687081

research-article2016
APAXXX10.1177/0003065116687081Britt-Marie SchillerThe Primitive Edge of Creativity

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Britt-Marie Schiller 65/2

The Primitive Edge of Creativity:

Destruction and Reparation in
Louise Bourgeois’s Art

Viewed within the psychic geography of Thomas Ogden’s modes of

generating and organizing experience, in particular the autistic-contiguous
mode, Louise Bourgeois’s creative imagination can be seen as originating
on what Ogden (1989) has called the primitive edge of experience. This
mode, dominated by the sensory, is characterized by chaos, fragmenta-
tion, and a loss of boundaries. In dynamic movements between the
depressive and the autistic-contiguous positions, between destructive
and reparative impulses, Bourgeois transforms experiences of chaos, as
well as destructive aggression, into aesthetic order and form, into works
of art. She is able to delve into the most elemental and presymbolic
modes of psychic experience and artistically harness raw feelings and
sensations on what can be called the primitive edge of creativity.

Keywords: creativity, depressive position, autistic-contiguous position,

Louise Bourgeois, aggression, reparation, abjection, sculpture

There can be no art without aggression.

—Hanna Segal (1991, p. 92)

L ouise Bourgeois (1911–2010) grew up in a family of tapestry repairers

in France. She became an artist when her parents needed her to draw
missing parts of tapestries for the weavers (Morris 2008, p. 286). Her
mother often sat outside in the sun repairing tapestries, and Bourgeois has
reflected that “this sense of reparation is very deep within me” (p. 242).

Professor of Philosophy, Webster University; full faculty and Dean, St. Louis
Psychoanalytic Institute.
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the American Psychoanalytic
Association Winter Meeting, New York, January 13–17, 2016, and at the Wisconsin
Psychoanalytic Society, Milwaukee, March 21, 2015. Submitted for publication
February 5, 2016.

DOI: 10.1177/0003065116687081 221

 Britt-Marie Schiller

Artists, she has said, “have access to the unconscious and are fear-
less. It takes a kind of fearlessness in your art-making to cut your parents
up in little pieces and put them down the drain. It is in a world of fantasy.
But then you wake up, you are afraid of what you’ve done. But then
comes the reparation and exorcism” (Greenberg and Jordan 2003, p. 17).
Destructive and reparative impulses oscillate in this artist, as they do in
the depressive position, and are manifest in many of her works. Bourgeois
is able to harness experiences of chaos and fragmentation originating in
the psychic modality Thomas Ogden (1989) calls autistic-contiguous, and
transform them into works of art, which leads me to claim that her artistic
imagination stems from the primitive edge of creativity.
Ogden (1989) expands Melanie Klein’s conception of psychological
organizations, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Klein
1935, 1946), by adding a third, the autistic-contiguous, which he refers to
as “the primitive edge of experience.” This mode of generating and orga-
nizing experience, dominated by the sensory, is characterized by rhythms,
textures, and patterns, thus being the most elemental, presymbolic mode
of experience. Ogden stresses that, while each mode is characterized by
its own form of symbolization and method of defense, the three are dia-
lectically related. They are conceived not as developmental stages, dia-
chronically following one upon the other, nor as isolated, but as synchronic
dimensions of experience, dynamically interrelated. My aim here is to
analyze Bourgeois’s works as manifestations of destructive and repara-
tive impulses within the depressive position, especially from the point of
view of her access to the autistic-contiguous mode of generating experi-
ence. Her artistic imagination drawing on the depressive position is mani-
fest in Maman (1999), a giant spider evoking aggressive attack and patient
reparation, and in Personages from the 1940s and 1950s, works that
embody the reparative gestures of an abandoned girl. Her access to the
autistic-contiguous position, the primitive edge of experience, is manifest
in Spiral Woman (1984), a work replete with vengeful murderous
impulses, and powerfully in The Destruction of the Father (1974), a cav-
ernous installation gesturing toward horror, revenge, and cannibalism,
stemming from the primitive edge of creativity.

R e g r e s s i o n a n d S u bl i m at i o n

While many have noted that regression is at the heart of creativity, as it is in

psychoanalysis, and that it is normative, not pathological (see, e.g., Kris

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1936, 1952; A. Freud 1963; Blos 1962, 1967; Knafo 2012), I seek to analyze
more deeply what I take to be Bourgeois’s regressive experiences of dread,
chaos, and fragmentation in the autistic-contiguous modality, and her trans-
formation of these experiences into works of art through sublimation.
Bourgeois has called creativity “the gift of sublimation” (Gorovoy
and Tilkin 1999, p. 17). I follow Hans Loewald’s conception of sublima-
tion (1988), not as neutralization of psychic energy, or substitution, or
eradication of infantile wishful or harmful impulses, but rather as a har-
nessing of these impulses. While the artist’s energy is organized on a
higher, more complex level of mental functioning, the manifest expres-
sions originate in a creative return to, and interplay with, a lower, less
differentiated position, the autistic-contiguous, without returning to a
lower level of functioning. Passion is thus not absent in sublimation;
rather, it is organized on a different level of functioning, and is especially
active, experienced, and expressed in creative work (p. 461). The passion
in the works I discuss here circulates around aggression, revenge, chaos,
mourning, and repair, which stir up regressive forces in the viewer and
have a potential “to arouse fear and anxiety because of the aggressive and
destructive forces they unleash and because of the loss of boundaries they
represent” (Knafo 2012, p. 40).

