louise Bourgeois

The Return of the Repressed

Volume I

Edited by
Philip Larratt-Smith

Essays by
Elisabeth Bronfen
Donald Kuspit
Philip Larratt-Smith
Juliet Mitchell
Mignon Nixon
Paul Verhaeghe & Julie De Ganck
Meg Harris Williams

Violette Editions
 Fig. 1. (frontispiece, p. 2)
LB-0216, loose sheet of writing
by Louise Bourgeois, c. 1951
First published in English
in 2012 by Violette Editions,
an imprint of Violette Limited
Violette Limited
25Lexington Street
London W1F 9AG
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www.violetteeditions.com
Edited by Philip Larratt-Smith
Produced by Robert Violette,
assisted by Tamsin Perrett
Designed by
Philip Larratt-Smith
and Lydia Skinner
Proofread by Philippa Hurd
Pre-press by Violette Editions
Printed and bound in Asia
For their invaluable
collaboration and assistance
in the publication of this book,
Violette Editions would like
to express its thanks to'Jerry
Gorovoy, Wendy Williams,
and Maggie Wright of the
Louise Bourgeois Studio;
Philip Larratt-Smith; Sarah
Douglas, Khadijah Abdullah,
Clive Liu, and Steve Bryant.
© 2012 Violette Limited
Texts © 2012 the authors
All images © 2012
Louise Bourgeois Trust,
courtesy Cheim & Read
and Hauser & Wirth,
unless otherwise stated.
Fig. 1; plate 37 © 2012
The Easton Foundation
Fig. 18, 12, 38; plates XII, XlV,
XV © 2012 Peter Moore
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of this publication may be
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ISBN 978-1-900828-30-7
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A CIP record for this book
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 contending with the Father:
Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation
Elisabeth Bronfen

If, throughout her life, Louise Bourgeois thought of herself as an archeologist,digging

tirelessly in the past to discover the source for her anxiety, one of her most resilient
primal fantasies revolves around the scene of a domestic crime. As she explained in
an interview with Donald Kuspit, "What frightened me was that at the dinner table,
my father would go on and on, showing off, aggrandizing himself And the more
he showed off, the smaller we felt. Suddenly there was a terrific tension, and we
grabbed him-my brother, my sister, my mother-the three of us grabbed him and
pulled him onto the table and pulled his legs and arms apart-dismembered him,
right? And we were so successful in beating him up that we ate him up. Finished.
It is a fantasy, but sometimes the fantasy is lived.'" First exhibited atl12 Greene Street
in 1974, The Destruction of the Father (also called Le Repas du Soir) not only re-enacts
this murderous scenario, but also gives evidence to the ambivalence at stake in
putting an intimate fantasy on public display. The violence Louise Bourgeois imag-
ined in her childhood home in Antony is relived not in mind but as a sculpted scene,
re-created in a different time and place for the benefit of an audience she is inviting
to share her resuscitation. Furthermore, by giving body to herfantasywithin a clearly
set frame-a dark box, theatrically lit with red light, set upin an exhibition space-
boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the present and the past,
the other and the self uncannily dissolve.
Recalling what was from the start an imaginary refiguration of her actual
family life resurrects the past as the return of her own psychic phantoms. The artist
is reliving not the real evening meal, but the way she had come to recast it in
her psychic reality. Her re-creation brings the past back into the present, even while
freezingthe retrieved affect in avirtual third space which sustains the tension between
an original anxiety and the belated effects this has had. At the same time, the
re-enactment taps into the magicaJ belief in the omnipotence of thought, which
Sigmund Freud called one of the key elements of the uncanny. By transforming
reminiscences of the past she chooses not to relinquish into a sculpted hallucina-
tory scene, Louise Bourgeois exerts control over the paternal aggression at the heart
of her lived fantasy. She manipulates the re-creation, deciding what will be shown
and what will remain hidden from sight. Yet it is equally important to note that we
cometo the scene of the crime after the event. What we see,encased in the dark box,
is the crime scene, not a re-enactment of the crime itself On display are the leftovers
of the second mea I rather than the actual act of devouring the dismembered father,
as this horrifically doubles a quotidian evening dinner. Foregrounded in the sculpted
reliving of the fantasy scenario is thus not the father's crime of showing off, but
rather the murder it prompted.
While we are called upon to imagine the presence of the mother and
the two children, first captivated by the father's unabashed self-aggrandizement
and then capturing him, we are shown what remains after the violence triggered
XlV. The Destruction
by the father's aggressive usurpation of the evening dinner table has taken place.
of the Father (detail), 1974
Photo: Peter Moore Relegated to the status of evidence, these body pa rts themselves serve an am biva lent

