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When my mother struggled with glaucoma in her 80s there was a particular moment that brought her great joy. She had listened to a radio program in which psychotherapist and historian Brett Kahr was speaking. “Listening to him, I did not feel blind. I could see everything he described as his voice was so clear and he can tell such an enthralling story.”
Brett Kahr is not only an historian, but he is also a musician, a psychoanalytic therapist, a riveting speaker and a loving encyclopedia and archivist of psycho-analysis. In 2024, he was awarded the British Psychoanalytic Council's Outstanding Professional Leadership Award for his contributions to the mental health field over the last four decades, as a clinician, academic, researcher, writer, mental health broadcaster and organizational worker. It is not surprising that this book has over 50 pages of references. To add to the numbers, he has published 18 books and has served as series editor for more than 85 other titles. So, any reader who comes to this book as their first experience of reading Kahr will have plenty to carry on with! This book is also the result of the Freud Museum London Series, Karnac Books and the author joining force. It follows Kahr's (2021) successful Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis.
For those who have followed Kahr's writings, this book is perhaps his most relational as well as historic. The deeply serious albeit humorous title of the introduction –“My Love of Deceased Psychoanalysts”– clearly illustrates his unusual position as both a clinical and academic historian, a development that came from his deep childhood love for and obsession with history. I see him as having qualities in common with Hilary Mantel whose award-winning novels on Cromwell were only possible because she breathed the history and felt that period alive in her mind. Hence in Chapter 1 (pp. 3-12), Kahr moves from the use of Zoom in our own time of Covid to Freud learning English in order