Chaos and Chaos Theory

Louise Bourgeois’s creative psyche is able to venture into an abyss of

chaos, to seek out and unmask fear while transforming it into an artistic
expression. This means not her living in chaos, but being able to tolerate
the experience of chaos, to work with it, explore it, and transform it into
new forms and give it some order, only to destroy that order again and
again. As Danielle Knafo puts it, “The artist may sometimes visit the
neighborhood of madness and disassemble, but he does not make his
home there” (Knafo 2012, p. 33).
Hector Fiorini (in Hagman 2014) suggests that the heart of creativity
is the crisis of chaos. The conditions for transformation, in a psychoana-
lytic process as in a process of artistic creativity, draw on a sustained expe-
rience of disruption, crisis, and reorganization (p. 173). Chaos theory
posits that order emerges out of disorder and chaos, as an alternative to
traditional theories of change that explain organization and order as emerg-
ing developmentally and/or sequentially in linear fashion. There is a

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certain ambiguity in the use of “chaos” to characterize both a theory and a

state or mode of experience, but the two senses are conceptually distinct.
I will briefly discuss chaos theory to show how a creative psyche can
make order and meaning out of chaos, in particular how dynamic move-
ment between regression and sublimation can occur in a nonlinear, non-
developmental way.
It is a fundamental tenet of chaos theory that nonequilibrium is a source
of order (Juarrero 1999, p. 119). Order emerges out of chaos. Internal interac-
tions and external disturbances are both required for change and allow a system
as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization (Waldrop 1992).
Complex self-organizing systems are adaptive, not merely passively respon-
sive. They are dynamic, not just complicated, but spontaneous, and have an
ability to bring order and chaos into some balance (Waldrop 1992). The bal-
ance point is called the “edge of chaos,” a site of constant fluctuation where
systems, poised between order and surprise, appear best able to coordinate
complex activities and evolve (Kauffman 1995, p. 26). For example, in the
analytic situation, a destabilization of the patient’s mind can lead to unpre-
dictable change, eventually even to structural change in psychic organization.
Allowing herself to destabilize or regress to a primitive edge of experience,
Bourgeois seems able to engage in a generative interplay between this mode
of sensory experience and the capacity for symbol formation characteristic of
the depressive position, and to use that interplay creatively. A creative psyche,
considered as an unstable chaotic system, might be seen not as random or
disorganized, but as sensitive, finely tuned, and actively responsive—a non-
linear system having an inherent capacity for discontinuous, nonproportional,
and unpredictable change or evolution (Piers 2000, 2005).1
Next I will explore more deeply the movement among conscious and
unconscious mental processes, and among Ogden’s modes of generating
and organizing experience. After reviewing the autistic-contiguous posi-
tion, I will analyze some of Bourgeois’s sculptures and installations from
the point of view of her access to this formless, presymbolic mode of
organizing experience.

1While traditional psychoanalytic models of character, mind, and development have

adhered to linear and equilibrium-seeking dynamics, chaos theory considers equilibrium to be

limiting, a temporary state rather than the desired destination (Piers 2000, p. 11).

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The Primitive Edge of Experience

I suggest, then, that the artist who is able to balance or destabilize on the
“edge of chaos” and make meaning of chaos is free to access and cre-
atively use what Ogden calls the primitive edge of experience (1989). He
captures this edge in the words of T. S. Eliot: the “frontiers of conscious-
ness beyond which words fail though meanings still exist” (quoted in
Ogden 1989, p. 3). The most primitive psychological organization, the
autistic-contiguous, is conceived as the sensory floor at which the experi-
ence of self is inchoate. This mode of organizing experience generates the
most elemental forms of human experience, forms in which psychic orga-
nization is based on sensory contiguity (p. 31). While claiming that the
autistic-contiguous mode exists only in synchronic dialectical interplay
with the other modes of organizing and generating experience, Ogden
also acknowledges a developmental perspective in addressing the infant’s
experience in the context of the mother-infant relationship (p. 202). In
this sense, an inchoate sense of self is built on rhythms of sensation, on
surfaces touching, on skin next to skin, in the earliest presymbolic mode
of experience, captured, for example, in a child’s experience of nursing
simply as “it is coming in by the mouth” (Laplanche 1976, p. 17).
Relationships are neither to subject nor to object, but “of shape to the feel-
ing of enclosure, of beat to the feeling of rhythm, of hardness to the feel-
ing of edgedness” (Ogden 1989, p. 32). There is almost no sense of self
and other, of inside and outside; rather, this mode of experience is charac-
terized by pattern, shape, rhythm, texture, hardness, softness, warmth,
and cold (p. 33). Although there is a primacy earlier than the other two
modes of psychological organization, this sensory floor of experience is
preserved and coexists dialectically with them (p. 49). I suggest below
that The Destruction of the Father is created from this primitive edge of
experience, situating Bourgeois’s artistic imagination on a primitive edge
of creativity.
Ogden adds the autistic-contiguous position to the two other modes
of generating experience, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions,
both so well known from Melanie Klein’s conception of psychological
organization that they need not be reviewed here. Empathy and reparation
are possible through recognition of others as subjects with their own lives
and feelings. And while the past can be reinterpreted, it cannot be undone,
which leads to sadness as well as a capacity for mourning and reparation.

