The Return of the Real?: Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed at The Freud Museum, 8 March - 27 May 2012.

The Freud Museum has a track record of exhibitions of the work of artists who invoke or evoke psychoanalytic resonances; indeed, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is an artist who wears her psychoanalytic insights on her sleeve. To this already rich combination of art produced by an artist who spent many years of her life in analysis may be added several additional layers of both textual and textural context. The Freud Museum is always evocative of Freud, surrounded as we are by his furniture, books, rugs and collection of classical figures. The choice of a curator, Philip Larratt-Smith, who provides a commentary rooted in the object relations tradition, adds another dimension to both text and texture. Finally, the particular kind of American psychoanalytic thinking that clearly informs Bourgeois's own understanding of what it means to create art within the culture of psychoanalysis adds another vertex.

Louise Bourgeois was psychoanalysed by Dr Henry Lowenfeld from 1952 until the early 1980s. From her own account and indeed from some of the exhibits on display, it is evident that she suffered from loneliness and depression. She had moved from her native Paris to live with her husband and family in America and the strain of motherhood, the recent death of her philandering father, living in another culture and maintaining her professional career clearly cost her dearly. The location of her psychoanalysis is not insignificant. If Bourgeois had remained in Paris it is at least possible that she would have been

influenced by the very different psychoanalytic approach of Jacques Lacan. Bourgeois read widely—both Freud and other European psychoanalysts—yet the French dimension is absent. Consequently, the effects of a particular kind of American psychoanalysis can be discerned in Bourgeois's work.

Lowenfeld's work with Bourgeois concentrated, it would seem exclusively, on her feelings about her mother and her relationship with her husband and children. One of the hallmarks of American psychoanalysis of this period is the departure from close attention to the precise words of the patient in favour of describing feelings. Feelings can be construed as a secondary phenomenon and it is notable that particularly in his early work and in his case studies, Freud concentrates on the importance of words, not feelings.

Another feature of American psychoanalysis practised at this time is a concept known as ‘the adaptation of the ego’. Patients were encouraged to adapt to the culture and life they already possessed rather than putting it into question; this approach is in stark contrast to the project of Lacan's rereading of Freud which was taking place at the same time. In a Lacanian analysis, the analysand is invited to put into question the adaptations that have been consciously or unconsciously forced upon the ego, (a fragmented Freudian ego) and to rethink their own position in relation to culture.

Whereas psychoanalysis consists in a variety of Freud's talking cure, perhaps the contrast with the objects by Bourgeois on display that is most notable is their silence. Furthermore, the visitor is not permitted to touch the work—most of which invites a tactile engagement. Touching adds a third dimension to words and feelings. Again, touch is a primary experience which leads to feelings as a secondary phenomenon. Thus, on entering the museum, one of the first exhibits which catches the eye is the famous spider, Maman, located in the garden behind a firmly locked door. Already we experience a feeling of frustration upon a denial of touch!

Bourgeois's work is notable for the uneasy fragmentation it produces in the viewer. The sculptures—femme-couteau (knife woman) is an example—with their knitted fabrics, made from old pieces of material that have a tatty, worn look with 1950's grubby pinks. They look tired, depressed, world-weary and yet also sexually ambivalent. They arouse

in the viewer a feeling of sexual unease. This is a theme in much of the work on display, whether in the knitted fabric objects or the various depictions of ambiguous genitals. Janus Fleuri is suspended in an unsettling position over Freud's couch in the study, temporarily replacing another unsettling exhibit, the lithograph of Charcot showing off Blanche Wittard's hysteria to a crowd of medical students. These feelings of uncertainty and unease are most aptly theorised by Lacan's proposal of the real—that which is ineffable and unsymbolisable, beyond language and yet capable of exerting a powerful influence over our thoughts, actions and feelings.

Let us return to the role of words in Bourgeois's work. The following statement appears on the wall of one of the rooms upstairs:

What is striking about these statements is that they describe feelings but the words and thoughts that evoked them are absent.

The exhibition is entitled, ‘The Return of the Repressed’, yet what is immediately striking about many of the artworks on display is the ambiguous but nevertheless explicit allusions to genitalia—the real is on

display, not hidden behind a symbol. Alternatively, in the textual rather than textural contributions, feelings are on display but the signs that created them are absent. This is a fascinating exhibition. It teases and provokes the viewer into looking and looking again, into switching between feeling and thinking, into wondering if too much has been revealed—or too little.