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“The ego is first and foremost a body-ego. It is not merely a surface entity, but is in itself a projection of a surface” (Freud, The Ego and the Id)
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them … That awful and sickening endless sinking, sinking through the slow, corruptive levels of disintegrative knowledge when the self has fallen from the hands of God. (D.H. Lawrence “The Hands of the Living God”)
In the 2012 exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, held at the Freud Museum in London, a number of the artist's sculptures and artworks were displayed in Freud's home and consulting room. The French-American artist's well-known Janus Fleuri , an evocatively corporeal object, hung suspended above Freud's famous couch. Situating Bourgeois so intimately amongst the rooms, objects, and furniture of one of the foundational spaces of psychoanalysis came about after a rich discovery was made in 2010. After Bourgeois's death (born 1911, died 2010), a number of previously undiscovered writings were found at the artist's Chelsea home relating to her experiences with psychoanalysis. Having continually denied undergoing analysis to her close friends and colleagues, the revelation of her 30-year analysis (1952-1982) with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld was a startling one. With these new findings, the 2012 exhibition and the essays that followed it in the two volume Return of the Repressed (2012) highlighted “the enduring presence of psychoanalysis as a motivational force and a site of exploration in the artist's life and work” (Larratt-Smith, 2012, p. 2). Bourgeois, both as a woman and as an artist, was thus profoundly impacted by psychoanalysis.
The first years of Bourgeois's analysis coincided with British psychoanalyst, painter, and autobiographer Marion Milner's (born 1900, died 1998) long treatment of a woman called Susan, recorded in Milner's case study The Hands of the Living God . Like Bourgeoi