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This mode of experience is manifest in the Personages, to which I will

return.
Against this theoretical background I turn now to explore and inter-
pret the works of art. Bourgeois has made public the childhood sources of
her intense emotional life and connected them explicitly to her art.2 At
birth she was a disappointment to her father Louis, who had wanted a
son.3 He spent World War I in the French army, and Louise was taken to
the front by her mother, who followed her husband from camp to camp
(Colomina 1999). After the war her mother fell ill with the Spanish flu;
she remained ill, and Louise left school to nurse her until her death in
1932. When Louise was eleven her father hired Sadie, an English tutor
and governess, to look after his children. Sadie lived with the family and
was the father’s mistress for almost ten years. “I was betrayed not only by
my father, dammit, but by her too. It was a double betrayal” (Gorovoy and
Asbaghi 1997, p. 35). Compounded by the mystery of her mother’s toler-
ating this domestic arrangement (Colomina 1999), as well as by being
unwanted as a girl, these betrayals seem to have filled Bourgeois’s child-
hood with feelings of abandonment and loss.

Revenge: Twisting The Neck of

T h e F at h e r ’ s M i s t r e s s

From an early age Louise helped with the tapestry repair work. After
washing tapestries in the river with the workers, she would help twist
them to wring out the water. Returning to this scene of betrayal, she recol-
lects that “later I would dream of getting rid of my father’s mistress. I
would do it in my dreams by twisting her neck” (Colomina 1999, p. 31).
The deep sense of betrayal thus fuels an abiding desire for revenge
grounded in complex oedipal disappointment and repeatedly played out
in dreams, in fantasy, and eventually in works of art.
Spiral Woman (1984, Figures 1 and 2) is a suspended, spinning
female figure whose entire body, but for the legs, is trapped in coils of
2In using Bourgeois’s reflections and commentaries on her experiences and artistic pro-

cesses, I take these to refer not to a factual or historical reality, but to a psychic reality (Abella
2016), a presentation of her internal world rather than a true picture of the past.
3According to Bourgeois, her mother said to her husband Louis, “don’t be disappointed

with that little girl. She is your spitting image, and we are going to name her for you” (Bernadac
and Obrist 1998, p. 163). However, Bourgeois has also said, “I was called Louise because my
mother was a feminist and a socialist; her ideal was Louise Michel, the French Rosa Luxemburg”
(p. 112).

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

Figure 1. Louise Bourgeois, Spiral Woman, 1984

Bronze and slate disc. Bronze: 48.2 x 10.1 x 13.9 cm. Slate disc: 3.17 x 86.3 cm. diameter.
Collection The Easton Foundation. Photo: Allan Finkelman, © The Easton Foundation /
Licensed by VAGA, New York.

bronze, twisting in the air. The coils wrap around the woman, like a boa
constrictor’s deadly embrace around its prey. The ceaseless spinning ges-
tures at once toward revenge, toward the arachnid activity of spinning
webs, toward repairing tapestries, and toward the restless repetition that
defines and redefines Bourgeois’s creative mode. “I never tire of repeat-
ing, I am used to it. It’s how I handle fear” (Keller and Malin 2004, p. 27).
The spiral embodies the sensory enclosure of the autistic-contiguous
mode almost like a second skin wrapped tightly around the body, as hard
and shell-like as an autistic object (Ogden 1989, p. 37), which is associated
with a diffuse sense of danger. In the autistic-contiguous mode the danger
is experienced as an anxiety of formless dread (p. 40), while in the paranoid-
schizoid mode an autistic object can function as a protective armor. Both

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 Britt-Marie Schiller

Figure 2. Louise Bourgeois, Spiral Woman, detail

Bronze, 48.2 x 10.1 x 13.9 cm. Collection The Easton Foundation. Photo: Marcus Leith, © The
Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

seem evoked in Spiral Woman, though in the murderous impulse Bourgeois

speaks of, the spiral functions as a tool of strangulation.
The revenge she recounts as perpetrated in her dreams is materialized
in the spinning woman immobilized inside the bronze coils spun around
her body in a phallic form, the shape of betrayal erect above the open legs
of the mistress. The vengeful urges fueling this creative sublimation are
not tamed or neutralized feelings (Poland 2006). Rather, the rage is
focused on its primary sources in reducing the twisted and twisting body
to legs dangling out of the father’s penis. Experiences of powerlessness,

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traumatic passion, and vengeance are transformed into a work of art, ges-
turing toward a primitive edge of creativity. From a developmental per-
spective it might seem that the gesture is directed toward a later phase of
development, but the oedipal betrayal is not necessarily the original event.
As Loewald (1975) has noted, the oedipus complex is the “reworking as
an enactment on a higher developmental level of early infantile stages of
psychic development” (pp. 358–359). This captures the notion of
Nachträglichkeit, the deferred action, or revision, of an earlier scene that
could not be fully incorporated into a meaningful context and to which we
do not have access. “The traumatic event is the epitome of such unassimi-
lated experience” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967, p. 112), and, according
to Bourgeois, this is the abandonment of being born.
Bourgeois kept diaries from the age of twelve; following is an entry
from when she was seventy-eight4:

The abandonment
I want revenge
I want tears for having been born
I want apologies
I want
Blood
I want to do to others what has been done to me
To be born is to be ejected
To be abandoned, from there comes the fury
[Morris 2008, p. 20]

