Introduction: Sculpture As Symptom, by Philip Larratt-Smith
The Return of the Repressed, by Philip Larratt-Smith
The Child, the Container and the Claustrum: the artistic vocation of Louise Bourgeois, by Meg Harris Williams
Beyond the return of the repressed: Louise Bourgeois’ chthonic art, by Paul Verhaeghe & Julie De Ganck
The Sublime Jealousy of Louise Bourgeois, by Juliet Mitchell
L., by Mignon Nixon
Contending with the Father: Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation, by Elisabeth Bronfen
Symbolizing Loss And Conflict: Psychoanalytic Process In Louise Bourgeois’ Art, by Donald Kuspit
Louise Bourgeois In Psychoanalysis With Henry Lowenfeld, by Donald Kuspit
Introduction: Sculpture As Symptom
Por Philip Larratt-Smith
[…] The psychoanalytic writings chronicle Bourgeois’s descent into severe depression in the 50s, agoraphobia being merely one of the most obvious symptoms. She was acutely aware that this breakdown was unravelling her family life and undermining her identity as daughter, wife, and mother. Worse still, it had become almost impossible for her to work. In the face of her depression, Bourgeois’s principal defense lay in making art that allowed her to enact the ritual movement from passive to active of which she often spoke and wrote. The process of making art also enabled her to channel and transform her dammed libido and her aggression against others and herself into symbolic form and through symbolic actions such as cutting, drilling, carving, and pouring. When she was deprived of this outlet, Bourgeois felt herself to be locked in a vicious circle of frustration, hostility, and guilt.
If the trauma of her mother’s death in 1932 had been the primary motive for her switch from the study of mathematics and philosophy to art, the death of her father in 1951 had served as the catalyst for her decision to undergo psychoanalysis.1 In her youth her mother had repaired the tears and holes in the tapestries that passed through the family workshop at Antony. Bourgeois took this activity as a model for the restorative possibilities of art. In an undated loose sheet, she wrote: “why sculpture – because –the experiences / reached when working are the deepest and / most significant […] / Sculpture is the others / or rather clay is the others and / the sculptor is the ego. these are situa / tions concrete and precise.”2 For most of her life, art was her primary form of psychic restoration, although at the height of her depression psychoanalysis served as a substitute for art, at the same time that it helped her to learn how to continue to make art. The psychoanalytic writings flesh out the relatively unknown period between 1952, when she was still articulating her series of monolithic and segmented wooden Personnages, and 1964, when she would exhibit a new body of work at the Stable Gallery in New York City.3 They establish the crucial role played by psychoanalysis in Bourgeois’s artistic development, and their richness of detail and emotional range confirm Lucy Lippard’s observation that “rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed by its maker’s psyche.”4
Along with Marxism, that other twentieth-century unity of theory and practice, psychoanalysis was the lingua franca of the intelligentsia in the United States of the 1930s and 40s. The Abstract Expressionist artists, Bourgeois’s contemporaries, were versed in Freud and Jung and spoke of their art in relation to the unconscious and the visual language of the dream world, all of which was the heritage of Surrealism. What Bourgeois’s writings now make clear, however, is that her relationship to psychoanalysis was of a different order of magnitude. Probably no other artist has engaged more profoundly with psychology and psychoanalysis. Bourgeois firmly believed that the artist is privileged with access to the unconscious and with a rare capacity to express fundamental psychic realities in symbolic form. She maintained that although the process of making art offers the artist no permanent cure, it does at least grant him a momentary reprieve or exorcism of past trauma. By digging deep into his unconscious the artist paradoxically develops the ability to create powerful images of universal significance. Both sculpture and psychoanalysis yielded distinct forms of knowledge that became fused in Bourgeois’s artistic practise.
Writing about Bourgeois’s installation of her Personages, Rosalind Krauss stated that the “nature of the encounter” was a “projection of the Unconscious onto the space of the real.”5 The psychoanalytic writings reveal that the rigid, top-heavy Personages, which could barely stand by themselves and had to be bolted directly into the floor, mirrored the inner fragility of her psyche. Like the artist herself, they were literally scared stiff. By making these surrogates portable Bourgeois ensured that they were dependent on and inseparable from her, which expresses in reverse her fear of abandonment. Their titles reflect Bourgeois’s states of mind: Persistent Antagonism (1946-48), Dagger Child (1947-49), The Tomb of the Unknown Child (1947-49), The Observer (1947-49), The Blind Leading the Blind (1951), and so on.6 According to Bourgeois, these works represented “mourning”– not just for her father who died in 1951, nor for the other loved ones she had left behind in France when she moved to the United States in 1938, but mourning for her own disintegrating psychic integrity – even, perhaps, proleptic mourning for herself, since she was not certain that she would make it out of her depression alive. […]
The Return of the Repressed, by Philip Larratt-Smith
By Philip Larratt-Smith
[…] To give unconscious expression to her Oedipal conflict Bourgeois created a triadic form, one which was sufficiently open to comprehend multiple narratives and shifting subject positions but also subject to the condensation and displacement characteristic of symbols and dreams. Janus Fleuri embodies the triadic structure of the Oedipal situation: the individual terms of this triad can be rotated and switched out, but the basic structure remains fixed. The central crevice of furrowed folds where two identical breasts/phalli are conjoined resembles the labia and opening of the vagina, here the third sexual organ. This tertiary point uniting two equidistant polarities forms the apex of an imaginary triangle. Like a theorem, Janus Fleuri concisely establishes the coordinates of Bourgeois’s blocked Oedipal strivings and passions. Its double-faced form allows it to serve as a repository of good and bad identifications in the Kleinian sense, which is a crucial turning point in the passage through the Oedipal phase.
The first triadic dialogue must be the nucleus of the Bourgeois family, Louis – Joséphine – Louise, a reading that brings together the father’s phallus and the mother’s breast. At the threshold of puberty a powerful love for and jealousy of her father coexists with a solicitous devotion to her sick mother that cannot conceal an incestuous fantasy of taking the latter’s place in the conjugal bed. In a loose sheet dating from 1959, Bourgeois notes various compulsive precautions she took to “protect” her mother from unspecified “people” who might wish to “hurt her,” which is to say that she displaced her own unacceptable death wishes against her mother onto others. “I was definitely / relieved by her death and I put myself in her bed,” coupling a symbolic enactment of her incestuous wishes for the forbidden father with a formulaic rationalization of the reason for her “relief” that displaces and disguises the source of her unconscious pleasure: “after she was dead I said / that at least she would not suffer any more.” That she later kept her mother’s memory alive “as an atonement” only confirms Bourgeois’s sense of guilt.7 Janus Fleuri represents the polarities and contradictory impulses of love and hate, but also the possibility of reparation. “I wanted to keep her alive (the / vow) it means I was trying or not to / get her dead ; then it was a mitigated and / crude aggression I felt (the reason is not necessary / to know) =I felt like killing – but this has never / been felt – I acted as if I was saving her.”8
Another permutation of the triadic dialogue is the now-canonical love triangle of Louis – Sadie – Louise. Sadie Richmond Gordon was hired by Louis to tutor Bourgeois and her siblings in English and became his mistress. That Sadie was very close to Bourgeois and lived in the same house (like “a standard piece of furniture,” in Bourgeois’s mordant phrase9) made the liaison all the more traumatic. More, Sadie’s liaison with Louis occurred right when Bourgeois was entering puberty and becoming sexually aware (the 1923 diary, dating from when Bourgeois was eleven years old, records her awareness of boys looking at her). Yet much as Dora facilitated her father’s affair with Frau K. by spending time with Herr K., Bourgeois facilitated her father’s liaison with Sadie by taking the role of her mother’s nurse. No less than her mother Joséphine, she too is complicit in her father’s liaison, adding another layer to her later guilt. Bourgeois’s love for Sadie, with the intensity typical of her age, is analogous to the feelings Dora harbored towards the “adorable white body”10 of Frau K.; it was also an unconscious identification with her father. If “the combined parent figure forms the basis of the ego ideal,”11 then these various triangular configurations can only have contributed to the split in Bourgeois’s ego.
