just don’t know yet but it will be an interesting and hopefully exciting process.”
More about what was in Susie’s mind while undertaking the radio “therapies” can be found in her new book In therapy – how conversations with therapists really work.
Freud Museum
The Freud Museum
On 10th December, 2016, Brett Kahr co-organised a day conference at the Freud Museum, London on “Power Play: Psychoanalysis and Political Culture”, in association with The Centre for Politics and Media at Bournemouth University and with the Media and the Inner World Research Network. Speakers included the distinguished British psychoanalyst Philip Stokoe, who talked on “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Understanding the State of Mind in Societies That Can Produce Brexit and Trump”, and Professor Eli Zaretsky, the well-known American historian who talked on “The Three Faces of Political Freud”.
We also had the privilege of hosting a wonderful interview between Andrew Davies, the scriptwriter of the original series of House of Cards, and Professor Iain MacRury, the noted scholar of psychosocial studies, about Davies’s career representing politics on television. And Brett Kahr had the great pleasure of hosting an “in conversation” with Professor the Baroness Sheila Hollins, speaking with her about her inspiring career as both a leading clinical and research psychiatrist and as the founder of the “Mental Wealth Festival” and many other contributions to the public improvement of mental health services. Professor Candida Yates, whose book on The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity inspired the conference, chaired the day with great panache.