ABSTRACT
In December 2016, Margot Waddell presented a paper at the monthly Tavistock Scientific Meeting entitled “‘And so of larger—Darknesses—’ Living with Dying: The Containing Function of Meaning”. Her delivery of the paper generated a unique atmosphere among the packed audience, and the chair commented towards the end of the discussion that he had never before experienced the particular quality of silence that took hold of the room at points, in the spaces between contributions from the floor. My own thought was that this atmosphere was produced by the degree and intensity of emotional work that Margot had undertaken with respect to her theme over a period of about eighteen months following a first version of the paper she delivered at a conference on the subject of “Living with Dying”. To me, her 2016 presentation was a rare phenomenon, in which she generated a “lived experience” of psychoanalysis for, and within, a live audience.