Conflicting impulses emanating from within the triadic configuration leads to murderous hostility and violence. Reverting to a pre-Oedipal position, Bourgeois feels castrated, dispossessed of the father’s phallus that she regards as rightfully hers. Impossible to identify with the weak mother figure of Joséphine, who has been supplanted by Sadie in the conjugal bed. And yet Bourgeois’s transference of hostility from her mother to Sadie, from Sadie to her father, ultimately produces only confusion:12
I have the missing link – Kill *
The killing – the stabbing to death
[…]
Is it Sadie back of it all -
[…]
my jealousy is deadly
Look how the triangle establishes itself
I feel two against one – against me
with Alain + Robert against me
the men against the woman
and the couple against me13
In later life she will play out this dynamic with the men in her own family, “with Alain + Robert against me.” She feels beleaguered by the “couple” which, in true Oedipal fashion, she wants to break up. As the title of Janus Fleuri implies, her repressed Oedipal deadlock continues to blossom and bear fruit in the present.
Bourgeois later wrote that “the story of Sadie is to me almost as important as the story of my mother in my life. The motivation for the work is a negative reaction against her.”14 The tale of a “double betrayal” by father and mother, by Louis and Sadie, can be said to culminate in The Destruction of the Father (1974), a murderous fantasy staged amid fragmented body parts. The Oedipal deadlock gives rise to “a patricide idea” that expresses the “wish for freedom from an overstrong father fixation” and “from a jealousy which does not permit the patient to share his father with other siblings”15 (or, in Sadie’s case, surrogate sibling). In Bourgeois’s account of this installation work, the children devour the overbearing father in order to bring his reign to an end. Certainly her murderous hostility against the father suggests a regression to a pre-Oedipal phase. But to eat the father is to incorporate the father’s body into oneself, a symbolic representation of intercourse. The guilt that follows this act of killing is nothing other than a screen for the true cause of her guilt, which stems from having symbolically enacted her repressed wish to sleep with her father and of having usurped her mother’s place.16 Bourgeois manifests an obsessive fear that “it is certain that if I steal a P / that belongs to her since my father belongs / to her she will not be content / and she will take her revenge.” This revenge will take the form of abandonment (“my mother will abandon me”):
but silly you I am not going
to love him I simply want to
steal him, to dispossess him, and I will come back to you
Both of us we are going to steal him, we
are going to eat him17
Nicky Glover writes that according to Klein, “emptiness” is “the most profound anxiety experienced by girls [and] is the equivalent of castration anxiety in boys.”18 The killing of the father in The Destruction of the Father is Bourgeois’s retaliation for the feeling of emptiness which indicates a castration anxiety (and which is so evident in her psychoanalytic writings). To fill herself with the father fulfils the most elementary “infantile phantasies” which are “associated with on the one hand love and on the other hand hunger.”19 […]
The Child, the Container and the Claustrum: the artistic vocation of Louise Bourgeois
By Meg Harris Williams
[…] In Bourgeois’s iconic series of Spiders, especially the giant Maman, the male and female aspects of the combined object achieve ‘equilibrium’ and emphasize the true scale of the infant’s powerlessness in proportion to its source of self-knowledge. She recounts tottering between items of living room furniture higher than her head, encouraged by her mother. Bourgeois said she wanted to be able to move around underneath the sculpture – in line with her many childhood play ‘tents’ (‘textile sculptures’), bearing in mind the fact that the large tapestries restored by the family had originally served as room dividers; recalling also playing beneath the family table, as in her earlier sculpture The Blind Leading the Blind, which she associated with watching her parents’ legs moving about as they prepared the dinner. The complex articulated legs (as male component) are also the abandoned family members of the Personnages, mourned and reconstituted and held in equilibrium via the fulcrum of the female body with its hanging egg-sac. The sac recalls all her hanging works, rooted in the childhood memory of beans and chairs suspended from the barn rafters, and suggestive of a birth looming: its white marble eggs are Louise’s siblings, the world’s babies. The carefully poised legs are strong and mutually reinforcing, forming a series of arches radiating from the central body. Each leg is an ‘arch of hysteria,’ a wound bundle of muscle and nerves, recalling the twisted rolls of tapestries wrung-out in the river Bièvre, or the arched skeins of hair in her drawing ‘Altered States’ (which she considered one of her ‘finest’).20 Strands of turbulence or volcanic sexual excitement are enveloped in formal containment (polished bronze) before they shapelessly explode. Hair, she writes, ‘represents beauty.’21 It is beauty when it is sculpted – for as she points out, the artist does not ‘serve beauty in its raw state; it / must be consumed, assimilated and recreated.’22 It is beauty when it achieves a kind of abstraction or refinement, which appear cruel and cutting, as in Femme Couteau (cut woman as well as knife-woman), or her armless Harmless Woman.23 For she described her work-process as one of continuous simplification until the meaning was finally revealed through form. The two types of artist traditionally characterized as maker and seer (or by Stokes, modeller and carver) are really one and the same.
