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Love the Wild Swan represents the culmination of Judith Edwards’ lifelong dedication to child psychotherapy, to observation and to the work of art. It collects into one volume some of her most significant thinking in both new and published papers. The collection has a wide compass, reflecting on nothing less than the ‘continual becoming’ (p. xix) of human life. There are four parts, or fields of enquiry: observation; clinical work; theory, teaching and learning; and links with the arts. Awareness of the possibility and possible complementarity of differing paradigms is integral to the book; perhaps the book represents a kind of love song to awareness. Robinson Jeffers’ poem from which the title is taken expresses the frustrations of ever capturing the essence of experience:
I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
but resolves
At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
The book explores this meta view in a clear-eyed, unromanticised way, following the neurologist Luria’s (1987) exhortation to view an event from as many perspectives as possible in pursuit of truth.
The collection has observation at its heart, and as the principles and practice of observation pioneered by Esther Bick and championed here become ever more widely applied, this publication from one of our most respected child psychotherapists is timely. She begins with observation, revisiting the pre-psychoanalytic observations of Darwin, who inflicted what Freud called a second narcissistic blow to mankind, that we are descended from apes rather than God. Edwards reimagines the nature of Darwin’s baby son’s experience from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. This circling back, reviewing and interrelating perspectives, is at the core of the book. For example, Chapter 2 in the opening section looks at the process of containing the processing in an infa