10'
 articulation. On the one hand, by drawing our attention to the fact that a crime has
been committed even while eliminating the actors, Louise Bourgeois gives voice
to the guilt her murderous impulse calls forth. Precisely because plaster and latex
casts recalling the father's dismembered body parts are exhibited on the table, this
sculpted meal (repas) can be seen as an emblem of the daughter's need to repair
(reparer) the damage her fantasy has inflicted. In a gesture of atonement, she accuses
herself publicly, using the re-enactment to claim responsibility for the destruction
fantasy that has lived on in her mind. On the other hand,given thatthe only body still
present is the father, now passively showing off, one might also say: inside the dark
box,on the level of the theatrical scene put on display there, the dismembered father
continues to hold forth, albeit in an enactment orchestrated by his daughter. In his
destruction, we areto surmise, the father is all the more powerful. He is, after all, what
the installation is about, while those who have survived the killing, having vanished
from the scene, are present only by the traces they have left behind of their act.
As such, Louise Bourgeois cannily taps intothe duplicitous power of belated
reparations, commemorating the very crime for which they are meant to atone.
In a late diary entry from March 13,1997, after conjugating the verb reparer (to repair)
she puns that eating at a table is alsoa formofJaisons table rase" (clearing the slater
In that The Destruction Ofthe Father Iitera Ily puts on theta ble what is to be erased from
the mental slate, resuscitating as a hallucination in the real what has been devoured
in fantasy, however, nothing is cleared away Instead, a monument is erected to the
father, whose obscene self-exhibitionism has simply migrated from an actual person
to a figure offantasy, remembered in a reassemblage of his dismemberment. Where,
during the war, spies got rid of evidence by swallowing it, Louise Bourgeois wallows
in presenting the remains of her personal resistance against tyranny, sustaining the
antagonism between her act of destruction and her father's phantomaticreturn.3
There is, however,even more to the ambivalence inhabiting this re-creation
of a domestic scene of crime. 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,alsoemergesasthe sceneofa battle over who owns
the right to excessive self-expression. In the statement Eleanor Munro published in
her profile ofthe artist, we have a slightly different version ofthe same story:"There is
a dinner table and you can see all kinds ofthings are happening. Thefather is sound-
ing off, telling the captive audience how great he is, all the wonderful things he did,
all the bad people he put down today Butth is goes on day after day A kind of resent-
ment 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."4
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

102
 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 bodyobsolete.Yetforthedaughter artist, who commemorates this act ofdestruc-
tion by re-creating 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 myfather / arrived we no longer existed." 5 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 fea red, blame, shame, distributed with I pain and with 'reluctance;"she
also admits that her own fantasy work itself often takes a violentturn:"ofeverything
I make an awful story where / things go from bad to worse [... J / children conspire
against the parents / parents cook their children."6
A proclivityto destruction is thus what shefaults herfatherfor but alsowhat
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 beginningto 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, theydo not / manipulate me."7The murderous impulse on display
in The Destruction of the Father emerges as the lynch pin to the shift her work took
in the early 1970S because it puts her interest in conquering her personal fears and
anxieties on displal 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.