Maman conquers agoraphobia to achieve what Stokes would call ‘beneficence in space’24 by unfolding downwards, mapping the sky-space, in a way that can be associated with Bourgeois’s love of geometry and the ‘calming’ quality of gridded paper and of the colour blue, all qualities associated with her mother.25 In this sense the sculpture fits Stokes’s formulation of the archetypal ‘triumphantly mourned mother.’26 It revises a nightmarish dream in which her mother had appeared as Death, in the shape of a wicker basket veiled in clothes.27 Maman still evokes fear and apprehension but it is open, contained in beauty. There are many leg-ladders (lines of energy) and many spaces between them, leading out of the claustrum to the sky beyond – and twisting back in again.28 Together they weave a container, in the manner of those classical godlike figures Athena and Penelope, and affirm the religious nature of Bourgeois’s ‘faith in the symbolic action.’29
There is an interesting visual correspondence between the Spider and a revealing dream of Melanie Klein’s child patient, Richard; it is the dream which first led her to formulate the idea of the ‘combined object.’ In this ‘umbrella dream’ the penis-stick inside the breast has an overwhelming quality for the child, since he is not sure if he is being controlled by it or not:
the world turning round was the whole world he had taken into himself when he took in the breast or rather Mummy mixed with Daddy, and her children, and all she contained. He felt the internalized powerful Daddy-penis – the secret weapon – as something which made him powerful if he used it against an external enemy. But it became dangerous if it attacked and controlled him internally. Nevertheless he trusted mummy and daddy – the umbrella – more than previously, both as external people and inside him. That was also why he now treated Mrs K’s umbrella more carefully than he had formerly treated Mummy’s.30
Both the spoked umbrella and the leggy spider, overarching the child like ‘the whole world turning round,’ are discoveries for the child of a many-faceted god that is within him, arousing the capacity for awe (fear and attraction) that fulfils his human nature as a symbol-maker (Langer). For the art-symbol is not just a signifying code, representing something that could be translated in another way, but a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.31 Its ‘underlying Idea’ (Langer) is served by the artist and captured in a formal way so it remains available to viewers of the future. […]
Beyond the return of the repressed: Louise Bourgeois’ chthonic art
By Paul Verhaeghe & Julie De Ganck
[…] Even a nightmare fails in its attempt to represent the unthinkable; we wake up before the final confrontation with what is literally undreamt-of. Louise’s insomnia spells may be understood as a nightly vigilance to keep the horror at bay, with the insomnia drawings functioning as a charm to ward off the danger of the Real by introducing it into the Symbolic. This is the final level, i.e. the confrontation at the border with the truly unconscious, facing the most fundamental forces that drive us. Eros pushes towards synthesis, destroying all individuality in a deadly fusion. Thanatos precipitates towards analysis, destroying all unity and giving birth to the individual in a deadly isolation. These two principles govern the organic world, from chemistry to the male-female relationship. By and large, their reign is unconscious for us and we only confront them in those moments that are called “existential”: death, birth, sex. Even then, we are usually well-protected because we have buried this Real under the layers of the Symbolic, usually in a mixture of religious, scientific, and artistic forms. For some, this defense is broken through, meaning that they have to construct a new one by themselves for themselves. Such is the case with Louise Bourgeois.
As previously suggested, chthonic is the best denomination for her work from that period (incubating in the 1950s, produced mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, roughly speaking). In its original Greek signification, chthonic means pertaining to the earth, subterranean. Chthonic art must be distinguished from and contrasted with Oedipal art, which is always in one way or another a sexual-genital and relational processing of these originally undifferentiated and more anxiety-provoking forces. Such processing is almost completely lacking in chthonic works, as shown by the different versions of Soft Landscape (1963-67), Portrait (1963) and Lair, Amoeba (1963-65), Le Regard (1966), Germinal (1967), Avenza (1968-69), Cumul (1969), and Sleep (1967). These works cannot be interpreted, in our opinion, because they are themselves first attempts to interpret what can never be fully represented. In Louise’s words: “It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving, and of destroying.”32 Because chthonic precedes the traditional erotic level, it is not surprising that Louise Bourgeois rejected the sexual interpretations of her work.33 Such automatic interpretations say more about the interpreters than they do about her work.34
Once these works had provided her with a more or less stable footing, we see a return to the first inklings of shared meanings at the pre-Oedipal level with its ambivalent bond between mother and child and with the onset of gender differentiation. The latter is illustrated by the different versions of Janus and Fillette, She-Fox and Nature Study. The former appears in her comment on a drawing (Untitled, 1986) of a large pair of shears with a smaller version between its legs, linked by an umbilical cord. She tells us that the big pair is her mother, and she is the small one: “That she was a monstrous cutting instrument didn’t matter to me. I liked her the way she was: very dangerous.”35 Ten years later, the spider project (1995-1997) or Maman endorses this return to the pre-Oedipal level from her horrific encounter with the Real. In part 9 of the film The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine, Louise tells us that the spider is her mother and an ode to her mother: “it represents a reconciliation.” She says this while walking around the spider, pulling and hitting the legs (“they can take a lot”). […]
After returning from the borders of the Real via the pre-Oedipal stage back to the normal level, meaning the Oedipal stage of sexuality and gender relations, the quality of her work, compared to that before the 1950s, is much higher — the confrontation with the fringes of madness proved to be very fruitful. A number of her later works condense the Oedipal and the pre-Oedipal level. That she herself is conscious of this condensation appears from her commentary on The Twosome (1991) as a rendering of the attraction of adultery for the male and female elements and at the same time of the effort of a child to gain independence.36 With Arch of Hysteria (1993) she deliberately mixes the two genders, but now with an erotic, almost seductive quality. Altered States (1992-94) brings the couple back, although originally still with a dominating woman/mother. This is no longer the case in the many versions of Couple. With the different versions of Red Room and Cells, as imaginary constructions of childhood memories, fantasies and anxieties about love and betrayal in the intimacy of the family, she can truly say “I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you. It was wonderful.”37 Her return is illustrated by her diaries from the early nineties as well, mirroring the anxieties of her early years, the Oedipal craving for The Father included – in translation: “I have to manage to find a good father / a professor, a scholar, a genius, a / doctor […]”38. […]
The Sublime Jealousy of Louise Bourgeois
By Juliet Mitchell
[…] “jalousy, the other / fellow is getting the thing I want, (it makes you see red, ready for / anything. Gushing of hate, and destructive impulse. / The creative energy seems to be related to that gushing of emotional / force slightly diverted by a soothing hand. reassurance of the right […] / kind. That reassurance which transforms the hate into work [...]”39
Lowenfeld will not have given the reassurance of a friend or family member; my hunch is that the absences from which he returned thereby showing that he could accept her violent rejection (or the story of her violent rejection), and a presence in which she could work out how to transform her artistic production, was “reassurance of the right kind.” According to her notes, Lowenfeld considered her all-pervasive problem was her inability to accept her aggression.40 By 1980, when she was seeing him for another stretch of analysis, she could write: “I do not forgive nor forget /I[t] is the motto my work feed [sic] on.”41 She must not go down memory-lane as a way of living but must do so for her art and its “ecstasies.” She must experience the past and “[...] transfer to a scene to day [sic] a / emotions [sic] that I experienced 40 years ago […] /but was this excstasy [sic] / present 40 years ago […]/ I live in the Past. I relive each day / parts of my past […] / a complete misunderstanding / […] agony of pain.”42
The task she set herself was to keep the emotions raw and alive because her sculpture was to make conscious what we all experience unconsciously. She must move from the “all-encompassing to the precise” which she equates as a move from “the unconscious to the conscious.”43 What she grasps from the repressed in which her individual history is but one instance of what we all share, she must force into the art object where we can understand it: “In terms of sculpture we become specific and visually understandable and satisfying for me and the spectator.”44 She thus has to have more not less of her symptoms; both bad and good experiences must be intensified: “I am likeable […] / [it] lives like a sun deep / within me [...] / but I will kill someone out / of rage.”45
It is not just that Bourgeois makes literal and concrete what she feels and experiences, it is that she goes into what is unbearable/unknowable (which is why it is repressed) and makes it conscious in visual form. This is why it is hard to free associate for therapy; she must do that for art. Her papers offer a web of associations of ideas. This is somewhat different from the absence of censorship underlying “free association” which is the one and only (but difficult) demand of a patient using psychoanalysis as therapy. Like all her objects, Spiral Woman, which she calls a signature sculpture, illustrates this associative process: Lowenfeld has gone away on holiday, so to stay equal she distances herself emotionally from him, which frightens her. To work, she must feel frustrated and guilty; the guilt may be because she wants to attack him; attacking him verbally is also to want to attack physically: this she associates to the physical violence of wringing out tapestries (childhood); she does this to him and to herself –
“I detached myself from Lowenfeld / and my rage of the last weeks comes from there [...] / The frustration (self-imposed + intolerable [along with] / Guilt are the enemies n˚ I and n˚ 2 – / […] the spiral / means squeeze out of, wring the laundry / wring dry – spin dry – twist your own idiot / twist his arm to make him do or talk or give / squeeze him, here is then the message of my spiral / that is going on since Lowenfeld left July 15th – / […] Do not forget / this Louise, that has been difficult, for Robt also!!!”46
Also: “my spirals are a vacuum. The void of anxiety,”47 which links associatively with “The whirlpool of histeria [sic] […] / follows a form of hypertightening faster and / faster, stronger and stronger [...],”48 which links to the twirling of girls at play: “the drawing / starts with a jab and goes / round and round […]/ faster and faster / like the children who swirl / faster and faster.”49 (See Spiral Woman, 1984.)
