John Michael Kerr (January 31, 1950 – July 18, 2016) was an American editor, psychologist, and author raised in New York City.
He was best known for his 1993 nonfiction book A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, which explores an episode in the history of psychoanalysis.
Raised in a house of writers, his family was the subject of humorous articles written by his mother that would be collected into the volume Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957).
Although not completing his doctorate, his learning in the field enabled him to fill the position of visiting scholar at Cornell University, Harvard, the Austen Riggs psychiatric treatment center in Stockbridge, Mass., and the William Alanson White Institute, which trains psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, located in New York City.
He offered Kerr the position of associate editor at the Analytic Press, which published books for an audience primarily of psychotherapists.
[5] There Kerr commented on the lack of enthusiasm by the practical-minded clinical community to recent advances in the study of the origins and early development of psychoanalysis.