In 2000 the new Tate gallery opened in the former Bankside Power Station, Giles Gilbert Scott's temple to industry, its enormous chimney centrally placed above a vast Turbine Hall. The first work to greet visitors as they entered the Hall was Maman, part of Louise Bourgeois's show, I do, I undo, I redo. Maman, a towering 10-metre-high spider – its size in itself astonishing – presented a very different type of power, a counterpoint to the phallo-modernism of Scott's mid-century structure and an elegantly effective way to inaugurate a re-purposing of the building. Bourgeois thought of the spider as a benevolent object and has insisted that it was made in commemoration of her ‘best friend’, the mother who was in charge of the workshop of the family's tapestry restoration business. The allusions to spinning, weaving and repairing are clear; Bourgeois's spider is not the terrifying phobic object of popular culture, but rather a loving, caring maternal figure, delicately and protectively cradling her egg sac. Her own mother died when Bourgeois was 21, which precipitated a move from the study of mathematics to an interest in creating art – sculptures, installation pieces, paintings and prints – that could function as a way of giving expression to and, to a certain extent, managing her psychological state and interrogating her family history. Bourgeois's childhood has been explicitly evoked in her work from the start alongside a recognition that an attempt is being made to counter, make reparation, idealise – sublimate – the traumatic traces of her Oedipal drama. When Bourgeois was 11, her father hired a nanny, Sadie, a few years older than Louise, who was employed as an English teacher for his children and as someone who could help the with the mother's needs. Sadie lived with the family for a decade and became Louise's father's mistress. Bourgeois, who was devoted to Sadie at the start, grew to detest her and to develop painfully ambivalent feelings about her father, particularly after her mother's death.
It's clear that Bourgeois's creative output can readily be subjected to a psychoanalytic reading. Themes of identity, idealisation, rivalry, sexuality, unresolved Oedipal conflict, femininity, rage and the knotty concerns of love relations are all apparent in her work. What makes her art particularly interesting, however, is not merely the possibilities of applying psychoanalytic concepts to her visual output, but crucially through her own interest and uses of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory. Bourgeois had an active engagement with psychoanalysis, both through her own 33-year analysis with Henry Lowenfeld and through her writings on psychoanalysis. It is this aspect in particular that the exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter focuses on. The unearthing – by the Canadian curator and writer, Philip Larratt-Smith – just before Bourgeois's death in 2010 at the age of 98, of her unpublished psychoanalytic writing, prompted the exhibition which displayed these texts alongside artworks from Bourgeois's entire career. These fragments, some typewritten, many in pencil on lined paper; appear as lists, diagrams, some with drawings sprouting between the words like dandelions through pavement cracks. Some are notes made in response to her analytic sessions and her dreams; others reflect on her life, particularly her relationships with her father, her husband and her sons; but there are also thoughts about herself, her work, her interior world.
According to Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois had been reading Freud ‘extensively’ even before she commenced her own analysis, and went on to develop an interest in the psychoanalytic canon: Reik, Horney, Lacan and Laing in particular. Her analytic relationship with Lowenfeld, which began when she was 40, was precipitated by a breakdown after the death of her father in 1951. She presented herself to Lowenfeld with a list of symptoms: insomnia, depression, agoraphobia, fits of weeping, dizziness, outbursts of anger, sore throats, diarrhoea and other digestive problems. She was experiencing challenges in being the mother to three sons, in a difficult marriage and in establishing a creative life. Being in analysis with Lowenfeld (who had published a paper on trauma and artistic production, ‘Psychic Trauma and Productive Experience in the Artist’, in which he suggests that where we find artistic talent we find ‘the coincidence’ of
childhood trauma) gave Bourgeois a new artistic language in which she could express herself. These texts deal with her symptomatology directly, but there are others where she uses writing in a more immediate way, such as one headed Circle of Worries (‘The person I love does not love me. No solution’), a list of her thoughts on her analysis (‘… a job, a privilege, a luxury, a duty …’), or a handwritten sheet from 1955 laying out her reflections on her husband (‘… he talks like a bottle of glue’). These represent, for Philip Larratt-Smith, vital contributions to the field of psychoanalysis, ‘particularly on the topics of symbol formation, female sexuality and the nature of the artist’.