The traumatic and unassimilated experience of being born seems deferred,

repeated, and assimilated in the betrayal and abandonment by her father
and Sadie, and Bourgeois wants revenge on both. The abandonment sensed
at the earliest developmental stage seems to gain meaning in the repetition
at age eleven, when the experiences of abandonment and betrayal could be
assimilated and verbalized. Intensifying these occurrences, the one at an
early infantile stage of psychic development being repeated at a later stage,
on a higher level of development, is then the artist’s experience of returning
to the primitive mode of generating experience, the autistic-contiguous,
now with the accent on a synchronic dimension of psychological experi-
ence, rather than on a diachronic dimension of psychic development.
4While I do not claim or imply that Bourgeois’s words provide empirical evidence for my

way of interpreting her works, I do treat them as an analyst would treat the words of an analy-
sand—they may be empirically unverifiable, but they carry psychic meaning.

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 Britt-Marie Schiller

Spiral Woman also captures an oscillation between two emotional

attitudes in perpetual dialectical movement: a fear of disintegration and a
receptive openness to experience. Bourgeois has written,

The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do
you place yourself; at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is
the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compact-
ing to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the
move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control: of trust,
positive energy, of life itself [quoted in Robinson 1997, pp. 25–26].

The spiral then represents both control and freedom for a sculptor
who fears disintegration, chaos, and abandonment (Morris 2008, p. 88).
The spiraling motion can be both restrictive and expansive. The rhythmic
regularity of spinning evokes a soothing experience of sensory cohesion
and boundedness to stave off the anxiety of disintegration. It also gestures
toward the desire to wrench (Bernadac 2006, p. 89), as if the vengeful
action of wringing the mistress’s neck had flown directly out of the art-
ist’s hands into the sculpture.
I turn now to Maman (1999), a maternal figure, and to Bourgeois’s
ambivalence toward a mother who abandoned her by ejecting her from
the womb, as well as by abdicating her maternal role and position in the
family by allowing a mistress to cohabit with her lover, the mother’s hus-
band, within the family home.

A g g r e s s i o n a n d R e pa i r : T h e A r a c h n i d M o t h e r

Maman is a steel and marble structure approximately ten meters high. Its
title designates it as a maternal spider. Bourgeois has associated the spider
with her mother, “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing [and] reasonable”
(Morris 2008, p. 170). The spider spins webs with slender threads, much
as Louise’s mother may have sat outside in the sunshine repairing thread-
bare tapestries. But mothers, no less than spiders, can be menacing fig-
ures, as Karl Abraham points out in interpreting spiders in dreams as
symbolizing the “wicked mother” (1923, p. 315).
The monumental scale of Maman evokes characters in animal fables
and, stirring up memories, moods, and mysteries, makes the spectator feel
like a child. Formally, Maman embodies a dialectic between sculpture
and architecture, and phenomenologically it oscillates between

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

Figure 3. Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999

Bronze, stainless steel, and marble. 927.1 x 891.5 x 1023.6 cm. Installed at the Tate Modern,
London in 2007. Photo: Marcus Leith, © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New
York.

the reparative tenderness and aggressive attack typical of the depressive

position (Potts 2008, p. 262). While the imposing length of the legs sug-
gests columns, they also convey a lightness as they taper to fine points
barely touching the floor, like a dancer who seems to defy gravity (Bal
2001). But then the spectator might feel caught in a web of fears. The
spider is a predator patiently waiting for some prey to be caught in its
sticky threads. The artist presents the patiently repairing and dangerous
predator embodying the dialectical tension within the depressive mode of
generating experience.
Addressing the mystery of the mother and the mistress, Bourgeois
has said, “Now you will ask me, how is it that in a middle-class family a
mistress was a standard piece of furniture? Well, the reason is that my
mother tolerated it and that is the mystery. Why did she?” (in Bernadac
and Obrist 1998, p. 133). One might speculate that Maman expresses
Bourgeois’s wish that her mother had been more fierce and not quietly
tolerated this domestic arrangement (Colomina 1999, p. 31). I propose
that Maman engages aggression, especially as experienced by women. A
cultural fantasy of the all-giving, benevolent mother has contributed to
women’s discomfort with aggression (Harris 1998). The mother-daughter

