You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is with great sadness that we inform our readers of the death of Judith Wallerstein in June 2012. Judith was a wonderful colleague and friend, servingrecently as an outside reader of one of my dissertation students, Marley Oakes, who did a qualitative study about joint custody, using some of Judith's research. It is an honor for us to be publishing her last article in this issue of PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY.
We have asked two people to contribute to this memorial note—Julia Lewis, Judith's long-time collaborator, and co-author on the article published here, and Hannah Wallerstein, Judith's granddaughter, who is a third year graduate student in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the City College of New York, CUNY. The Wallerstein family contribution to psychoanalysis lives on!
Elliot Jurist
Editor
Julia Lewis
This is Judy's last paper. We submitted it to this Journal on June 5, 2012 and Judy died suddenly two weeks later. It is fitting that this final paper is about the divorced mothers' relationships with their children as Judy was especially concerned with preserving this essential relationship through the vicissitudes of the post-divorce years. Judy understood that the attachment between parent and child, while the most fundamental and enduring human bond, was not invincible. She understood that human relationships exist within a structure and that they are strengthened and supported or attenuated and broken depending on how that structure changes and moves through time.
Those of us that knew Judy well understood that Judy was a feminist in the fundamental sense that she believed and lived accordingly that women's roles and responsibilities as wives and mothers were entirely compatible with and indeed informed and elevated their contributions outside the home. Judy's enormous compassion for children as well as her eloquent and highly effective promotion of children's well-being post-divorce is testament to this position. Working with Judy was to experienc