wilted roses against a dark grey background
CPD Credits
3.5
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Your TR Together account
Standard
£67.50
Trainee/NHS
£57.38
Buy Recording
wilted roses against a dark grey background

The Psychology of Erotic Fantasies and Behaviours

Curing Sexy Couples

With Professor Brett Kahr & Albertina Fisher (Chair)

In this seminar, Professor Brett Kahr, one of the world’s leading researchers on the structure and function of sexual fantasies, offers participants insights as to how we might address the private erotic lives of individual and couple clients in a more honest, more straightforward, and more clinically impactful manner. The confidence to practise in this way will support therapists and counsellors, helping us to discover the often hidden, traumatic, unconscious foundations of sexual symptomatology, which often cause quite complex challenges for clients. You will be able to think about how clients might integrate and work through sexual difficulties, regardless of how theses traumata erupt among couples.

Kahr shares his clinical insights as Principal Investigator of the British Sexual Fantasy Research Project (2002-2008), in which he studied the private masturbatory and coital fantasies of over 25,000 adult participants, aged eighteen to ninety-plus years of age, in both the United Kingdom and in the United States of America, undertaken in collaboration with the international polling agency YouGov.

He then explores key concepts, including the “intra-marital affair”, the “erotic tumour”, and the “conjugal aneurysm”. He draws upon his multi-decade experience of treating couples to investigate the deep and often traumatic origins of sexual challenges within the relational context, examining the ways in which sadism enters the adult bedroom.

In speaking about these complex and often ignored topics, Professor Kahr helps us all to develop a greater capacity for “sexpertise” within our consulting rooms.

Programme

Introductions
Unravelling the Role of Masturbatory and Coital Fantasies: From Early Childhood Trauma to Adult Psychopathology

Although most people regard “sex” as a behavioural activity conducted between two naked bodies, psychoanalytical clinicians and researchers as well as sexologists have long appreciated that much erotic excitement occurs inside the head, rather than in the genitalia, often in the form of sexual fantasies, whether masturbatory or coital in nature, which impact hugely, not only upon the nature of the spousal relationship but, also, upon other aspects of one’s working life and private life.  In this seminar, Professor Kahr will draw from his extensive transatlantic research, unearthing the nature of erotic fantasies and their aetiology, emphasising, in particular, the traumatic origins.  

Q&A
Break
From Intra-Marital Affairs to Extramarital Affairs: The Impact of Unconscious Fantasies on Spousal Survival

Needless to say, although many people do often fantasise erotically about our long-standing partners and about sexy, glamorous film stars and pop singers, the vast majority of individuals actually achieve orgasm as a result of fantasies which had developed in early childhood due to particular traumatic episodes, through the eroticisation of cruelty.  Professor Kahr has referred to such fantasies as “intra-marital affairs”, which often become enacted as extramarital infidelities.  In this portion of the seminar, he will investigate the ways in which early, internalised fantasy structures become part of the long-term “ego structure” of the human mind, permitting victims of physical sadism to fantasise about their attackers.  Professor Kahr will describe the ways in which such erotic thoughts emerge in the midst of psychotherapeutic consultations and how the clinical practitioner can help to facilitate both catharsis and insight, thus transforming these often self-destructive and other-destructive states of mind and styles of behaviour.

Q&A
Break
The Role of Sexual Sadism in Contemporary Relationships

In the final section of the seminar, Professor Kahr will explore the ways in which sadism will emerge in the spousal bedroom in multitudinous forms, ranging from physically sadistic enactments and bodily evacuations, to intra-marital affairs and infidelities, to the use of sex workers, and to the prevalence of pornography addictions.  He will also consider how even “micro-separations” between couples including small episodes of abandonment, misunderstanding, or emotional illiteracy can destroy an intimate relationship.  He will share material from his many decades of clinical experience about the ways in which trustworthy consulting room conversations can help to repair such horrific marital damage over time.

Q&A
End

Brett Kahr

Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for over forty years. 
He is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London.  He is, additionally, the Honorary Director of Research at Freud Museum London and an Honorary Fellow of the museum, as well as the Series Editor of the “Freud Museum London Series” of books on the history of psychoanalysis.  Professor Kahr is the author of nineteen books and series editor of over eighty-five additional titles.  These include the best-selling Sex and the Psyche, and its revised American edition, Who’s Been Sleeping Your Head?:  The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies, based on his work as Principal Investigator of the British Sexual Fantasy Research Project.  His most recent books include Bombs in the Consulting Room:  Surviving Psychological Shrapnel, as well as Freud’s Pandemics:  Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis, and, also, Hidden Histories of British Psychoanalysis:  From Freud’s Death Bed to Laing’s Missing Tooth. 

Professor Kahr is Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council and, also, Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.  He worked for many years as Resident Psychotherapist at the British Broadcasting Corporation, having broadcast to 15,000,000 Britons weekly about mental health.  In recognition of his contributions to media psychology, he has become a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. 

Kahr has had the privilege of a long relationship with the couple psychoanalysis community, and has served as Chair of the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists and, subsequently, as Chair of the British Society of Couple Psychotherapists and Counsellors – the forerunners of the current membership organisation, the Tavistock Relationships Association of Psychotherapists and Counsellors, having facilitated the founding of both the journal Couple and Family Psychoanalysis and the Routledge monograph series “The Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis”.  A Consultant Psychotherapist at The Balint Consultancy, he works with individuals and couples at his consulting room in Central London.

Albertina Fisher

Albertina Fisher is a couple and individual psychodynamic and psychosexual therapist, trainer and supervisor. She leads Tavistock Relationship’s Psychosexual Studies Certificate, and teaches on the Psychosexual Diploma. Following a career in business, she retrained at Tavistock Relationships, completing their diploma in Couple and Individual Psychodynamic Psychotherapy before training as a Psychosexual Therapist. She has a special interest in sexual desire in individuals and couples across the lifespan, among other sexual and relationship issues. 

Buy Recording