Along with an enactment of a relationship with Lowenfeld, for Spiral Woman, as elsewhere, she works out what her feelings are about his leaving and about herself, as she induces the frustration that produces the necessary rage that enables her to change her perception and translate the complexity of feelings into the unity of a sculpture. Then, mocking analysis, she mock-scolds herself about Robert. A second (linked) line in Spiral Woman’s incarnation moves from the inner emptiness that indicates anxiety to sexuality (see “’Life’ and the Telling of Stories” below). The so-called “primary process” that operates in the unconscious is multiple, non-linear; consciously (“secondary process thinking”) we can only have one thought at a time and the next will follow in sequence. But if that thought has been brought into the light of day from the repressed, it will be aware of its many associated strands from which it has grown (“like a mushroom out of its mycelium”50); so too will the sculpted object or even the sequentially regarded pieces in an installation. […]
L.
By Mignon Nixon
[…] Bourgeois’s writings not only expand the archive of psychoanalysis but transform it. In particular, she brings feminine aggression to the forefront of psychoanalysis, makes this the main theme. The trend of violence and its yield of anxiety, guilt, and fear dominate these pages, precipitating the analysis itself and providing its core dynamic. Reading Melanie Klein on July 14, 1956, Bourgeois makes one of her rare comments on the treatment itself: “(To Lowenfeld this / seems to be the / basic problem) / it is my aggression / that I am afraid / of) and this / nucleus would fit in / with Melanie Klein / and Freud).”51 Bourgeois was a close reader of Klein, whose theories, we now know, featured early and prominently in her own analysis.52 Lowenfeld posited the anxiety of aggression—fear of one’s own destructive impulses and their harming effects—as “the basic problem” of her analysis, a classic Kleinian stance. Throughout her artistic life, Bourgeois would pay elaborate homage to this theory. Her work also crucially expands its compass. Repeatedly breaking the cultural taboo on maternal aggression, for instance, she created works in which the anxiety of aggression is provocatively extended to the mother’s relationship with the child. As anger, or “colère,” escalates, and is played out in the domestic scene, the vicissitudes of fury and remorse come under the pitiless scrutiny of this most scrupulous of diarists. “I was so angry that I / was afraid of what I / might do. I needed all / my self control and it / kept me from answering / I became paralysed by / my own violence,” she writes, Sunday, May 9, 195453--Mother’s Day on the commercially printed pocket calendar.
Yet, Bourgeois is anything but compliant in her attitude toward psychoanalysis, her analyst, and the culture that treats women’s aggression so differently from men’s. The analysis, she frequently remarks, has the coercive aim of making her more “acceptable,” of bringing her into conformity with cultural expectations of femininity.54 Her diaries and analytic notebooks are mordant on the subject of feminine deportment. She drily enumerates the expectations of a good wife, mother, and hostess to be friendly, flattering, and clean. “My house work is finished / The house is clean 2PM - / I deserve my nap. I am reading Simone / de Beauvoir on the atrocious fate of / women.”55 Bourgeois lists “remedies” for social anxiety: “1) pay complete attention to the other / 2) listen + understand what he says / 3) answer to the point-” “What if he says nothing?” she demands. “That is a good point,” she answers herself. “However don’t give / up the ship—encourage him -”…“How?” she pursues. “By looking at him in the eyes and smiling,” she suggests. “Should not I give a compliment?” she wonders. “No, it is too gross—maybe taken as patronizing /who am I to distribute compliments like rose / petal blessings it is assinine [sic]?” comes the tart riposte. But, “With your eyes and your expression invite / friendly feeling […]” she advises.56
Bourgeois bemoans the coercive climate of analytic treatment with its aim of making her more socially acceptable. She fumes at being assigned inconvenient “housewife” hours. She anguishes over Lowenfeld’s fees, which deepen her financial dependency upon her professor husband, and opens Erasmus, a small book and print shop, to generate independent income. The entire ritual of the analysis seems at times profoundly dispiriting. She considers breaking it off—and does not. Unlikely as it was in the chill 1950s with visions of the “happy housewife” dancing in ad-men’s heads and fantasies of “infanticide” lurking in those of housebound women, the analytic situation became, for Bourgeois—at her insistence--a setting in which to examine the psychic trends of feminine and maternal aggression.57
“When I do not ‘attack’ I do not feel myself alive,”58 she reflects, voicing a sentiment all but expected of male artists of her generation, whose “colère” is so often enthusiastically celebrated as a virile stimulus for art.59 Struggling with her own aggressive impulses, which are the “basic problem” of the analysis and a source of intense suffering, but also a symptom of the repressive patriarchal authority she defies in the defense of her own integrity, Bourgeois produced an unparalleled portfolio of writings on a question that psychoanalysis itself for too long failed to address: What makes women mad?