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relation holds both love and hate, tenderness and aggression, but hate and
aggression are often split off, denied, and repressed. The fear of acknowl-
edging hate might originate in the very realistic fear of the aggression and
destructive violence actually inflicted on women and a desire to find in
the mother-daughter bond a haven from this reality. It might also be a fear
that aggression and its manifestations in competition and ambition are
seen as masculine desires, forbidden and dangerous to femininity, and
leading to a loss of goodness. Competition between women might threaten
an idealized relation (Harris 1997). Such fears can lead to women’s habit-
ually undermining or destroying their own prospects and opportunities,
and especially to inhibiting their creativity.
Arachne, the mythic first weaver (Ovid c. a.d. 8), was not afraid of
aggression, competition, or ambition. Her tapestries were wondrous, and
Athena, the divine weaver, was enraged that Arachne would not acknowl-
edge her talent as a gift from the goddess. Athena would not let this self-
sufficiency and refusal of humility go unchallenged. She set up her loom,
as did Arachne, unafraid of divine envy, her heart set on victory. When
Athena looked at her competitor’s weaving and found no fault, she repeat-
edly struck the girl on the forehead. Unable to endure such divine rage
and envy, Arachne sought to hang herself. Feeling pity and saying “Live
but hang, you wicked girl,” Athena changed the girl into a spider who, “as
a spider still / Weaving her web, pursues her former skill” (p. 125). The
successful result of ambition in the finished work was a threat that Athena
could not tolerate. She punished Arachne with sadistic retaliation, as
many parents (not only mothers), unable to contain a child’s aggression,
do, unless they collapse in depression.
Many of us, women in particular, have made the distinction between
assertiveness, as a positive and healthy energy, and aggression, as a nega-
tively charged and dangerous affect (Harris 1998). Here I adopt Adrienne
Harris’s conception of aggression as a neutral term, spanning a continuum
of manifestations from motility, activity, assertion, and competitiveness,
to envy, anger, destructiveness, hatred, and rage (p. 36). Thus conceived,
aggression is not a defensive, secondary reaction to impingements, injury,
or neglect, but a primary drive.
The aggression and energy of an active child can be appreciated and
safely limited, or rejected as exhausting, being too much, and punished as
unacceptable, especially in girls. Western culture has traditionally shown
more tolerance for a boy’s aggression. A girl’s intense feelings and

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passions are often met with judgmental fears and crushed, because the
mother experiences her own feelings of aggression as dangerous and
destructive. If a mother is able, nonjudgmentally, to accept being experi-
enced as a spider, protecting but also threatening, her daughter might not
be caught in a web of repressed fears and threatening fantasies. This
assumes that the mother is comfortable with her own aggression and
ambivalence, her love and hate for her child (Winnicott 1949). Her con-
scious acknowledgment of this can liberate her daughter from destructive
fantasies and lead instead to the development of a more integrated psy-
chic structure. “Hatred unknown or disavowed is what does so much
damage” (Harris 1998, pp. 37–38). I suggest that Maman gestures toward
“re-weaving the maternal web” (Kristeva 2008, p. 249) in such a way that
female aggression does not go underground to be destructively acted out,
but rather is creatively harnessed. Recall Hanna Segal’s claim (1991) that
there can be no art without aggression. She does, however, as we shall
see, hold that art counters aggression, while Harris’s conception suggests
an embrace of aggression, in particular female and maternal aggression,
that informs my analysis of this sculpture.
In the depressive position, aggression (in Harris’s sense), empathy,
and reparation are possible through an acknowledgment of others as sub-
jects with their own lives and feelings. I turn now to creativity as a repara-
tive impulse grounded in object relations and generated within the
depressive mode of experience.

R e pa r at i v e G e s t u r e s o f a n Ab a n d o n i n g
a n d Ab a n d o n e d G i r l

In the 1940s Bourgeois used the roof of her building as a studio.

Surrounded by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, she carved tall, vertical,
slender monoliths, Personages. She had left her native France in 1938,
and feeling lonely she re-created the people she had left behind (Bernadac
2006, p. 86). Abandoning, as she had felt abandoned, she ran away from
them, “because [she] could not stand them” (Strick 1994, p. 16), and now,
missing them desperately, she made a mourning and reparative gesture in
reassembling them. In her new country she sought to surround herself
with the relations she had left.
As a work of mourning, Personages might express an internal pro-
cess of acknowledgment and reconciliation, of letting go and going on, of

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 Britt-Marie Schiller

Figure 4. Louise Bourgeois, Dagger Child, 1947–1949

Painted wood and stainless steel, 193.4 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm. Collection Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York. Photo: Allan Finkelman, © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA,
New York.

adjusting to living in a foreign land while feeling exiled. The imaginary

community of the Personages can be seen as embodying an internal
world of object relations, revealing anxiety over being alone and a long-
ing to feel at home. Feeling homesick, Bourgeois once said “it was an
unconscious land that I longed for” (Bernadac 2006, p. 86); thus she
expressed Segal’s idea that “the act of creation at depth has to do with an

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

Figure 5. Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1950

Painted wood and stainless steel, 160 x 30.4 x 30.4 cm. Collection The Easton Foundation.
Photo: Rafael Lobato, © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

unconscious memory of a harmonious internal world and the experience

of its destruction; that is, the depressive position” (1991, p. 94).
The Personages inhabited, according to Bourgeois, a transitional
space, “make-believe and yet real” (Morris 2008, p. 230). The early fig-
ures are rigid, totemic, and aggressive, sculpted by cutting, hacking away,

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 Britt-Marie Schiller

Figure 6. Louise Bourgeois, Figure Regardant une Maison, 1950

Bronze and stainless steel, 168.9 x 38.1 x 30.4 cm. Collection The Easton Foundation. Photo:
Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

and gouging.5 Dagger Child (1947–1949; Figure 4) consists of “black

tapering blades thrust upwards in a gesture of volatile aggression,” while
it also “retains an aspect of vulnerability as it teeters on its narrow base”
(Morris 2008, p. 98). The work is seen from a betrayed and neglected
child’s point of view, at once defensive and destructive. As the artist has
explained, “First I am going to try to hurt you. But if I cannot hurt you, or
if you don’t care, or if you cannot be hurt, then I will turn against myself ”
(quoted in Morris 2008, p. 98).
The second set of Personages has softened into gestures that hold
restoration in tension with the force of destruction. Untitled (1950; Figure
5) consists of triangular wooden pieces stacked on top of one another, as
a child might stack blocks. This sculptural mode of construction and

5I am grateful to the art historian Bradley Collins for underscoring the aggressive nature

of the first set of Personages and the more reparative nature of the second set.