Returning to The Destruction of the Father with Louise Bourgeois's own commentary
in mind allows me to read it not only as a cathartic working through of one of her
seminal primal scenes of fantasy. My claim is that it can also be understood as a
 reflection on what living fantasy in the act of re-sculpting a traumatic past entails.
As such, it functions as a key to the way psychoanalysis came to inform her aesthetic
process in more general terms. According to Freud, the work of fantasy does more
than summon up an imaginary object; it stages it as a visualized drama of wish-
fulfillment.The fantasizer is invariably present in this scripted scene, taking on multi-
ple roles in a mise-en-scene of desire to which she belongs. As the one responsible for
organizing its shape, however, the author of the fantasy is always also theprivileged
viewer, both inside and outside the scene. Indeed, the pleasure fantasy affords has to
do with the way it allows her to control her fears by imposing a coherent visualized
scenario onto what would otherwise be undetermined affects. As claustrophobic as
the recasting of her evening meal might be, it is unequivocally a theatrical scene of
her own making. Louise Bourgeois is the creator of the bulbous mounds hanging
from the ceiling and covering the floor. She has carefully calculated how to arrange
the molds of lamb and chicken legs amidst the egg-shaped rounds on the table.
At the same time, fantasies are mental representations of affects that
make sense of unconscious anxieties and desires by regulating how these come
to be voiced. Rather than screening out uncomfortable truths, they encrypt them
in scripted scenarios that make use of dream's rhetorics of psychic distortions.
As such, fantasy affords a compromise between the unconscious psychic
material which insists on drawing attention to itself and the psychic censor who
protects the ego from too traumatic an articulation of repressed knowledge.
Reading The Destruction of the Father as an emblematic performance of the work
of fantasy thus means focusing on the destabilizing of meaning it brings into play.
There is, first and foremost, the frame, establishing a scene which both reflects and
contests what Freud had come to call the other scene ofthe unconscious. Intimate
psychic material has been externalized, allowing us, as distanced spectators, to visu-
ally partake in the sculpted recasting of her father's remains,even whilewe are clearly
unable to enter into the encased theatrical scene so as to move around in it ourselves.
Our position is fixed in a frontal gaze, confi ned to peering around the bulbous shapes
encircling the table, but prevented from looking behind or beneath, much as we can
neither penetrate into the dark recesses from which they seem to emerge nor into
the folds of the curtain functioning as a backdrop. We are staged as the external
voyeurs of a grotesque distortion of paternal exhibitionism.
If implicitly for those in the scene there is no way out, for us as specta-
tors there is no way in. We are not onlyeoming to a scene of crime after the event,
but also held back by the invisible fourth wall of an implicit theater stage, unable to
transgress this obstacle. The father's uncanny presence in absence, thematically at
issue in this darkly melodramatic display of his dismemberment, becomes part of
the aesthetic effect. Louise Bourgeois draws us into her re-creation of lived fantasy
by underscoring that something recedes from ourvisual grasp;analogous to the way
the return to consciousness of repressed knowledge is always also curtailed. Indeed,
while the mise-en-scene of desire circumvents prohibition by encrypting the trou-
bling knowledge to which fantasy gives an oblique voice, the sculpted re-enactment
re-installs this rhetoric of duplicity. We have only a curtailed access to a reconstruc-
tion, which tantalizes us by playing with our own desire for complete vision, even
while prohibiting its fulfillment. If in Louise Bourgeois's narrative fantasy the father
liquidates the children with his abusive words, in her restaging of his liquidation she
takes on his aggressive power by diminishing us. Straining our eyes as we delve into
the dark recesses and folds, we find ourselves constricted in our visual power.
 Furthermore, far from protecting us from the claustrophobic over-
proximity of ominous forms that leave little room for any movement inside the
scene, we, though distanced and constrained, are nevertheless affectively drawn
into the set. We are let in on a secret even though we can never fully penetrate it
because, as in all dreams, the dramatic visualization is overdetermined. The surplus
of molded chicken legs functions like a double vision, metonymyforthe many limbs
the children tore off the father but also for the fowl proper to a typical bourgeois
evening meal. The ominous bulbs, in turn, could be seen as grotesquely embellished
breasts, exerting pressure on the deconstructed father, as though containing his
space. Yet their claustrophobic effect also recalls Louise Bourgeois's description of
how her father's self-aggrandizing behavior at the dinner table made his children
feel small, dwarfed by the words coming out of his mouth and the emotional
demand these made on them.
Furthermore, three different fantasy scenarios come to be juxtaposed in
the visual dramatization of The Destruction ofthe Father. If, in her narrative comments
on this work, Louise Bourgeois begins with the experience of incapacitation, "my
father is eating me with his verbal abuse," and then moves on to an active rebellion,
"I am eating my father to finish him off," in her recreation of the lived fantasy, she
welds together these two moments into a temporally duplicitous domestic scene of
crime, which both testifies to the destruction of the father and the reconstruction
of his terrifying presence: ''A father has been eaten." Again, the framed encasement
of the sculpted scene can be taken as a canny gesture towards the duplicitous
power at issue in any retrieval of a painful past. The stifling affective intensity the
daughter came to attribute to her father's presence is fixed in the act of recapturing
h is destruction. The dismem bered father will aIways be lying on the table. Reta i ned in
the display of his destruction is his phantomatic return. As such, the scene contains
the father's aggressive omnipotence in both senses of the word; it restricts his
strategic power by encircling it with the bulbous shapes, even while it preserves it in
the enclosure of this visualized spectacle. Yet it also brings a further aspect of the
site chosen to commemorate this captivating capture into play. As the artist
explains in her interview with Christiane Meyer-Thoss, a "lair is a protected place
you can enter to take refuge. It has a back door through which you can escape."
It may not be a trap, but, as she mischievously adds, transforming incapacitation
into power, "my form of being active is building a trap myself The fear of being
tra pped becomes the desi re to tra p the other."9
In The Destruction of the Father, the perpetrators of the crime (as well as
the artist recreatingthe scene) have clearlyslipped outthrough a back exit which we
can not see and, indeed, have no access to. Yet if this work is emblematic for the way
Louise Bourgeois transforms her fear of being trapped into a successful entrapment
of the other, it is less clearly determinable who this refers to. Is it the father, whose
devouring has been recaptured? Is itthe pastthat has been feeding on her, even while
she also feeds on it? Or is it us, transfixed by the spectacle of this overdetermined
feast? Furthermore, if having recourse to sculpture is in general conceptualized by
Louise Bourgeois as a refuge,allowing herto confront a past she can neither abandon
nor accept, one might ask in what way does this work about a father's demise, shown
forthefirsttime oneyear after her husband's death,speakemblematicallyto the way
her art compulsively retrieves and works through past trauma by giving plasticity
to reminiscences and in so doing repossess them. To explain the fraught tensions
inscribed in her relation to her parents, Louise Bourgeois notes, in an entry entitled
 "A Catastrophique View," from January 6,1993: "when I was born, my father and
mother 1 were fighting like cats + dogs 1 and the country was prepa 1 ring for war, and
myfather 1 whowanted a son got me [.. .]"'0 Seeing herself as the child of both familial
and national contention, she takes this strife further by internalizing it, transfol'ming
herself into the battleground for her parents' private war. "Louise," she claims, "had
the brain of her 1 mother and the emotions of her 1 father."" In what way, then, does
The Destruction ofthe Fatherpick up on and refigure her idiosyncraticfamily romance?
While in her reminiscences the father is unreasonable, dependent on
the attention of others yet vulnerable in his compulsive exhibitionism, the mother
is patient and analytical, always trying to entertain her husband, and above all, after
the war, putting up with his amorous transgressions. The child Louise, in turn, riddled
with a perSistent fear that owing to the battle between her parents she has come
to be deprived of the love and attention she feels is her due, is cast as the one trying
to please both mother and father by making herself indispensable.A general pattern
emerges in the written self-meditations which run parallel to the psychoanalysis
Lou ise Bourgeois entered into after the actua I death of her father in 1951. Repeatedly,
she posits an undefined sense of emotional lack and fear of abandonment as the
catalyst for fury, seeking revenge on others for the psychic pain inflicted on her, only
to find that any act of retribution can never be really satisfying because the initial
sense of dispossession was overdetermined to begin with. Recasting herown psychic
malaise along the distinction between an emotional father and an analytical mother,
she notes on March 12, 1953:"depression is connected with my (father in the analyti-
cal situation -I the rage is connected with my / mother."'2
There is, however, more to the way Louise Bourgeois came to think of
herself as the stake in the feud between her parents. Her birth is recast as the scene
of a duplicitous sexual interpellation. Imagining the disappointment herfather must
have felt when his third child proved to beyet another daughter, she attributes to her
clever mother the following ruse: "She was not without imagination and she said,
'Don't you see, this little girl, we are going to name her for you. Do you know that
that child is your spitting image?'" In h·er fantasy, the sentimental father responds,
'''Gee, it is true. She is very pretty and she's just like me.'''Yet Louise Bourgeois finishes
by underlining the price she had to pay for siding with her mother in duping her
father: "50 this is the way I made it,you see, but he made me feel that I was supposed
to fulfill his dreams of having a successful descendant."'3The lack of not being a boy
tra nsforms into a sense of obi igation to satisfy the father, in imitation of her mother's
ceaseless effort at appeasing her husband. Once again, the rhetoric offetishismis at
play. To appropriate the status of the son against her biological sex erects a monu-
ment to the very lack wh ich clai m i ng to be herfather's proper descenda nt is mea nt to
cover up. Noteworthy also is the fact that the likeness is one detected by the mother.
As in the lived fantasy of the destruction of the father during the evening meal,
she is in cahoots with her daughter.They both sharethe desireto appease the father's
disappointment that there is no son to carryon the family name, even as they share
in tricking him into believing the daughter to be his living portrait.'4
A counter-scene can be found in a dream, noted on November 4, 1953:
"we get in the carriage and I ask my / father if I can carry his luggage / he is no thank
you but I grab / a large flat case and it comes / apart half broken at the / hinges; I am
embarrassed then / I say can I carry your suitcase / and I do when I look down / at it
after carrying itthere is / two arm bones -I think they / are carrying their leg of lamb
/ eaten up by now. the / bucket is 3 quarters full of a / pink bloody liq uid a little 1gelati-

