Main description:

Although Professor Kahr spends most of his week facilitating traditional psychoanalytical sessions with his patients, in his spare time he has had many professional adventures outside the consulting room, broadcasting as Resident Psychotherapist for the B.B.C., lecturing about the intimacies of couple psychodynamics on the stage of the Royal Opera House, and defending "Lady Macbeth" in a murder trial at the Royal Courts of Justice in conjunction with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In this compellingly written and unputdownable book, Kahr shares his wealth of adventures both inside the consulting room and in the wider cultural sphere, disseminating psychoanalytical ideas more broadly. The book suggests that the "traditionalist" and the "maverick" aspects of the practising clinician can exist side by side in a fruitful collaboration. These adventures will encourage those embarking upon their first steps in the helping professions to entertain more creative ways of working.

Contents:

Prelude: Of Mavericks and Medias; Introduction: On Practising Therapy at 1.45 A.M.; Section One: Consulting Room Essays; Chapter 1: The Handshake; Chapter 2: Tissues; Chapter 3: The Ten-Minute Gap; Chapter 4: On Painting the Consulting Room; Chapter 5: The Bookshelf; Chapter 6: Baseball Caps, Overcoats, Orange Suits, and Neckties: On Patients and Their Clothing; Chapter 7: On Patients Who Remove Their Clothing in Sessions; Section Two: Media Essays; Chapter 8: How to Make a Forty-Seven-Minute Television Programme in Only Three Years; Chapter 9: Filming Sexual Fantasies; Chapter 10: How to Make 120,000 People Happy in Just Ten Weeks; Chapter 11: A Night at the Opera: Freudians at Covent Garden; Chapter 12: Defending "Lady Macbeth": Testimony of an Expert Witness; Section Three: Historical Essays; Chapter 13: Four Unknown Freud Anecdotes; Chapter 14: Why Freud Turned Down $25,000: Mental Health Professionals in the Witness Box; Section Four: The Mind of the Psychotherapist; Chapter 15: Musings of a Musicophiliac; Chapter 16: I Suffer from Karnacitis; Postlude: In Camera and On Camera, or, a Maverick's Manifesto; Acknowledgements; Original Sources of the Chapters; References; Index