Fighting the most sedentary profession - with Professor Brett Kahr

Wessex Counselling & Psychotherapy

ABSTRACT.No profession could be described as more sedentary than that of psychotherapy. We literally spend every moment in our consulting rooms confined to a chair, unable to move our bodies, other than shifting our legs from time to time!In addition to remaining restricted to our seats, we devote our entire working day to the absorption of traumatic story after traumatic story, listening carefully and quietly as our patients reveal their most painful fears, their deepest anxieties, their most shameful secrets, and their fears of death ... hour after hour after hour.In view of the potential burden of practising psychotherapy, it seems amazing that so many psychotherapists can actually survive!Fortunately, in spite of the burdens and the restrictions of psychotherapeutic practice, the art of treatment also helps us to save the lives of many suicidal patients, and that should help us to feel pleased and proud and relieved that we might make a difference.But nonetheless, psychotherapy remains a truly sedentary profession, and, alas, many practitioners will not only remain sedentary and silent in the consulting room when listening to patients in sessions, but, moreover, large percentages of mental health workers will retain their passivity outside the office and fail to participate in the field as teachers, researchers, lecturers, committee members, organisational leaders, writers, broadcasters, publicists, creators of new projects, political consultants, and so forth. In consequence, many of our more “quiet” colleagues, who fail to claim authority outside of the office, will often suffer from deep regret and true disappointment, even depression from time to time.In this presentation to Wessex Counselling and Psychotherapy, Professor Brett Kahr will share his multi-decade experience about how those of us, post-qualification, can enhance our own personal skills and careers more efficaciously, helping us to flourish more fully as clinical practitioners with more exciting careers; additionally, he will consider how, by developing our own verbal potency and our own skills as experts, we will ultimately acquire the capacity to collaborate more fully with other institutions and thus work towards developing greater impact upon the profession and upon our culture more broadly.Professor Kahr will focus, particularly, on how psychotherapists must enhance not only our “vocal potency” but, also, our “actional potency”, and he will encourage us as to how we must continue to remain respectfully quiet in the consulting room while listening to our patients but, also, he will consider how we might assume fuller ownership of our clinical and psychological wisdom outside the office and thus help to expand the respectability and the impact of the British psychotherapy field and therefore improve our own lives as well.

BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSOR BRETT KAHR.Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for over forty years.He is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London. Additionally, he serves as Honorary Director of Research and as Honorary Fellow of the Freud Museum London.Professor Kahr is Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council and, also, Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. In 2024, the British Psychoanalytic Council presented him with the “Outstanding Professional Leadership Award” for his contributions to the field, having worked not only as a clinician and supervisor, as a researcher, writer, and teacher, and institutional contributor, but, also, as a media psychologist, having served for many years as Resident Psychotherapist at the British Broadcasting Corporation.He is the author of twenty books and series editor of more than eighty-five additional volumes. His solo-authored books include D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait, which received the Gradiva Award for Biography from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, as well as the best-selling book, Sex and the Psyche, investigating the psychology of sexual fantasies, based on his work as Principal Investigator of the British Sexual Fantasy Research Project, in which he examined the private erotic minds of over 25,000 British and American adults. His more recent books include the best-selling How to Flourish as a Psychotherapist – soon to be republished in a second edition – as well as Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel, and Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, and, also, Hidden Histories of British Psychoanalysis: From Freud’s Death Bed to Laing’s Missing Tooth, as well as Forensic Psychoanalysis: From Sub-Clinical Psychopaths to Serial Killers. His impending books include The Holes in Winnicott’s Trousers: The Brilliance and Shadows of a Psychoanalyst, as well as an edited edition of the memoirs of Sigmund Freud’s grandson, Anton Walter Freud, who fought against the Nazis during the Second World War. Additionally, he has just completed a new volume of his selected writings, entitled Curing Madness, currently in production.A Consultant Psychotherapist at The Balint Consultancy, Professor Kahr works full-time with individuals and with couples and families at his consulting room in Central London.

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Fighting the most sedentary profession - with Professor Brett Kahr

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