106
 nous / I as I look further I see / a brain whole and floating / and I wake up in horror /
thinking. It is my own body / she put in there - / then my mother calls loud / to me
and say 'Louise do you / know that your red trunk / which is in the luggage / compart-
ment has holes in it'."'5 Not only does she persist against her father's refusal to carry
his bag, as though denying her the successorship she is claiming. The baggage she
shares with him, containing her dissipating body, is itself fragile, coming unhinged
the minute she violently takes possession ofit.And once more it is the mother's voice
that makes the connection between their shared vulnerability, drawing attention
to the holes in the daughter's own red trunk, as this supplants the father's large
flat case in this dream scenario.
A pattern of shifting identifications with the father emerges in Louise
Bourgeois's writings, ranging from the demand for exclusive love to the expres-
sion of mu rderous hatred. Repeatedly she presents herself as aggressively vying for
her father's attention, needing to eliminate all rivals, wanting to be the first in his
emotional life or nothing. At the same time, she also feels aggressive envy towards
her father because, in his transgressions, he was everything but pitiful, rewarded
with pleasure, success, and social standing. She not only repeatedly finds fault with
him for haVing demanded complete surrender and obedience from his children.
He is also placed at the heart of the many fantasy scenarios revolving around her
sense of having always already been abandoned, betrayed,jipped, and left unpro-
tected, prompting a cycle of emotional helplessness, turning into anger and then
calling forth the desire to repair what in the heat Qfherfury she sought in fantasy to
destroy. Yet part and parcel of an ingrown sense offailingto get what she feels she is
entitled to is an equally intense critical sense of the deadliness of her jealousy, want-
ing to kill those whom she believed betrayed her. In all cases, her fantasies invariably
lead back to the strife-riddled identification with her parents, locating in the fraught
double heritage the two sides to her aesthetic process. In a late entry from April 30,
1992, she recalls, "in real life I identifie with the victim, / in my art I am the murderer.
/ / I was supposed to make myself be forgiven / for being a woman. / eventually the
cruelty against the self / flow[s] into the cruelty against others !The desire to please
is the motivation."The aggressive destruction which she needs to sculpt her material
is attributed to the mother, the emotion of pain and reparation driving herto rework
her past, in turn, is conceived as her paternal legacy. In the same diary entry she adds,
"I inherited my mother's / rationality, but my father's / foolish heart.",6
Ultimately, the "father" in her writings, however, functions as a composite
signifier of the many figurations of paternal authority including her teachers, her
analyst, and God,all of whom she incessantly challenges even as she admits to being
unable to function without their protection.'7 Thus, even while her work as an artist
feeds on the desire to destroy a father she found wanting, she also recognizes that
she works so that she will retrieve his love. In her sustained reparation compulsion
she is fully aware that a return to the real father is impossible, so that her need for
approval must be transferred to one of his surrogates, the most prominent of whom,
in herwritings, is Robert Goldwater. On the one hand she ascribes to her husband the
role of legitimizing the hereditary lineage she is claiming based on a counterfeit like-
ness. On May12, 1952, she notes:"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 / nextto Louis Bourgeois in a / picture
gallery.'"g Along with her mother, her siblings are discarded from this ancestry, so
that she can stand alone nextto herfatherfor all eternity. Yetthefact that she needs

