Grandmotherland
Exploring the Myths and Realities
Editor: Judith Edwards
How might we better understand our travels through Grandmotherland? In this lively exploration, an experienced child psychotherapist draws together a wide range of perspectives on the role and experience of grandmothers.Judith Edwards looks back to the past and forward to the future, while being rooted in the reality of the modern grandmother’s life. We meet ‘good’ grannies, ‘bad’ grannies, and all those in between, as well as women who decided to be agents of transmission in other ways than passing on their DNA. Our guide looks at how the behaviour of the grandmother is affected by personality, culture, tradition and ‘norms’ and considers how psychoanalytic insights may help us understand this territory of life.
Contents:
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: We begin the journey and see where we go
CHAPTER 2: Pits and pitfalls: is the Grandmother a made-up creature?
CHAPTER 3: Grandmothers around the world
CHAPTER 4: ‘The Good Granny’
CHAPTER 5: Finding your place
CHAPTER 6: A Granny story: Little Red Riding Hood
CHAPTER 7: ‘The Bad Granny’
CHAPTER 8: Flo and Co: Grandmothers recalled over the years
CHAPTER 9: Conclusion: In which we sum up what we may have learned along the way
REVIEWS AND ENDORSEMENTS
“This is an area ripe for exploration.” – Hilary Mantel
“Wow! … I found I romped through it, fascinated by finding so many pleasant and painful representations of myself and stimulated by those who had found grandmotherdom a quite different realm from my own. As for flavour, it reminds me of my grandmother’s butterscotch, kept locked in a cupboard, definitely delicious but never enough …” – Juliet Hopkins, Ph.D , former ACP consultant child psychotherapist and author of An Independent Mind
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Judith Edwards is a child and adolescent psychotherapist who has worked for over thirty years at the Tavistock Clinic in London. Apart from her clinical experience, one of her principal interests is in the links between psychoanalysis, culture, and the arts, as well as making psychoanalytic ideas accessible to a wider audience. She has an international academic publishing record and in 2010 was awarded the Jan Lee memorial prize for the best paper linking psychoanalysis and the arts during that year: ‘Teaching & Learning about Psychoanalysis: Film as a teaching tool’.
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