In this compellingly written and meticulously researched new book, Professor Brett Kahr draws upon extensive unpublished archival sources and upon his four decades of oral history interviews to paint fascinating portraits of many of the icons of mental health. Unearthing Freud's Death Bed and Laing's Missing Tooth: Hidden Histories of British Psychoanalysis includes detailed accounts of Kahr's interviews with such noted figures as Enid Balint, Marion Milner, Ronald Laing, John Bowlby and his wife, Ursula Longstaff Bowlby, as well as numerous members of Donald Winnicott's family. Framed as a series of glimpses into the early history of British psychoanalysis, Kahr explores how the German-speaking Sigmund Freud learned how to psychoanalyse English-speaking patients; how Enid Eichholz (the future wife of Michael Balint) pioneered couple psychoanalysis in the wake of the Second World War; how Donald Winnicott treated "The Piggle" in the midst of his own health crises; and how Masud Khan degenerated from a clinical sage into an anti-Semite. A breathtaking combination of interviews, reminiscences, and well-documented scholarship, this book provides a gripping overview of many of the key figures in British psychoanalysis, all of whom made unparalleled contributions to the mental health profession, and whose lives and careers deserve to be visited and revisited. Few books are simultaneously informative, deep, playful, and pleasurable to read. Combining humility and respect for his subjects with creative audacity and understated eloquence, Brett Kahr's Hidden Histories of British Psychoanalysis is a rare book of such sort. The two words in the title that give away the author's passion and craft are Hidden" (with its impish promise to unveil secrets) and "Histories" (with its sombre acknowledgment of the myriad, divergent sources, choices, and agendas in writing history). Based upon laborious archival research and personal interviews with the London glitterati of psychoanalysis (e.g. John Bowlby, Marion Milner, Enid Balint, Pearl King, R. D. Laing), Kahr offers us a penetrating glimpse into the post-Freudian developments in British psychoanalysis, while introducing us to the strengths and solidities of his dramatis personae as well as to their whims, idiosyncrasies, and occasional madnesses. This is a great contribution to our professional literature indeed!" Salman Akhtar, MD, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia "This is a very sneaky book. Ostensibly it is a series of tales from the history of Anglophone psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. But, in reality, it is a readable, often funny, account by the best historian of psychoanalysis of his generation, Brett Kahr. As much autobiography as historical account, it shows what happens when a brilliant mind meets an intractable object. The essay on the young student Brett Kahr and R. D. Laing's missing tooth is itself worth the price of the volume, and has the possibility of becoming the classic essay on the pitfalls of celebrity." Sander L. Gilman, PhD, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Emory University "A self-described "clinical historian", a prolific writer and biographer of Donald Winnicott, with a passion for the rigorous rendering of historical detail and the healing of the human soul's most intractable sufferings, Brett Kahr has made a reputation for himself as the eminent narrator and in depth analyst of the vagaries and some of the most protracted motifs and aspects that animate the legacy of psychoanalysis and that of its leading and lesser-known figures (the "elderly psychoanalysts", as he lovingly calls them, whose homes, libraries, and couches he recalls visiting here). The present collection of essays adds a series of important chapters to this ongoing and captivating lifelong project. In an at once engaging and well-documented fashion, Kahr takes us back to the contingent elements that, together, gave psychoanalysis in the United Kingdom its inescapable force and necessary radiance. From Freud's unknown English teacher, to the growth of his English speaking clinical practice, and his remarkable Anglicisation, via the untold sources and adventures related to Winnicott as filtered through his marital life, up to the contributions made by a host of significant but much less-known theorists and practitioners, from "unassuming icons" to "bad boys" in British child, adult, and couple analysis, Kahr's unique book traces overlooked names and cases, concepts and practices, that have not received the attention they deserve in what he calls "psychoanalytical historiography". Kahr is attentive to and appreciative of the networks, both familial and professional, within which great thinkers produce their psychoanalytic ideas and do their clinical work. He relies not only on