Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter

by Philip Larratt-Smith

with an essay by Juliet Mitchell

 

Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter is an exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis.

 

From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition—and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois’s work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist’s life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst’s viewpoint on the artist’s long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud’s own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois’s copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.

 

Philip Larratt-Smith is curator at The Easton Foundation. He has written and curated extensively on Louise Bourgeois and serves as the artist’s literary archivist. Juliet Mitchell is professor emerita of psychoanalysis and gender studies at the University of Cambridge.

 

This book accompanied the exhibition of the same title that was on view at the Jewish Museum from May 21 to September 12, 2021.