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assembly suggests a reparative process of mourning in “a rebuilding, bit

by bit, of the subject’s inner world” (Nixon 2005, p. 148).
Bourgeois’s longing for an unconscious land can be a longing for the
internal dialectic that is the “gift of sublimation,” the font of her creative
imagination, rather than (or as well as) a longing for the people in the land
she left, as they can be seen as the day residue, the stirring events of cre-
ativity. The “primary anxiety of creativity is the anxiety of aloneness,”
according to Jerome Oremland (1997), because that anxiety blocks the
free internal movement between playing, dreaming, and creating (p. 55).
Feeling lonely in her new homeland, Bourgeois re-created those she had
left behind, recognizing their importance in calling them, not just persons,
but personages.
In mourning, each memory, image, and expectation is invoked and
invested with energy, an obsessive kind of listing (Nixon 2005, p. 147),
which seems evoked in the litany of titles from the 1950 exhibit of Les
Personages: Figure Bringing Bread, Figure Gazing at a House, Figures
Holding Up a Beam, Figure Leaning against a Door, Figure Entering a
Room, Figures Waiting, Figures Talking without Seeing, Sleeping Figure,
Figure for a Niche, Figure Leaving the House, Figure Exposed to the
Wind, Figure Carrying a House, and so on (Bernadac 2006, pp. 92–93).
Figure 6 shows Figure Gazing at a House (1950), which might gesture
toward a figure on the outside longing to be invited to enter and join those
inside, the longing of an exile to return home.
Marie-Laure Bernadac (2006) claims that sculpture functioned for
Bourgeois “as a tangible way of recreating the past, that is to say control-
ling and manipulating it” (p. 93). I would suggest that the Personages are
sculptural embodiments of memories in order to master them, not in the
sense of controlling and manipulating, but, as coming to terms with them
(Loewald 1988) and developing a feeling of responsibility for one’s feel-
ings and actions (Ogden 1989). As sculptures, memories of the past,
which are expressions of present beliefs and wishes, not an accurate pic-
ture of the past (Freud 1910), can at once be perpetuated and relinquished
in a psychic reorganization that alters the response to losses, in relation
both to objects and to their significance.
While suffering is directed inward, reparation is directed outward, an
acknowledgment of one’s having done something destructive (Rosen
2009). The reparative aspect of creativity is grounded in a need to over-
come the despair that results from fantasied damage inflicted on the

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 Britt-Marie Schiller

Figure 7. Louise Bourgeois, View of exhibition installation

in the Peridot Gallery, 1950

“Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures” at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1950. Photo: Aaron
Siskind, © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

object by the subject’s destructiveness (Abella 2010). As unresolved

mourning can issue in turning anger against oneself, as is manifest in
Dagger Child, where part of the work of mourning is accomplished sculp-
turally by carving, chiseling, and scratching pieces of wood—that is, by
aggression—rather than, as in the later series of Personages (e.g.,
Untitled), by assembly and construction. “I use the aggression I am suf-
fering from against the sculptures,” Bourgeois once said in an interview
(Morris 2008, p. 36).
Hanna Segal (1952) argues that artistic activity is reparative and akin
to the depressive position. Both are characterized by a struggle to counter
aggression and to reunite good and bad part objects split in the paranoid-
schizoid position: hence her claim that there can be no art without aggres-
sion (Segal 1991, p. 92). On this view, creating is a re-creating of objects
once loved but later ruined, objects that are restored in the work of art as
split objects are internally reintegrated. From this perspective, artistic
activity is grounded in an ability to acknowledge and overcome paranoid-
schizoid anxiety. As in the depressive position, there is at once a double
awareness: on the one hand an internal world and, on the other, an
external reality, embodied artistically in the ability to use materials to
express internal fantasies.

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

A number of the Personages were exhibited at the Peridot Gallery in

New York in 1949 and again in 1950 (see Figure 7), the whole exhibit
constituting a sculptural space to be inhabited.
The sculptures have a striking bodily presence, highlighted by their
presentation in the gallery space, where the hauntingly anthropomorphic
abstractions were arranged in clusters, resembling people mingling at a
social event. The internal object relatedness of creativity is thus externally
exhibited by the sculptural community created in the gallery space.
Dispersed across the gallery, the figures occupied a social space into
which the spectators entered, evoking Bourgeois’s concern with “the rela-
tion of the individual to his surroundings” (Strick 1994, p. 9). Already
assembled, the life-size, simple, and totem-like forms are affected by
what surrounds them, the gallery space and the other sculptures. The fig-
ures exist “in imaginary relationships to one another and to the viewers”
(Nixon 2005, p. 124), in a sculptural space that extends a welcoming
gesture to mingle with them. The sculptural encounter, the engagement,
and the interaction are thus experienced as a relation between someone
and his/her/its environment (Potts 2008 p. 262). Originally exhibited
without bases, the sculptures were on narrow, precarious footing (Storr
2004) evoking the fragile and unstable nature of human relationships.
Each terminates in a point, as do the legs of the spider Maman, expressing
the fragility of verticality and representing the human effort to hold one-
self up (Bernadac and Obrist 1998, p. 178).
The impulse to repair and reconcile the fantasied damage of injury to
another involves a search for atonement. In a secular sense, atonement is
reconciliation within the self, an attempt to repair and restore the internal
damaged other (Rosen 2009). Feeling alone, vulnerable, and exiled, the
atoner seeks to repair and restore the tie to the lost, injured, or betrayed
object—literally to re-pair, re-join, the object in his or her inner represen-
tational world (p. 415). Seeking atonement, reconciliation of separateness,
at-one-ment (Loewald 1988, p. 463), Bourgeois, who had left her home-
land, said to a friend, “I feel so lonely that I am rebuilding these people
around me. I ran away from them because I couldn’t stand them, and as
soon as I’m away from them I rebuild them” (Strick 1994, p. 16). Their
presences stood as a kind of memorial to her loss and “these pieces were
presences—missed, badly missed presences” (Bernadac and Obrist 1998,
pp. 192, 105). The Personages are manifestations of reparation and mourn-
ing (Nixon 2005), an attempt at severing attachments while rebuilding an