Louise elle est maligne.
cette pensée me plait +
J’ai ecrit ces pages pour
me soulager d’un
feeling malheureux
de guilt, mon agression
me fait peur
me rend guilty60
In these writings, Bourgeois holds herself to account daily, even hourly, in a painstaking catalogue of self-examination, duly acknowledging the pleasures of her own beastliness (Louise elle est maligne, cette pensée me plaît) and the pain of its boomerang effects (mon aggression me fait peur, me rend guilty). In a household with three little boys, the cultural taboo against maternal aggression is persistently violated.61 Like her art, these analytic notes, the final dossier of the writer Louise Bourgeois, carry political and ethical import. Unsparing but never self-lacerating, she recounts the “psychic facts” of life, in a phrase supplied by the Kleinian psychoanalyst Hanna Segal, destructive impulses, even toward one’s own children, being foremost among them.62
Bourgeois’s decision to offer her analytic notes to study, to expose her faithful record of human failing to any reader, is an invitation to share her close and patient interest in all that is worst about us—all. It is a gesture in keeping with the entire trend of her art, which is toward responsibility. As an art of subjectivity, Bourgeois’s work is most often seen as abstaining from politics, apart from its engagement with feminism. Some even question her fidelity to feminism, as if this, too, were vitiated by the exploration of subjective experience, including her own. This is not surprising. For a splitting of the subjective and the social might qualify as a defining condition of political discourse, even of the Left, and is ritually invoked in the political critique of psychoanalysis. Bourgeois made no claims for the political significance of her art.
But, devoted as she was to examining the vicissitudes of the passions, and the dark fantasies of everyday life, her art was politically significant precisely in questioning the psycho-social divide. Her rejection of cultural myths of the maternal-infantile relation is fundamental to this endeavour and begins, perhaps crucially, in advance of analysis. Bourgeois brings to psychoanalysis some searching questions about motherhood, and she uses psychoanalysis, both in theory and in praxis, to explore the dynamics of maternal subjectivity in her art. […]
Contending with the Father: Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation
By Elisabeth Bronfen
[…] As Louise Bourgeois reformulates the family story behind The Destruction of the Father, her comments tap into yet another aspect of repetition compulsion. Psychic reparation seamlessly transforms into a complex gesture of reappropriation, in which the daughter and the father exchange positions. The terrifying family dinner table, headed by a father who sits and gloats, with the mother initially trying to satisfy the tyrant while the children, reduced to a state of utter incapacitation, sit in silence, also emerges as the scene of a battle over who owns the right to excessive self-expression. In the statement Eleanor Munro published in her profile of the artist, we have a slightly different version of the same story: "There is a dinner table and you can see all kinds of things are happening. The father is sounding off, telling the captive audience how great he is, all the wonderful things he did, all the bad people he put down today. But this goes on day after day. A kind of resentment grows on the children. There comes a day they get angry. Tragedy is in the air. Once too often, he has said his piece. The children grabbed him and put him on the table. And he became the food. They took him apart, dismembered him. Ate him up. And so he was liquidated. It is, you see, an oral drama! The irritation was his continual verbal offence. So he was liquidated: the same way he had liquidated his children."63
In this case, the story is told not as the personal confession of one of the actors at the table, but from the position of a distanced spectator of a ritual, who wants us to read it as a mythic narrative of retribution. Significantly, the mother is absent from the scene of transgenerational struggle, with the children doing unto the father what he has done unto them; literally paying him back in kind. If his compulsive story-telling reduced them to nothing, they now obliterate him. Furthermore, eating the father who has selfishly been feeding on their attention, demanding their pity and their reassurance while leaving no room for their own emotional needs, also involves another turn to the literal. The children answer the father's harsh demand to partake in the stories he compulsively tells about himself by actually partaking of his flesh, rendering the distinction between paternal words and body obsolete. Yet for the daughter artist, who commemorates this act of destruction by recreating it, more is at issue than simply recalling a ritual punishment. If the attack puts an end to the father's abusive speech, it also marks the moment when her previous silence becomes aesthetically loquacious. By incorporating the father, she ironically also takes on what was at the root of the killing fantasy to begin with, namely the act of projecting oneself in storytelling. In commenting on her sculptured scene, she not only claims for herself the right to speak the last word, judging the father who incessantly judged her. She also poignantly places her act on a par with other mythic tales of filial insurrection, from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to Freud's Moses and Monotheism.
Finally, these commentaries, recapitulating both an intimate scene of fantasy and uncovering the back story to a sculpture, also draw attention to Louise Bourgeois's deep emotional investment in aggression as the driving force behind her artistic work. In her writings, she consistently connects paternal presence with a destructive force, noting, "When my father / arrived we no longer existed."64 If, however, the father is remembered as bringing an intensity of emotions with him whenever he entered the house, turning her childhood into "many Melodramas with / intense suffering, friendship desired, compliments / or encouragements fervently expected, puni / shments feared, blame, shame, distributed with / pain and with ‘reluctance,’” she also admits that her own fantasy work itself often takes a violent turn: "of everything I make an awful story where / things go from bad to worse […] / children conspire against the parents / parents cook their children."65
A proclivity to destruction is thus what she faults her father for but also what she shares with him. Indeed, to take on the father emerges as a duplicitous gesture. Even while, in fantasy, she draws scenes of competition with paternal authority, in her work as a sculptor she is beginning to handle her paternal debt by implicitly engaging the father as one of her key sources of inspiration. She appropriates the annihilating power she attributes to his presence (and above all his words), so as to productively refigure this legacy into her own artistic language. Indeed, as she confesses in a diary entry from May 24, 1978, "is it through Identification with / aggressor or with God / I manipulate them, they do not / manipulate me."66 The murderous impulse on display in The Destruction of the Father emerges as the lynchpin to the shift her work took in the early 1970s because it puts her interest in conquering her personal fears and anxieties on display.67 Yet her reenactment of the fantasy scene of paternal devouring does more than cathartically exorcise his demon. It takes on her complex debt to the father, identifying his abusive verbal power as the source of her own destructive reconstruction; self-consciously taking possession of a past that possesses her. […]
Symbolizing Loss And Conflict: Psychoanalytic Process In Louise Bourgeois’ Art
By Donald Kuspit
[…] Psychoanalytic process is a kind of weaving, and weaving is Bourgeois’s way of dealing with her penis envy and managing her conflicts and splits. Madame Lefarge compulsively knits, and Bourgeois compulsively weaves, with the same aggressive concentration and sexual undertone: weaving is a simulation of sexual intercourse—a symbolization of its “form”—and of interpersonal intimacy and intersubjectivity, elegantly and eagerly uniting opposites, forcefully and formally making the incommensurate commensurate, psychically binding the physically different in an undifferentiated orgasmic whole, at once tidy and messy, a truce in the ongoing “war of the sexes.” Weaving is the metaphor par excellence for Bourgeois’s art, its primary method: she is an artful weaver, both on a physical and psychic level, and on both simultaneously, for she weaves together the physical and psychic with a seamlessness unmatched by any expressionist weaver. Weaving is a romantic process that results in classical form—a clear, rational, stable pattern, sometimes elaborated but always essential, simple but never simplistic, unified but never mechanically uniform, at least at its best, composed of fluid, organic, richly textured materials. Goldwater once said that “romanticism looks to the sublime rather than the elemental,”i but Bourgeois’s romanticism looks to both and integrates them to classical effect.
