In Person Booking Only | Applied Section Meeting | Wednesday 11 December 2024- Judith Edwards

IN PERSON BOOKING | Judith Edwards | Grandmotherland: Exploring the Myths and Realities

Discussant: Anne Alvarez

Chair: Stephen Frosh

Wednesday 11 December 2024

In Person at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and Online via Zoom

Abstract

As the cost of childcare continues to skyrocket, the lure of the grandmother childminder becomes ever stronger but what of the toll on grandmother? Fractured relationships are commonplace but what does a grandmother do when she is frozen out? Judith Edwards’ book, Grandmotherland: Exploring the Myths and Realities examines every facet of grandmothering: the meanings, reasons, and possibilities behind the myths, memes, and realities experienced by women the world over. In this presentation, Judith Edwards takes us on a journey through ‘Grandmotherland’, a territory ‘ripe for exploration’ as the late Hilary Mantel suggested. A land full of myth, where stereotypes and memes jostle with reality. She questions what we think of when we speak of grandmothers: an apple-cheeked granny knitting in her rocker or a monstrous grandma in wolf skin?

Dr Edwards looks at the stories about grandmothering carried down through fairy tales, family history, and legend and those of women living today. She extends the ideas about the role of the grandmother and the intergenerational patterns which affect how it is experienced. Internationally and inter-culturally informed, she links to the internal psychological experience of granny-hood as well as the external factors at play: personality, culture, family history, and so much more.

Judith Edwards is a retired consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist who has taught and supervised on various courses at the Tavistock Clinic, where she has worked in various capacities since the 1980s. Since retirement she has worked there as a visiting lecturer and also at Roehampton University. Her book of selected papers Love the Wild Swan was published in Routledge’s World Mental Health series in 2016. She was course tutor for the Tavistock’s MA in Psychoanalytic Studies for non-clinical students for ten years until July 2011. A past editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, she has published her work in papers and academic books internationally, the most recent being Media and the Inner World (Eds. Bainbridge and Yates, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In 2010 she was awarded the Jan Lee memorial prize for the best paper linking psychoanalysis and the arts during that year. Her book Grandmotherland was published by Karnac in 2023. Apart from her clinical experience over the years, one of her principal interests has been in the links between psychoanalysis, culture and the arts, as well as making psychoanalytic ideas accessible to a wide audience. To that end she has published a pamphlet HELP! for parents and children about psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Her memoir ‘Pieces of Molly: An Ordinary Life’ was published by Karnac in November 2014.

Anne Alvarez is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and retired Co-Convener of the Autism Service, Child and Family Department, Tavistock Clinic, where she still teaches. She is author of Live Company: Psychotherapy with Autistic, Borderline, Deprived and Abused Children. and has edited with Susan Reid, Autism and Personality: Findings from the Tavistock Autism Workshop. A book in her honour, edited by Judith Edwards, entitled Being Alive: Building on the Work of Anne Alvarez was published in 2002. She was Visiting Professor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society in November 2005 and is an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Centre of California. Her most recent book, The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy with Disturbed Children was published in April 2012 by Routledge. A book by Galit Gampel on Alvarez in a series on influential thinkers in psychoanalysis is in preparation for Routledge.

Should you wish to join this meeting online, you can register here: Zoom registration only.

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