239
 Britt-Marie Schiller

Figure 8. Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father, 1974

Latex, plaster, wood, fabric, and red light, 237.8 x 362.3 x 248.6 cm. Collection The Easton
Foundation. Photo: Rafael Lobato, © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

internal world (Freud 1917). At the same time, the works of art keep the
tension alive between abandonment and atonement, between separateness
and longing for one-ness, and between destruction and reparation.
I turn now from the people the artist left behind, from the mother and
the mistress, to the father.

T h e D e s t r u c t i o n o f T h e Fat h e r ,
or Evening Meal

Bourgeois has written that she suffers from her own aggression, and is
overwhelmed with feelings of revenge, hate, rage, and chaos. According
to Donald Kuspit (2008),

Bourgeois is acutely conscious of her disruptive emotions and unconscious fan-

tasies, she refers to the unconscious several times, suggesting that it is the
‘underground’ of her art, the ‘secret’ that ‘reconciles it with humanity’—and is
determined to rein them in by writing about them, tracking and articulating them
as precisely as she can. She knows they cannot be expunged, but by gaining
insight into them she hopes to make them less menacing. She is psychologically
minded and self-analytical, monitoring her emotions as they occur. However
fragile her sense of self may seem, her observing ego remains [p. 296].

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

Bourgeois, then, returns to traumatic impingements, refusing through

her art to be a victim, and instead to master, to come to terms with the anxi-
ety, confusion, and disintegration of her self. “The process,” she has said,
“is to go from passive to active. As an artist I am a powerful person. In real
life, I feel like the mouse behind the radiator” (Bernadac 2006, p. 181).
The Destruction of the Father (1974; Figure 8) is an installation made
one year after Bourgeois’s husband’s death and twenty-two years after her
father’s.6 Approximately 3.5m x 2.5m x 2.5m, it is a giant oral cavern,
bathed in red light. Inside this enormous open mouth, a table is sur-
rounded by buttock- and breast-like hemispheres protruding from the
floor and hung from the ceiling like stalagmites and stalactites. Gesturing
toward an underground cave, the work evokes Freud’s characterization of
the unconscious, the id as “a cauldron full of seething excitations” (Freud
1933, p. 73). Bourgeois also gave the title Evening Meal to this work of
viscera, scattered limbs, and bloody intestines presented on a platter
placed in the middle of the table. The oral site of speech, nourishment,
and cannibalism, all at once, it calls to mind Karl Abraham’s second oral
phase, a sadistic one in which the infant ambivalently wants to bite and
cannibalistically devour the breast (Segal 1979, pp. 15–16). I will return
to fantasies of cannibalism below.
Orality and aggression are closely linked in our idioms: “a biting
comment, they chewed him out, they chewed him up and spat him out,
he’ll eat you for lunch, she tore into him, he bit her head off, you swal-
lowed it whole, just eat it, chew on this, it sticks in my throat, what’s eating
you, spit it out, they’ll eat you alive” (Kolodny 2000, p. 63). Bourgeois’s
site of orality reveals a primitive edge of vengeance, a banquet to liqui-
date the powerful father (Bernadac 2006, p. 115). According to her, “This
piece is basically a table, the awful, terrifying family dinner table headed
by the father who sits and gloats. And the others, the wife, the children,
what can they do? They sit there, in silence. The mother, of course, tries
to satisfy the tyrant, her husband. The children are full of exasperation. . . .
So, in exasperation, we grabbed the man, threw him on the table, dismem-
bered him and proceeded to devour him” (quoted in Morris 2008, p. 102).
A provocative tableau of retribution for the appropriation and violation of
the community to be shared around the dinner table, and also a reverbera-
tion of echoes of the violated conjugal bed, a community not to be shared,
6Her father’s death triggered a deep depression that led Bourgeois to enter a lengthy psy-

choanalysis with Henry Lowenfeld (Küster 2013).

