Rose Edgcumbe

Rose Edgcumbe (12 May 1934 – 22 August 2001), sometimes known as Rose Edgcumbe Theobald, was a British psychoanalyst, psychologist and child development researcher.

Biography Edgcumbe was born in London, and as a child during the London Blitz of World War II, she and her mother were evacuated to Yorkshire in northern England for their safety. The effect of these evacuations on the psyche of young children would later play a part in her research.

Edgcumbe studied at the South Hampstead High School for Girls, and attended University College London specializing in psychology. As a Fulbright scholar in the 1950s, she worked as a clinical psychologist in the United States to further her psychology research. She also spent time in a hospital working with children labeled "mentally deficient" thus sparking a lasting interest in child developmental psychology. According to Clifford Yorke, who wrote her obituary, "she had also become dissatisfied with what she saw as the aridity of academic psychology and became more interested in psychoanalysis." "Edgcumbe captures the slippery slope between psychoanalysis and education. Is psychoanalysis a form of education? Or are these incompatible aims for child analysis? Recall that Anna Freud felt that children could not be psychoanalyzed as if they were adults. But children could be educated. Yet one wonders how education can be psychoanalytic."