Professor Brett Kahr

No topic within the mental health field has generated as much controversy as that of schizophrenia. Since the publication of Professor Eugen Bleuler’s ground-breaking monograph on schizophrenia in 1911, members of the medical and psychological professions have engaged in heated debate as to the origin and treatment of this severe form of mental distress. Professor Brett Kahr will introduce course participants to the different ways in which colleagues have conceptualised the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia, and he will help students to understand such aspects of schizophrenia as positive and negative symptoms; so-called “thought disorder”; catatonic retreats; and so forth. He will provide an overview of the theories of aetiology, ranging from genetic, biochemical, and neuroanatomical approaches, to those derived from social psychiatry and psychoanalysis and traumatology, prior to considering the psychoanalytical alternatives to traditional psychiatric treatment. Kahr will examine the pioneering contributions of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, as well as those of more modern contributors such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Harold Searles, Herbert Rosenfeld, Bertram Karon, and many others, and will also discuss his own work on the role of early parental death threats in the aetiology of psychotic states, which he has come to understand as the “infanticidal attachment”.

About the Speaker

Professor Brett Kahr is Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, and Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Arts at Roehampton University.