The Louise Emanuel Essay Prize

The Louise Emanuel Essay Prize is an annual award for an outstanding piece of writing in the area of Infant Mental Health.

Dr Louise Emanuel, who died in May 2017, was deeply committed to psychoanalytic interventions in the field of infant mental health and work with under 5s. She led the Infant Mental Health Workshop at the Tavistock Clinic for many years and set up the hugely popular Infant Mental Health short course at the Tavistock, which gained an international reputation. With Dr Tony Lee, Louise also instigated a more formal research project at the Tavistock called BIP (brief intervention project). Louise became ill and died before this work could be published.

Louise wrote widely on the subject of Infant mental health and other subjects, including the book co-edited with Elizabeth Bradley What can the Matter Be? Therapeutic interventions with Parents, Infants and Young Children, Tavistock Clinic Series (Karnac, 2008). She also taught extensively in the UK and in many countries abroad, introducing the Tavistock model of work with under 5s and supervising such work with colleagues in the UK and abroad.

The prize of £350, given under the auspices of the Tavistock Clinic Foundation, will be judged by a panel comprising of leaders in the field of infant mental health, including those based at the Tavistock Clinic and Anna Freud Centre. There is representation on the panel from the Journal of Infant Observation and the Journal of Child Psychotherapy. The judges will be looking for a piece of writing, written in English, which could be submitted for publication, subject to the usual consents being obtained. Please note that the essay cannot have been previously published nor due for forthcoming publication in either journal or book form.

The panel invites papers up to 8000 words on any of the following subjects:

Infant or Young Child Observation

Psychoanalytic Clinical work with Under 5s

Psychoanalytically informed research with under 5s

Entries should be submitted as a word attachment to Ilana Inspector iinspector@tavi-port.nhs.uk by Friday 30 November 2018

The prize will be awarded alongside a presentation of the winning submission in an event at the Tavistock on 13 March 2019, 6-8.30pm in the Lecture Theatre on the 5th floor.