107
 a second father to sanction the position she has usurped for herself indicates the
fragile grounds on which her audacious claim is based.
On the other hand, precisely because he is cast as the one ascertaining
the likeness between her and her father, her husband can also be relegated to the
maternal position. Uncannily anticipating her murderous re-creation ofthe family's
evening dinner, she writes on March 8,1952, "stone silence of my mother / at the
diner [sic] table / her way of being critical / myfather goes away / in despair / pattern
of a getting out / of the house. / / Rt [Robert] turns me into my / father," adding,
"all day in bed."'9 The suicidal depression that came to incapacitate her to such a
degree that during the initial years of her analysis she found it difficult to leave her
home, is aligned with her paternal legacy as much as the immense jealousy that
drives her to eliminate the rest of her family from the family portrait gallery In her
idiosyncratic family romance her husband, in turn, is the one to affirm her alliance
with her father's position, either in response to her dema nd for self-authentification
or by opposing her with his silence.
Sometimes the similarity between the real father and his surrogate is fore-
grounded, when, for example, she recognizes that she only becomes fully conscious
of the hate she had for her father in the extreme irritation and jealousy she feels
toward her husband. On March 18,1964, in turn, the two are played off against each
other: "the suicide wish has receded and has been / replaced by attacks to destroy
what is most / dear to me - my husband - and my work, she notes,"when Iam well
II