Weaving is a dialectical process, and so is psychoanalytic process. Its ambition is to establish an equilibrium of forces: “as in all human things, equilibrium is only maintained in art by the law of contradiction, by the battle and opposition of different currents.”ii Bourgeois is desperate for equilibrium, mental and physical, and struggles to equilibrate them by making art which for her is a psychoanalytic process of weaving together opposites—most noteworthily, as in The Destruction of the Father, 1974, breast and penis--into a symbol of her True Self. Psychoanalytic weaving is doubly dialectical. On the one hand it involves the weaving together of analysand and analyst in a so-called “therapeutic alliance.” On the other hand it involves the analysand’s weaving together of conflicting psychic currents into a symbolic pattern under the tutelage of the analyst’s interpretation of them. Dreams are full of personal symbols; interpreting them involves socializing them into familiarity--objectifying them so that their meaning becomes clear, and thus less anxiety-arousing and traumatizing. Looking at Bourgeois’s notes about her psychoanalysis, it seems clear that she sometimes needed what has been called empathy rather than interpretation—holding rather than understanding--and when she didn’t get it she had a so-called negative therapeutic reaction and narcissistic rage.iii Psychoanalytic process is a learning process, and it taught Bourgeois to use art to learn about and sustain herself—interpret and mirror, and even idealize and double herself, all at once.iv Art making was self-analysis for her, but also a narcissistic way of having a mirror, idealizing, and twin transference. All transference (“a new edition of an old object,” as Freud said, and of old relationships, as object relational psychoanalysts say) is dialectical, and Bourgeois’s art can be understood as a kind of dialectical narcissism, narcissism being a dialectical relationship with an idealized twin of oneself, or at least one’s body, beautified by being reflected in the mirror of one’s self-love.v
I am arguing that Bourgeois’s art--her symbolic object-forms--are psychoanalytic torsades, not to say Gordian knots, weaving together the opposites that constitute her inner world and environment. I also think, no doubt more speculatively, that virtually all her later male figures are, unconsciously, her psychoanalyst, even as they are her family members. He, after all, became a very important member of her inner family.vi Indeed, one of the fruits of a successful psychoanalysis is that the analyst becomes a good internal selfobject. He is the Other that gave her the Self-confidence she desperately needed, and thus whom she identifies with—unavoidably internalizes to the extent of becoming a kind of psychoanalyst herself, her own psychoanalyst and the psychoanalyst of Others. And, I venture to say, with whom she wanted to have sexual intercourse with, as though to enact their unbearable yet desirable and desire-filled intimacy. I think that her last woven copulating couple represents herself and her psychoanalyst, for she began psychoanalysis after her father’s death (1951), and her psychoanalyst became a replacement for her husband, suggesting that psychoanalysis is a kind of “mind-fucking,” in which the listening psychoanalyst and the talking analysand play both male and female roles, active listening a deceptively passive way of receiving the other into oneself, active talking a way of penetrating the other, sometimes forcefully. The physical distance between them remains even as they psychically copulate. “Je suis un autre,” Rimbaud famously said, and psychoanalysis is about discovering and investigating the Others in one’s Self—acknowledging the others that are parts of one’s Self and thus gaining Self-knowledge. It involves understanding their role in and power over one’s Self, allowing one to manage them and form a harmonious family, knowing full well that war will sooner or later break out between them, disturbing one’s peace of mind. I suspect that Bourgeois’s psychoanalyst became a very important Other, as the fact that she seemed to be continually at war with herself suggests. […]
Louise Bourgeois In Psychoanalysis With Henry Lowenfeld
By Donald Kuspit
[…] Bourgeois read extensively in the psychoanalytic literature—even though she said she didn’t want to “dirty” her analysis by such reading68 —and had an extensive psychoanalytic library. She seemed to have read Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defenses (1936) thoroughly, and knew the writings of Karen Horney, an early psychoanalytic feminist who argued that women envied men’s power, the penis being merely a symbol of it—as well as those of Marie Bonaparte. She criticized Lacan for his “anti-Jewishness,”69 implicitly an attack against the Jewish Freud—a remarkable insight into the fact that Lacan’s so-called return to Freud dismantled and undermined his ideas (Lacan took the “Jewishness” out of the “Jewish science” of psychoanalysis, Frenchifying the dynamic unconscious almost beyond recognition by reifying it as a language)—and appreciated Erick Ericson’s concept of “identity crisis,” which she undoubtedly experienced, particularly in adolescence. She knew Alfred Adler’s work—his “masculine protest” became her “mastery complex” and his “inferiority complex” became her “insecurity complex”70—and read Breuer’s and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1893-95), and early on identified herself as a hysteric,71 apparently male as well as female, if her Hysteria sculpture is any clue. (She also mentions “the hysteria of war,”72 suggesting hers during World War I.) But her object relational problems are the major source of her sexual and aggression problems, as she came to realize. She was aware of object relational theory—she clearly realized that the Self was composed of Objects (others), ambivalently good and bad (“the good mother needs the bad mother,”73 even though they tended to polarize into idealized good mother and persecuting bad mother, suggesting a borderline aspect to her psyche)—even as she tended to blame her aggression for her problems. Lowenfeld made her secure because he was a good object, even though she sometimes attacked him with her anxiety as though he caused it, and thus was as bad as she felt she was.
Although Bourgeois had the conventional—and early psychoanalytic—idea that making art was a cathartic sublimation, and that the work of art, like the dream, was a substitute gratification, she was also ahead of her times in regarding the work of art as a substitute object, and especially in her idea that “form is the refuge of creativity.”74 She anticipated the later psychoanalytic concern with consciously made form rather than only unconscious content, however much she realized that the genesis of the work of art, like all creative activity, is in large part unconscious,75 just as, according to Freud’s topographic model, consciousness only gives us a glimpse of the unconscious, which is the most influential, “largest,” and dominant part of the psyche. She was acutely aware of what she called “the irrational in everyday lives,”76 a play on Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), but she knew that art had to seem rational if it was to be convincing as art, however inwardly irrational—however much it dealt with the irrationality of life. Her sculptures represented “emotional states,”77 but they had to be unemotionally presented and self-contained if they were to be socially accepted. Her spirals are rational—mathematically correct—constructions however irrationally compulsive they are. Indeed, they suggest that repetition compulsion is the basis of her compulsive creativity, or at least one of its “motivations.” It is worth noting that serial Minimalism is compulsively repetitive—reminding us of Bourgeois’ compulsive documenting of her feelings in her journals, the same feelings repeating again and again. (She speaks of her “masochistic impulse to repeat a frustrating ritualistic experience.”78) It is also worth noting that Minimalism involves achieving “security” by way of “elimination,” as Bourgeois says,79 which suggests the difference between her insecure, often irrationally sprawling webs and secure, neatly rational staircases.) She uses psychoanalytic concepts deftly—reaction formation especially, applying it to herself—and records her dreams diligently, agreeing with Freud (and the Symbolists) that they are the “royal road to the unconscious.” Psychoanalysis was clearly of great intellectual as well as emotional benefit to her.
