Maudsley Arts and Psychoanalysis | The Accursed Empty Space - Susie Godsil

Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis | Arts and Psychoanalysis

The Accursed Empty Space

Susie Godsil

22nd April 2024

7:30pm - 9:00pm (BST)

Hybrid

In-person at 10 Windsor Walk and online via Zoom.

Recording available for 1 week.

The speakers will be in dialogue with Psychoanalyst Dr Anne Patterson.

The case of Ruth Kjär.

In this talk I shall reflect on my own creative process in responding to a request to write a psychoanalytic paper exploring creativity. On the road I revisit Melanie Klein’s 1929 paper, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and the Creative Impulse’. This paper, where Klein first uses the term reparation, a paper which I had read many times and thought I knew well, hit me in a new way and faced me with interesting questions about what I had not seen in all previous readings. I will try to explore this new experience, a new creative encounter so to speak. My title, ‘The Accursed Empty Space’, is a quote from the section of the paper which I had erased or not registered. It evokes a particularly terrible state of mind which often seems to form part of the struggle to create and I think raises questions about the representation of femininity and of blackness which we can discuss.

It may be helpful to read this short paper in advance. I shall be focusing on the second part where Klein focuses on the artist Ruth Kjär to elaborate her ideas about the particular infantile anxieties of girls.

Susie Godsil is a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, living and working in the north of England. She studied French and German language literature and thought and started professional life as a secondary school teacher of these languages. She soon developed an interest in adolescents with emotional and behavioral difficulties which interfered with their capacity to learn and develop. Discovering psychoanalytic approaches to thinking about these young people was a turning point and she went on to train as a psychotherapist and then a psychoanalyst. As well as a private psychoanalytic practice, she held a Consultant Psychotherapist position in the NHS for fifteen years. She retained her link to teaching through contributing to a variety of psychotherapy trainings, developing the Tavistock Clinic’s Foundation Programmes in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the north of England, and contributing to the development of the Institute of Psychoanalysis’ Northern Training. She has a special interest in the creative process and has been involved in a collaborative relationship with Opera North resulting in several symposia on Psychoanalysis and Opera and other events involving dialogue between artists, performers, and psychoanalysts. More recently she is revisiting her interest in languages as part of a multilingual study group of European psychoanalysts exploring the process of working psychoanalytically across languages and what gets found in translation. She is a member of the organising committee of the IOPA’s European Psychoanalytic Film Festival.

From Freud’s thinking on the sublimation of libido and his later theorisation of the Life and Death Drives, to Klein’s work on reparation and the recovery of the good object and Winnicott’s ideas of creative living, psychoanalysis has always been interested in creativity. 

In the fourth Maudsley summer series on arts and psychoanalysis, we continue to explore this theme of creativity between internal and external worlds in dialogue with artists from a range of different perspectives: from the natural to the built world and ceramics to literature and theatre.

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Concession tickets are available, for students, BPAS candidates and NHS trainees and nurses. Please email outreach@iopa.org.uk if you are unsure if you qualify for a concession ticket.

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