Fantasies of Cannibalism in the Art of Louise Bourgeois

Of the three instinctual wishes that are so strong that they require the imposition of taboos, incest and the lust to kill have been central to psychoanalytic theory for their roles in the Oedipal phase of development. Cannibalism has been much less theorized, as the French multi-disciplinary intellectual René Girard puts it, “cannibalism has not yet found its Freud” (Girard, , p. 277). But Freud (1939) reassures us that there is “no need to balk at this cannibalism” (p. 81). He notes that behind the guilt of neurotics lie psychical realities, never factual ones (Freud, 1913, p. 159). Louise Bourgeois, an artist of rare psychological insight and courage, did indeed not balk at exploring and expressing her cannibalistic impulses and fantasies in works of art. She was well read, in psychoanalytic treatment for many years, and well acquainted with the power of fantasies. She has said, “Artists […] have access to the unconscious and are fearless. It takes a kind of fearlessness in your art-making to cut your parents up in little pieces and put them down the drain. It is in a world of fantasy” (Greenberg & Jordan, , p. 17). This is the world Bourgeois invites us to visit in the works of art I focus on here.

Writing about love and hate in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” Freud (1915) notes that the first sexual aim takes place in the phase of incorporating or devouring, wherein love can only be described as ambivalent, since it aims at abolishing the object's separate existence (p. 138). “The cannibalistic dream,” to use Pierre Fédida's (1978) expression in “Le cannibale mélancolique,” reveals a desire to eliminate what separates and distinguishes one from the other, and thus the imaginary aim of never losing the other (p. 64). Only devouring gives the assurance that the object will never abandon you. But this fantasy of absolute appropriation requires killing your object