with my father I want to kill / my husband; the allegiance or fixation to the father /
when Iam well with the present i want to I silence and destroy the past."20 In all cases,
the cyclic pattern of destruction and creation, however, rema i ns the sa me. An intense
need for love and approval of father and husband is balanced by a desire to destroy
those she blames for not living up to her expectations, followed by the guilt this
murderous desire induces. Within this triangulation between herself and her two
privileged figures of paternal authority, the sustained struggle with the past finds
articulation either in the incapacitation of a suicidal depression or as the aggression
of artistic recreation. Yet if her innate sense of abandonment and a need to retaliate
and to repair was predominantly played through in fantasy in relation to the father
and his surrogates, the sense of dispossession is heightened in the face of real loss.
One of the most revealing statements linking the two father figures comes the
same year that The Destruction of the Father is first exhibited. On March 9, 1974
she notes, "it is a loss of balance more than a / break down: / when my father died
I lost my equili / brium - / when Robt died I fell in a state of / shock for a year."21
To understand the balance that is disturbed when in psychic life the posi-
tion of the father momentarily fa lis a'way, it is worth recalling that in Civilization and
its Discontents, Freud casts the harsh superego in the individual's psychic life as a
pu nisher of gothic dimensions produced by the neurotic himself"His aggressiveness
is introjected, internalized," he argues,"sent back to where it came from - that is, it is
directed towards his own ego." Feeding on one's own aggression, in turn, produces
a psychic split, setting a portion of the ego over against the rest, "which now, in
the form of ,conscience,' is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh
aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous
individuals."22 The sense of gUilt, according to Freud, is thus the result of a battle
the ego fights with itself; a form of self-punishment in the course of which the
aggression it would like to impose on others is instead redirected toward the self
Taken as one of the seminal fantasy scenarios in Louise Bourgeois's idiosyncratic

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 psychic drama, The Destruction of the Father can be seen as a belated recapitulation
of the way fear, aggression, and guilt feed off each other. In the installation, taking
on the strength of her own aggression is re-enacted asa devouringofthefatherViewed
in conjunction with her writings we can view the sculpture as a palimpsest, inscribed
with the many turns which guilt over usurping the father's power had taken in her
fantasy life: the hate directed outward toward a composite of figures of paternal
authority that threaten punishment and the suicidal hate directed inward to punish
herself for seeking such violent retribution when the actual fathers fall away.
Rather than renouncing her aggression out of fear of her conscience
(or external retribution), however, Bourgeois reclaims guilt as one of the most promi-
nent energies sustaining her work. In her writings as well as the installation, devour-
ing the father also serves as a powerful trope for the way incorporating an external
punitive authority allows the daughter to take charge herself of the act of punish-
ment to be feared from paternal authority. As terrible as the psychic effects of this
guilty takeover may be (with the father explicitly identified in her notes as the source
of her depression), it also inaugurates the possibility of psychic self-determination.
It marks the transition from being abusively acted upon to actively taking possession
of external threats. The daughter is now herselfthe agency imposing the aggression,
either by construing fantasy scenarios that threaten the other, or by giving in to the
depression herguilt induces. Finally, in a cathartic act based on retrospective remorse,
she re-creates, as an installation, a sculpted fantasy scenario revolving around the
fear a father calls forth, the destruction this prompts and the need for reparation.
Aggression is once again sent back to its source;tothe daughterwhere it came from,
who now, however, figures as the author of the secondary enactment.
While the aesthetic reparation commemorates the very act of aggres-
sion it also seeks to overcome, the empowerment it affords resides in the transition
from passive endurance to active confrontation and confession. In the installation,
re-creating as it does her incorporation of aggression, Louise Bourgeois is able to tap
into the same aggressive energy, hacking away at her materials to give plastic shape
to psychic phantoms. At the same time, inscribed in The Destruction of the Father
is the way that the intense identification Louise Bourgeois entertained with her
father was predicated on the destructive power she attributed to him.A particularly
chilling fantasy scenario from March 7,1952, entitled "insomnia," foregrounds this
lethal exchange:"a little child is lying I in a crib [... ] I a man comes, puts his big I foot
in the crib. the child I is afraid and he bits [sic] the I foot coming down on him !Then
the man beats the I child to death - he stays I dead for 38 years Ithen he is not quite
dead / and the doctor wiggles him I out of the crib / I in the next crib I another child
cannot be / wiggled out and dead he / lays there with his I eyes still opened - I the
name of the second / one is Pierre Bourgeois." In an afterthought, phantasmatically
conjoining her new home with the one she left in 1938, she adds,"diner [sic] at Italian
restaurant / it is a diner [sic] in Antony I co/ere because I I am myfather."23

By bringing forward a complaint against the father in precisely the same gesture
that she presumes herselfto be his likeness, Louise Bourgeois discloses yet a further
debt to psychoanalytic thinking. Fascinated with hysteria, which the Surrealists had
praised as the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century, she, too, takes
inspiration from the Studies on Hysteria Freud wrote at the beginning of his career.