Bourgeois seemed to have anticipated Wilfred Bion’s concept of the “bizarre object”—“let the sediments form themselves sealed by / the peace of forgetfulness ”80—and sharply distinguishes between her menstrual periods and her chemical periods, connecting the latter with the psychoanalytic process, which she brilliantly realizes is as physical as it is emotional,81 and as painful as her menstrual periods. And suggesting that she realized that psychoanalysis changed her body’s as well as psyche’s “chemistry.” Bourgeois was imbued with psychoanalysis, and understood it more than any other artist-thinker of her time—Breton had a limited, narrow understanding of it compared to her, Pollock appropriated a few psychoanalytic generalizations (debatably Jungian or Freudian) which he probably didn’t understand, and Motherwell, for all his symbolization of castration anxiety, never dealt with woman’s sense of inferiority and feeling of abandonment by society (“you are nothing since you are / only a woman,”82 “the diseases of the femininity”83)—which makes her the premier psychoanalytically oriented artist of modernity, all the more so because she understands the male as well as female psyche, and their inseparability. Lowenfeld was her psychoanalytic mentor, and psychoanalysis became her cultural homeland, and made her feel at home and one with herself as nothing else did. One might say that thinking psychoanalytically gave her the alchemical ability to turn her leaden feelings of deprivation and emptiness into the creative gold of her art. […]
1 Her motivational matrix takes the form of a chiasmus. Bourgeois stated, “I inherited my mother’s rationality and my father’s sick heart,” (“Self-Expression Is Sacred and Fatal: Statements,” in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall (Zürich: Ammann Verlag, 1992), 185), viewing her mother as rational and reserved, and her father as emotionally expressive and self-indulgent. Yet when her mother died she abandoned the certitudes of mathematics and the logical structures of philosophy for the self-expression of art, hence she moved in the direction of a paternal identification; and when her father died she shifted back to the rationalistic self-inquiry of psychoanalysis, hence moved towards a maternal identification. Throughout her oeuvre she oscillated between these two identifications. This explains why the late works, including Maman and the fabric pieces, are grounded in a strong maternal identification.
2 LB-0630 (undated loose sheet, c.1959).
3 Bourgeois would continue writing extensively in her diaries, loose sheets, notebooks, even annotating the fronts and backs of drawings. This is not to mention the four articles she wrote for Artforum (“Child Abuse” in December 1982, “Freud’s Toys” in January 1990, “Obsession,” an article about Gaston Lachaise, in April 1992, and “Collecting: An Unruly Passion” in Summer 1994, all of which were psychoanalytically oriented) as well as the numerous interviews she gave over the years, with Donald Kuspit, Christiane Meyer-Thoss, et al.
4 “From the Inside Out,” Artforum, 13 (Mar. 1975), 27; quoted in Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 29.
5 “Magician’s Game: Decades of Transformation, 1930-1950,” in 200 Years of American Sculpture(Boston: David R. Godine, in association with the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976), 168; quoted in Wye, 20.
6 Some were natural wood, others were painted white with touches of Prussian blue, and others still were painted black with touches of red. Formally the sculptures show affinities both with the then-regnant Abstract Expressionist idiom and with primitive totems.
7 LB-0124 (17 September 1959).
8 LB-0654 (14 November 1966).
9 “Child Abuse,” ArtForum, 20, no. 4 (December 1982), 40-7; rpt. in Bernadac and Obrist, 133.
10 Fragment, 54.
11 Glover, 121.
12 "Robert who is an authority in / History + authenticity + critical / study of document is called / upon by Louise to establish the / fact that she is the only one / who can rightfully stand / next to Louis Bourgeois in a / picture gallery." Earlier in this entry Bourgeois observes “I litterally [sic] cannot live or function / without the protection of a father.” (LBD-1952, 12 May 1952)
13 LB-0153 (18 March 1964). It need hardly be said that motions of stabbing are symbolic of genital intercourse. The impulse to “stab” Sadie places Bourgeois’s in the position of her father, who did “stab” her.
14 On the occasion of Bourgeois’s retrospective at MoMA in 1982, the artist created a slide show called Partial Recall that was presented alongside the work and later adapted into a limited edition book: Louise Bourgeois: Album, published in 1994. It was first published as an edited version titled “Child Abuse” in ArtForum (vol. 20, no. 4, December 1982). Bourgeois’s own psychoanalytic account of her childhood, which immediately became the definitive critical lens on her production, advanced the interpretation that supplied critics with a hermeneutic device that was no less aesthetically convenient than ideologically congenial. It is only with the discovery of the psychoanalytic writings that the true complexity of her Oedipal situation has become clear.
15 Stekel, 19.
16 If in the standard Oedipal template the boy who desires the mother (id) is threatened by castration by the father (superego), one may imagine that for the girl the terms are reversed, that is to say that the formation of the superego is tied to maternal law.
17 LB-0649 (15 April 1958). See also LB-0596 (undated loose sheet, c. 1959): “the fear (phobia) of / being abandoned by my / mother (Robt) may be the / fear of retaliation of my / mother for my incestuous / wishes so this is the answer.”
18 Glover, 51.
19 Eduardo Colombo, “Sexuality and Erotism: From Sexuality to Fantasy,” in Infantile Sexuality and Attachment, ed. Daniel Widlöcher, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Books, 2002), 71.
20 “Interview with Marie-Laure Bernadac,” in Pensée-plumes, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1995); rpt. in Bernadac and Obrist, 302.
21 “Statements,” in Meyer-Thoss, 178.
22 LBD-1950 (25 January 1950).
23 Bourgeois explained that the wordplay on ‘harmless-armless’ was to do with ‘knowing limits’– a necessary orientation in refining the symbol. “Statements,” in Meyer-Thoss, 177.
24 Painting and the Inner World(London: Tavistock, 1963);rpt. in Wollheim, 228.
25 “Tender compulsions”; rpt. in Bernadac and Obrist, 305; see LBD-1991 (21 February 1991) and LBD-1994 (6 June 1994) on the colour blue. Also recalling Bourgeois’s use of the top of her apartment building as an open-air studio in the early days of New York, with her Personages becoming part of the skyline (as shown in a photo). The architectural scale of Maman associates it with skyscapes even though it was created for the Turbine Hall.
26 Painting and the Inner World; rpt. in Wollheim, 72.
27 In the dream a servant says: ‘[…] what is / a symbol – it is something that / pretends to be something else. / You know this woman that you call your / mother. she really is “Death” her / body is like a wicker basket / underneath her dress [...]’ LB-0257 (15 January 1959).
28 In the Cajori and Wallach film she is seen showing the way through one of her Cells and says: ‘there doesn’t seem to be a way out – but there is.’ She liked three-dimensionality partly for the opportunity of constructing windows, and felt that in order to become better artworks, even tapestries could have ‘holes’ not just their natural ‘slits,’ and become more sculptural. See Bourgeois’s review of the exhibition “Wall Hangings” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in Craft Horizons 29, no. 2 (March – April 1969); rpt. in Bernadac and Obrist, 87.
29 “Interview with Trevor Rots,” in Bernadac and Obrist, 194. Bourgeois identifies with Penelope in her diaries, and cites Athena as goddess of weaving.
30 Meltzer, Kleinian Development, 120, discussing Klein’s account in Narrative of a Child Analysis.
31 Bourgeois cites this in her diary of April 24, 1996. LBD-1996.
32 “Statements,” Meyer-Thoss, 194.
