ABSTRACT

Love the Wild Swan is the culmination of thirty years of clinical and teaching experience, undertaken by child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist Judith Edwards. Along with new material, the book consists of previously published papers spanning Edwards’s entire career, which have been carefully selected to chart the journey that every clinician and human being makes, from babyhood to adult life.

Edwards offers an example of how the evolution of meanings occur and how lifelong learning about the self and the other takes place. The book is divided into four parts, with sections on observation, clinical work, teaching theory, and links between these ideas and ongoing life in the form of the arts, through poetry, film and sculpture.

Love the Wild Swan will be of interest to practitioners and clinicians, as well as appealing to anyone in the field of mental health who wishes to reflect on the nature of human development and growth.