Confer Books - Confer

Welcome to Confer and Karnac Publishing

We have reached our first birthday as a new publisher. Launching a publishing house during a pandemic has been both challenging and exhilarating, but we now have some wonderful books in print and exciting new additions on the way.

Confer is now housing two imprints: the new Confer Books and Karnac Books. Published for all those interested in psychotherapeutic ideas, Confer Books are designed, like our events, to deepen our understanding of psychological, relational and emotional processes. Karnac – also a bookshop – has been a specialist publisher of books about psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for over 70 years, and was acquired by us in 2020.

In both imprints we embrace the values of inclusivity and creativity within the field of psychotherapy and related branches of mental health. We are dedicated to publishing contributions from the full range of schools of thought, particularly those from emerging and marginal voices.

Christina Wipf Perry
Publishing Director

BOOK OF THE MONTH

Primitive Bodily Communications in Psychotherapy: Embodied Expressions of a Disembodied Psyche (2022, Karnac Books)

Every psychotherapist will be familiar with what it means to experience the hatred and despair of their most vulnerable patients in the midst of a psychotherapy session. Most often these patients will manage to express their feelings verbally, but what about those who never developed the capacity to speak? Or those who are capable of talking, but carry a complex range of unprocessed embodied feelings that cannot be verbally expressed? Some patients must rely on another type of language in order to communicate their dissociative states of mind.

SEE MORE