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This guide for psychotherapists is helpful to anyone in, or about to embark on, private practice, but is essential for those just beginning their careers. It is Brett Kahr's eleventh book and draws on his decades of experience as a busy, successful practitioner with couples, individuals, and adolescents.
Kahr's career has been very rich and his publications reflect that richness. From scholarly tomes on Winnicott to research-based books such as Sex and The Psyche, Kahr writes with confidence, developing an intimate conversation with the reader. This book is no different; it draws one into the secret world of a therapist with all its challenges, dilemmas, and gratifications.
Kahr begins by referencing Nina Coltart's book, How to Survive as a Psychotherapist (1993). Coltart's book, though now of its time, gave invaluable insights to beginning therapists such as myself, into what it was really like to see patients day after day in private practice. Kahr, with more ambition for the profession, suggests that we all need to aim to flourish rather than simply survive and the book endeavours to help beginning clinicians reach that goal.
After describing the qualities needed to be a therapist (not too mad, clever, and with a good memory), Kahr exhorts beginning therapists to read and study. He is firm about the importance of knowing the literature, and instructs therapists to put away the novel and to turn instead to Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, and the other great theorists. Kahr's superego might be a little too much to the fore here and the injunctions perhaps feel rather daunting to emerging clinicians. Kahr, after all, isn't, by a very long shot, the typical “good enough” therapist but is a multi-talented history scholar, creative thinker, teacher, and bibliophile. Quite a lot for the rest of us to live up to!
But Kahr's helpful steering on the needs of new trainees to assess their financial capacity to undertake training and his discussion of the importance of one's own a