In Grandmotherland, Dr Judith Edwards offers an exploration of Grandmotherhood as an intergenerational, relational, and socially constructed position. Drawing on myth, fairy tales, family narratives, and contemporary lived experience, she examines how dominant cultural discourses shape expectations of grandmothers and organise family roles, boundaries, and power across generations. Judith attends to patterns of transmission, alliance, exclusion, and care, situating Grandmotherhood within wider socio-economic and cultural contexts—including the increasing reliance on grandmothers for childcare. Grandmotherland invites systemic practitioners and scholars to rethink grannyhood not as a fixed role, but as a dynamic position shaped by relationships, histories, and social structures.

Judith Edwards is a child and adolescent psychotherapist who has worked for over thirty years at the Tavistock Clinic in London. Love the Wild Swan: The Selected Works of Judith Edwards was published by Routledge in their World Library of Mental Health series, and her edited book, Psychoanalysis and Other Matters: Where Are We Now? was also published by Routledge. From 1996 to 2000, she was joint editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy. 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’.

In this episode of The Systemic Way, we talk about age in the room—listening for it not as decline, but as presence, memory, and becoming. Drawing inspiration from Maya Angelou’s On Aging, where she writes of being “old as the hills, and far from done,” we explore lifecycle transitions, working with older people, and how a therapist’s age is read, misread, and positioned in the therapeutic relationship.

We reflect on age as a cultural and systemic story: how wisdom, power, invisibility, authority, and expectation are shaped across generations and communities. This is a conversation about the assumptions we inherit, the vitality that persists, and what age—spoken and unspoken—brings into systemic practice.

In this episode we speak with no other than Dr. Jaako Seikkula on this latest bookWhy Dialogue Does Cure: Explaining What Makes Dialogue Unprecedentedly Effective in Difficult Crises (2025). The book presents the core principles of Open Dialogue, a system of psychiatric care and dialogic psychotherapy that has spread to over 40 countries. Why Dialogue Does Cure explores the transformative power of Open Dialogue, a radically humanistic approach to mental health care developed in Western Lapland. This episode unpacks why dialogic practice—where clinicians, clients, families, and networks meet in shared conversation—can lead to recoveries unimaginable in conventional psychiatry.

Together we discuss the history, development and discovery of how Open Dialogue redefined care: not by aiming to eliminate symptoms, but by meeting the full human through transparent, team-based dialogue.

Dr. Seikkula argues that the widening gap between humanistic and conventional approaches must be bridged—and that dialogue itself can be curative. This episode is essential listening for psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and anyone interested in meeting the full human in therapeutic practice.

Seikkula, J. (2025). Why dialogue does cure: explaining what makes dialogue unprecedentedly effective in difficult crises.