Larratt-Smith is keen to connect Bourgeois's early experiences with her art, a kind of psychoanalysis once removed, heavy on interpretation and conducted via the conduit of her images, sculptures and, in particular, her written texts. In his essay in the catalogue, ‘The Case of LB’, he stresses how young Louise found herself in an impossibly conflicted position caring for her mother, doing the job the nanny was employed to do, in order to try and please a father who was off enjoying the good life with a young woman who wasn't her. The Oedipal conflict, between love and hate for the father, as well as an identification with him and a deep mourning for the lost maternal object is replayed, for Larratt-Smith, directly in Bourgeois's work, where the wasps' nest in the installation Passage Dangereux represents sexuality or where the ‘part object’ of a plaster breast is a nurturing mother affirming ‘the primacy of the mother/child dyad’. This is a rather flattening approach, with symptoms and symbolisations becoming attached to artworks, not only as a way of describing them, but in order, it seems, to ascribe meaning to them. Is this what Bourgeois intended? It's doubtful. Meaning for Bourgeois is in the making of the work; one piece after the other over and over again serving, as Juliet Mitchell implies in her essay, as a form of self-analysis, continuing long after her own analysis ended.
The contribution in the catalogue from Juliet Mitchell, ‘Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud: Passage Dangereux, the Girl in Psychoanalysis and Art’, takes a different approach from Larratt-Smith's. Mitchell posits that for Bourgeois psychoanalysis acts as both a ‘ballast‘
within her art, and that ‘she carries her art within her psychoanalysis’. For Mitchell, it isn't psychoanalysis that informs our understanding of the artwork, but rather that psychoanalysis can ‘learn a great deal from the art embedded in Bourgeois's psychoanalytic experience’. What is at stake, she goes on to say, ‘is Freud's account of the female Oedipus complex, which Louise the patient lives, and Bourgeois the artist rewrites. It is a radical – indeed a revolutionary – achievement.‘
Mitchell asks: what does Bourgeois's art ‘carry’ in the depth of her psychoanalytic knowledge? How might the signifiers, ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ in her art inform, ‘transform’, Freud's thought? Thinking about Freud's assertion that the ego is a bodily ego, Mitchell suggests that for Bourgeois, entering analysis provoked physical symptoms; an embodied practice, just like her artistic output. She renders, says Mitchell, ‘the psyche that arises from her body in her art’. For Mitchell, it is the body that becomes the ego and Bourgeois's bodily symptoms outside of her psychoanalytic sessions return her to an infantile state of dependence which must be suffered and endured in order to make her way in the world. Her selfhood, her ego, as both artist and patient, was formed from the demands of her body and the pulse of her unconscious drives.
Mitchell goes on to look at Bourgeois's series of fabric sculptures, Couples, where two figures in fabric or leather are suspended from a hook on the ceiling or lie prone on the floor. The example in the catalogue, Couple III, has the addition of a steel arm brace. The figures are often entwined in some way: ‘the contradictory strength of love and loss’, says Mitchell, or the twin poles of attraction and fear. This, she says, reflects a practice that attempts metaphorically to express the contradictory and ambivalent vissicitudes of the unconscious, and Mitchell's observation that Bourgeois expresses these contradictions as identities is important. In a piece from 2002, three fabric heads emerge from a single neck below a domed shape that might be a surveillance camera; her 2001 piece, Hysterical, again has three heads from a single woman's body – full length and in pink fabric this time – with a defiant or possibly triumphant smirk on the face at the front of the cluster. Fillette – the sculpture made famous when Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Bourgeois cradling it – is not
only a phallus that's a little girl, but also a penis that, by being suspended with wire, is rendered distinctly unphallic. Was Louise Bourgeois using art as therapy? As a way of working through her trauma, her forbidden desires, her fears and anxieties? Or do we understand, as Bourgeois did, that successful sublimation must be a lifetime's task, a recognition that there is no resolution, only the work of doing, undoing, redoing. Best said by Bourgeois, here in her essay, Freud's Toys at the end of this beautifully produced catalogue:
artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure. People sublimate and turn to art because, first of all, they would like to be sexual but they are afraid, and second, they feel guilty.
Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, by , with an essay by is published by Jewish Museum New York/Yale University Press (2021), ISBN-13 978-0300247244.