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 Famous as a psychosomatic disturbance for which no actual organic lesions can be
found, hysteria had already entered the annals of medical discourse as an expression
of unsatisfied desire. What Freud came to discover, in addition, was the pertinacity
with which his patients, often highly intelligent daughters of Victorian bourgeois
families, held onto their bodily incapacitation.As though satisfaction was what they
sought at all price to defer, they would energetically develop new symptoms when-
ever he managed to retrieve an event from the past to explain their current psychic
distress. In tile notes she writes in tandem with the psychoanalysis that she began in
1951, Louise Bourgeois exhibits the same double consciousness Freud detected in his
patients, straddling emotional excess with shrewd self-awareness. Repeatedly she
notes that the love one gets is never enough, that something will always be missing.
At the same ti me she ti relessly plays th rough a II possi ble perm utations of her psychic
discontent, taking from the discourse of the hysterics above all the privileged role
they ha"d come to ascribe to the father in their persistent family broadcast.
Her exaggerated disappointment in Louis Bourgeois emerges as an exact
measure of her equally excessive adoration; challenging his authority a measure
of her love. To insist on having been deprived of and betrayed in his love is unabash-
edly presented as a demand for his approval. Self-consciously aware that she wants
to please the father and his surrogates for fear of being rejected, she also recognizes
that overdoing this uncovers the aggression at the core of her demand for exclusive
attention. As she notes on May 5, '957, regarding her insatiable search for a reliable
figure of paternal authority, "this / new father must be abandoned or renounced /
because it is the eternal lost cause. the ambivalence / for the father uses 2 fathers the
bad / old and the wonderful new." 24 Idea Iizi ng the father a nd den igrating him a re two
sides of the same coin. Each new father must be found lacking, so that he, too, can
be replaced, unable to deliver on the excessive promise she projects onto him.
As the intenSity driving her work, psychic pain must be preserved, much as those
obstacles which she needs incessantly to destroy in fantasy so as to reconstruct
them in her sculptures and draWings. Indeed, like Freud's hysterics, she too loves her
phantoms. As she writes in February 1964, "This attempt at explaining my father is
in order to by making / him out forgive him and also break the spell that his words /
+ behavior still has on me."25 Forthe equilibrium between fear, aggression, and guilt
to hold, the position of a father, to whom her challenge can be addressed, must,
however, remain conSistently occupied. The exorcism of her psychiC demons can
only be conceived as a n incessant attempt, a trust in future developments predicated
on the assurance of the father's sustained return.
At the same time, Louise Bourgeois's productive deployment of the
insights of psychoanalysis involves balancing the debt to both parents. "Today in my
work there is a strong emotional motivation," she explains, "but it is held in a kind
of formal restraint. The two things have to be together. The motivation is emotional
and murderous or whatever you call it, but the form has to be absolutely strict and
pure."26 Reformulating this statement in relation to her family romance, one might
surmise that the subject of her persistent family broadcast is the intenSity of passion
she always attributed to her father, a long with the hate, fear, love, and guilt he
inspired. The formal perfection in turn derives from her mother's silent rationality.
The Destruction ofthe Fatherputsan archeological find on display,uncoveringafantasy
to explain why she is so anxious. At the same time, precisely by tapping into uncon-
scious material, sculpting the return of the repressed in the shape of a dismembered
father, she a/so exhibits the process by which fear can be conquered. Her claim to the

