Psychoanalytic Writings
by Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois, Loose sheet of writing, c. 1961, pencil on lined paper, 9 ½ x 6 in. (24.1 x 15.2 cm); LB-0019, Collection Louise Bourgeois Archive, The Easton Foundation, New York, © The Easton Foundation/DACS, UK.
In the early 1950s, Louise Bourgeois took a nearly decade-long break from making or exhibiting new work. During this time, she ran an antiquarian bookstore and underwent intensive psychoanalysis, which she continued, off and on, for the next thirty years. She first saw Dr. Leonard Cammer, who later founded Gracie Square Hospital, then Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a Freudian trained by Wilhelm Reich, from 1952 until 1982.
In 1958, at the height of her most intensive period of therapy, she described it as ‘a duty’, ‘a joke’, ‘a love affair’, ‘a bad dream’, ‘a pain in the neck’ – but also, ‘my field of study’. In 2004, two metal boxes full of papers written during her analysis were discovered in a closet of her Chelsea brownstone by Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’ longtime assistant. Six years later, another two boxes were found. In total, the papers run to almost a thousand pages.
A selection of Bourgeois’ psychoanalytic writings in the metal boxes in which they were stored © The Easton Foundation. Photo: Christopher Burke.
Composed on loose sheets, the writings are records of dreams and process notes. They were created as an adjunct to her analysis with Lowenfeld, for whom she sometimes made carbon copies. Granta presented six images of Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings in Issue 174, three of which are included here. Bourgeois ‘devoted a lifetime to excavating her unconscious’, wrote her friend Gary Indiana; these literary artifacts bear witness to the neuroses that fuelled her work.
Louise Bourgeois, Loose sheet of writing, c. 1958, pencil on off-white paper, 11 x 8 ½ in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm); LB-0127, Collection Louise Bourgeois Archive, The Easton Foundation, New York © The Easton Foundation/DACS, UK.