33 Jerry Gorovoy, conversation with the author, July 2010.
34 In a BBC-documentary directed by Jill Nichols (Imagine… Louise Bourgeois Spider Woman, 2007), only the sculptor Antony Gormley voiced a different reading: “…she has made her pain into form …anxiety, anxiety is the thing we need to find a form for.”
35 Quoted in Meyer-Thoss, 133. Drawing reproduced on page 222.
36 See Louise Bourgeois, directed by Camille Guichard (Paris: Terra Luna Films and Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993).
37 Statement was embroidered on a handkerchief: Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (I Have Been to Hell and Back), 1996 (BOUR-2827).
38 LBD-1994 (3 September 1994).
39 LB-0455 (17 December 1951).
40 LB-0158 (20 March 1964).
41 LBD-1980 (27 January 1980).
42 LB-0566 (undated loose sheet, c. 1956).
43 In conversation with Jerry Gorovoy, 29 October 1998 (LB-0559).
44 Ibid.
45 LB-0322 (1 October 1963).
46 Ibid.
47 In conversation with Jerry Gorovoy, c. 1990s (LB-0028).
48 LB-0245 (5 March 1957).
49 LB-0266 (28 October 1958).
50 Sigmund Freud [1900-1], “The Interpretation of Dreams,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. IV and V, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 525.
51 LB-0158 (20 March 1964).
52 For a reflection on Bourgeois’s dialogue with, and challenge to, Kleinian psychoanalysis, see Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/October Books, 2005).
53 LBD-1954 (9 May 1954).
54 Bourgeois writes, for example: “insofar as my analysis was motivated / by a desire to be ‘acceptable’ I have / felt the need for a little interest (kindliness or help) from Robert [Goldwater]” LB-0175 (27 February 1960).
55 LB-0693 (undated loose sheet, c. 1964).
56 LB-0744 (31 October 1964).
57 The ironic phrase “happy housewife” was coined by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963). On infanticide as a tragic symptom of patriarchal culture’s repression of maternal ambivalence, see Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976).
58 LB-0019 (undated loose sheet, c. 1965).
59 In conversation with Jerry Gorovoy, on February 9, 1994, Bourgeois continues to pursue this theme: “I never saw my mother angry in her 52 [years]. So if I get angry I’m ashamed. Women do not get angry […] People who get angry are the men, women are suppose [sic] to run away or shut up. If you get angry you feel like a man and get even more angry. It makes me scream. It attacks my identity. Men are admired for being angry […] When women become angry the[y] become ugly and people laugh at them.” LB-0023.
60 LB-0511 (11 May 1962). Translation: “Louise, she is coy. / this thought I like + / I wrote these pages to / rid myself of an / unfortunate feeling / of guilt, my aggression / frightens me / makes me feel guilty.”
61 October 31, 1964: “I do my hair dress myself nice / shine my shoes and finally leave / to save Rbt [Robert Goldwater] from another speech / what did I say. I have reproached / things he did to me—threats / to give myself courage I am going to end it / with myself and with J.L. [Jean-Louis] / terrible / […] after these 2 pages I had my monthly terrific suicidal terror tantrum at Robt.” LB-0744.
62 “From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and After: Socio-Political Expressions of Ambivalence,” in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War: Papers 1972-1995, ed. Jon Steiner, vol. 27 (London and New York: New Library of Psychoanalysis, 1997). Rosalyn Deutsche discusses the significance of Segal’s thinking about what psychoanalysis offers in a situation of war in “Hiroshima After Iraq,” October 131 (Winter 2010), 7.
63 Originals: American Woman Artists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); rpt. in Bernadac and Obrist, 115.
64 LB-0315 (undated loose sheet, c. 1964).
65 LB-0176 (undated loose sheet, c. 1959).
66 LBD-1978.
67 In the interview with Donald Kuspit, she goes on to explain, "The Destruction of the Father deals with fear – ordinary, garden-variety fear, the actual, physical fear that I still feel today. What interests me is the conquering of the fear, the hiding, the running away from it, facing it, exorcising it, being ashamed of it, and finally, being afraid of being afraid. That is the subject," adding, "And after it was shown – there it is – I felt like a different person." 21, 24 passim.
68 LB-0309 (14 July 1952).
69 In conversation with Jerry Gorovoy, 5 September 1990 (LB-0051).
70 LB-0383 (undated loose sheet, c. 1963); on September 28, 1957 she notes her “inferiority feeling.” LB-0224.
71 LBD-1949 (22 February 1949).
72 LB-0246 (undated loose sheet, c. 1957).
73 LB-0827 (1995-96 notebook).
74 LB-0007 (August 1991).
75 LBD-1954 (15 January 1954).
76 LB-0249 (undated loose sheet, c. 1967). Bourgeois: “How does the irrational / present itself in everyday / live [sic]”
77 LB-0134 (undated loose sheet, c. 1958).
78 LB-0263 (13 November 1957).
79 LB-0431 (undated loose sheet, c. 1951) .
80 LB-0254 (undated loose sheet, c. 1959).
81 LB-0036 (17 October 1955).
82 LB-0320 (undated loose sheet, c. 1958).
83 LB-0331 (undated loose sheet, c. 1965).
i Primitivism, 125, note 33.
ii Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Painting at the Exposition of 1855,” The Art of All Nations 1850-1873: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics, ed. Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 134.
iii Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), 252. Kohut speaks of “empathic understanding,” which involves “empathic immersion into [the] inner life” of others. He distinguishes sharply between empathic and emotional responsiveness, and what he characterizes as the pseudo-reponsiveness of an “inhuman computer-like machine” (253)—an interpreting machine. “Destructive rage,” he writes, “is always motivated by an injury to the self,” that is, a “narcissistic injury” (116).
iv In the mirroring transference, the mother functions “as a mirror for the child’s healthy exhibitionism.” In the idealizing transference, the father functions as the child’s “reliable ideal.” In the twinship transference, a sibling functions as the child’s alter and auxillary ego. In all three the Other is internalized as a self-object. See Kohut, 7, 57, and 44. I suggest that Bourgeois had a twinship transference towards Sadie, her English tutor and her father’s mistress, and was also jealous of Sadie’s sexual and emotional intimacy with her father, and probably envious of her linguistic competence—her ability to weave French and English together, which is one way of thinking of translation--just as Bourgeois was of her mother’s weaving. Clearly a member of the family, Sadie seemed more passive and pliable than Bourgeois, and thus met with greater social approval.
v What is particularly significant about the story of Narcissus, from the perspective of this essay, is that he rejected Echo’s love, and was incapable of loving or returning love, and that he was equally attractive to men as well as women. He was punished for his indifference and self-absorption by being made to “feel what it was to love and meet no return of affection,” for he loved his reflection in the mirror of water but it did return his love, only mimicked it. Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable (New York: Heritage Press, 1942), 102.
vi “The unconscious is structured like a small society,” Hinshelwood writes, which is what a family is, and like a family, “it is a mesh of relationships between objects” (451).