110
 artist's ability to "immediately short-circuit the conscious," trusting an unconscious
she is at ease with, is, however, based on a two-fold confidence.'? After all, sculpture, as
she also maintains, can be produced only in a state of controlled emotional intensity.
She can trust the unconscious and its arsenal of melodramatic representations of
violence and filial revenge revolving around the abuses of the father, because she can
also rely on maternal restraint when reshaping this material into works of art. In the
third space of the installation, maternal silence and the paternal language meet, to
be refigured as a conversation between intense emotion and formal perfectionism.
Returning one last time to The Destruction of the Father, regarding it
through her psychoanalytically informed writing, the dark recesses, shadows, and
folds suggestively open up a mental site. Forced to recognize that not everything
retrieved from the unconscious can be rendered visible, we begin to understand that
in the course of translation something remains hidden in the dark, not lost but as yet
undetermined. The material that cannot directly be seen tarries on the scene along
with the prominent bulbous shapes and the recast limbs.The dark recesses creating
depth fOI'what we do see,contain an affective power oftheirown,a potent message
about recapitulating shards of a past that can be re-created only as an assemblage
of dismembered parts. Putting back into shadow as much as revealing, the act of
reparation entails parting as well as partaking. Louise Bourgeois sharply recognizes
that in tandem with tapping into her traumatic past, separateness from the father
must be acknowledged. In a canny counterpoint to the chilling identification with
the murderous father in "insomnia," she notes: "Each blade ofgrass / has the right to
be considered / examined / separated and / differentiated / from the others / it is not
only a right / it is a need, an obsession / / am not myfather." Again, as though it were
an afterthought, she adds, "/ am defined by what / do not know / I may not know /
what I am, but I / know what I / am not."28 More than mere negation, her emphasis
on the word "not" is above all a mark of confidence. Comparing herself to a blade of
grass is a way of invoking the biological connection to the father who brought her
forth,even while insisting on the unique difference ofevery natural growth. In noting
this separateness, she can also repair the connection.
As with the hysteric's vibrant resistance, the declaration of what one is not
requires a paternal position against which it is posited. While any unequivocal self-
knowledge is i m possi ble, as u nfi n ished as the past with a II its grieva nces, trusti ng the
knowledge of what one is not proves to be a most viable form of self-definition:"1 am
my father" - "I am not my father." For Louise Bourgeois's tireless psychic archeology
both are true. On the level of reparation, oxymoron underwrites the fantasy scena rio.
Exorcising a traumatic past by reworking it is not an act of re-injury but a resourceful
work in self-differentiation. Painful as the revisitation of a scene of domestic crime
may be, it trusts that strict artistic formalization will control all return of repressed
knowledge. If Louise Bourgeois refused to relinquish her stories of psychic abandon-
ment then it is because these allowed her to reveal to herself and others, over and
again, how she could manipulate them to her advantage, as an artist and a woman.
Paying back the father proves to be tantamount to recognizing her own indebted-
ness to the very paternal authority she challenges. Not just because any attack, like
all other forms of love, reqUires an object, but also because she needs constantly to
reassert that she is her father's successor. As the only one authorized to stand next
to him in her imaginary picture gallery, she is also a unique entity. In the double
portrait she exhibits in The Destruction of the Father, likeness and difference hold
each other at bay, leaving the case elusive and conclusive, which is to say utterlyopen.

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 Notes

1. Bourgeois (New York, Elizabeth Avedon EditionslVintage Contemporary Artists,

a division of Random House, 1988), 25·
2. LBD-1997.
3- Asked by Marie-Laure Bernadac about a drawing, in which she claims to be eating a
child, whether this is comparable to Medea, Louise Bourgeois responds, "The only way
of making them [children] disappear is to eat them, the way spies during the war used to
get rid of evidence by swallowing it." Quoted in "Interview with Marie-Laure Bernadac,"
in Pensee-plumes, exh. cat. (Paris: Musee national d'art moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, 1995); rpt. in Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, eds., Louise
Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father (Writings and Interviews
7923-97) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press in association with Violette Editions, 1998), 296.
4. Originals:American Woman Artists (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1979); rpt. in
Bernadac and Obrist, 115.
5· LB- 0 315 (c. 1964).
6. LB-0l76 (c. 1959).
]. LBD-1978.
8. 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 ofthe 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.
9. Louise Bourgeois: Designingfor Free Fall (Zurich: Ammann Verlag, 1992), 136.
10. LBD-1993-
11. LB-00l6 (c. 1992).
12. LBD-1953.
13- Louise Bourgeois: Album (New York, NY: Peter Blum Edition, 1994); rpt. in Bernadac
and Obrist, 279. In a different version, Bourgeois takes on the position ofthe mother
herself, claiming, "I was the spitting image of my father. That was my first piece of luck.
It may be why he treated me like the son he always wanted. I was gifted enough to
satisfy my father. That was my second piece of luck." Quoted in "Self Expression is
Sacred and Fatal: Statements," in Meyer-Thoss, 185. (Regarding the fraught issue of
descendants it is interesting to note that Louise Bourgeois wasto give not the
paternal name Goldwater but her maiden name Bourgeois to her three sons.)
14. The fantasy reveals more than mere sibling rivalry given that her brother's poor
mental health made it impossible for him to take on this role. He would die in
a mental institution in 1960.
15· LBD- 1953-
16. LBD-1992.
1]. On June 1, 1952, she notes, "Ilitterally [sic] cannot live or function / without the
protection of a father." LBD-1952.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. LB-0153-
21. LBD-1974.
22. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI,
ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1961), 123- On March 20,1964, Bourgeois astutely notes that her psychoanalyst
Lowenfeld thinks the basic problem is that she is afraid of her aggression (LB-0l58).
23- LBD-1952 As Jerry Gorovoy recalls, when The Destruction of the Father was exhibited
for the first time, Louise Bourgeois had a bronze piece entitled "Pierre" laying on the
black drapery on the bottom of the installation. This portrait of her brother was,
however, only included in this one instance.
24· LB-0223·
25. LB-0333 (February 20,1964).
26. Album, rpt. in Bernadac and Obrist, 285. xv. nllette, 1968
2]. Meyer-Thoss, 119. Photo: Peter Moore
28. LB-0569 (c. 1965).

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