241
 Britt-Marie Schiller

as Louise’s father did with Sadie. Bloody table linens cover a shape evoc-
ative of a bed, also covered in linen. The artist reveals the raw rage of a
trapped and helpless child, who had to swallow the pontificating words
and tyrannical insults of the powerful father, demolishing him just as she
had felt demolished (Bernadac 2006, p. 122). It is difficult to find words
that adequately capture the unconscious fantasies of sadistically devour-
ing a bad object in this sculptural gesture of intensely destructive impulses
(Nixon 1995). Part of what is so shocking about this piece is that vengeful
feelings, which typically fester in the dark recesses of the soul (Poland
2006), here take center stage. Another part is the evocation of the autistic-
contiguous. The artistic expression in The Destruction of the Father,
which seems almost free of secondary process restraints, conveys with
frightening eloquence that amorphous and archaic state of being, the
autistic-contiguous. I suggest that we grasp the autistic-contiguous posi-
tion and the horror of this work through the concept of the abject.
In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva (1982) holds that abjection is
caused by what disturbs identity and order, a dark revolt against the col-
lapse of awareness of being a separate being (p. 2). “Abjection is the state
in which one’s foothold in the world of self and other disintegrates”
(McAfee 1993, p. 120). The horror of this disintegration is anxiety at the
prospect, or even more strongly, the dread, of slipping away into an empty
abyss as the borders of the subject, the self, dissolve. The power of this
horror is thus not fear, since fear has an object; it is of some thing. This is
rather dread, which is of nothing. While profoundly unsettling, this expe-
rience gives rise to an awareness of one’s subjectivity, the separateness of
one’s being (p. 121).
Anxiety is stirred up in the viewer because of the destructive and
aggressive forces The Destruction of the Father unleashes, and because of
the loss of boundaries it represents. Richard Serra has said about this instal-
lation, “I am not sure where from or how these obvious, direct, concen-
trated, and dense forms come into being. . . . the core of the anxiety remains
indecipherable, and yet these sculptures trigger in me memories of personal
experiences I’d rather forget. . . . The work causes states of fear so brief that
speech always comes too late” (quoted in Morris 2008, p. 102). Serra cap-
tures the experience generated within the autistic-contiguous position as the
work seems to evoke a fleeting sense of abjection in him.
The abject comes back to us in such fleeting encounters, fleeting
because we flee, horrified over the threat of falling back into a loss of

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

differentiation, the lack of subjectivity. This horror, the experience of the

abject, perpetuates the boundary of the self in the face of annihilation, the
lack of boundaries between self and other, self and the external world, that
is, a descent into psychosis. Kristeva (1982) writes of “the inaugural loss,”
the loss of oneness with the mother, “that laid the foundations of its own
being”; the subject experiences anxiety over a loss of this loss, over being
“a blank subject . . . at the dump for non-objects” (pp. 5–6). While, or even
because, we cannot endure the abject, it safeguards our subjectivity. “Loss
inaugurates being-a-subject, and thereafter abjection marks this loss”
(McAfee 1993, p. 122). Through this primary repression, expelling the
mother’s body from herself, the child begins to form personal boundaries,
the experience of what Winnicott calls “not-me” (Winnicott 1971, p. 5).
Through abjecting, the child gives birth to herself as an “I,” a “me.” “I expel
myself,” Kristeva (1982) writes, “I spit myself out, I abject myself with the
same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself ” (p. 3). But the
abject comes back (not least in a psychoanalysis) just as repression returns,
bringing a horror of falling back into an undifferentiated realm, where no
subjectivity is possible (McAfee 1993). The abject, then, even as it threat-
ens the self, also constitutes it, by setting and resetting the bounds of our
perpetually precarious subjectivity. It marks the primitive edge of experi-
ence, this edge that I claim Bourgeois is able to inhabit creatively.
The expulsion of the abject in The Destruction of the Father is cap-
tured not least in the viscera, the limbs, and bloody intestines scattered on
the table. Bourgeois demolishes through art what she experienced as
threatening to demolish her, her father’s pontificating and tyrannical
insults. The infernal container of this Evening Meal evokes not an object,
but an inchoate state at the primitive edge of experience. Bourgeois cre-
ates this effect partly through casting dismembered animal limbs, chicken
legs, and lamb shoulders in soft plaster (Colomina 1999, p. 32), and partly
through bathing the domestic dinner scene in red, the color of flowing
blood. While aggression is used in the creation of the early Personages,
through carving and “hacking away” at the material, Bourgeois maintains
the tension between form, content, and material in The Destruction of the
Father, by creating it through an accumulation of forms, allowing her to
stress “the paradox between the process of construction and the idea of
destruction” (Bernadac 2006, p. 115).
While this work appears to gesture toward a collapse into a paranoid-
schizoid position of part objects, introjects, and persecutory anxieties, I

243
 Britt-Marie Schiller

Figure 9. Simon Ushakov, Last Supper / Mystical Supper, 1685

Simon Ushakov [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

suggest that these forms come into being through a transformation of passion
from the autistic-contiguous position, the primitive edge of experience. There
is almost no sense of self and other, of inside and outside; rather, this
mode of experience is characterized by pattern, boundedness, shape,
rhythm, texture, hardness, softness, warmth, and cold (Ogden 1989, p. 33).
The “sensory floor of experience” (p. 45) is evoked in The Destruction of
the Father, not only as a locus of experience, but also as a feeling of
entrapment. In the autistic-contiguous position there is no physical object
present to the subject, though there is to the observer. There are simply
sensory impressions of devouring and screaming to break the oppressive
pontification at the evening meal. Ogden characterizes autistic shapes in
the autistic-contiguous mode as feelings of softness, like security, safety,
relaxation, warmth, and affection. The feelings manifest in The
Destruction of the Father are more like autistic objects experienced as
torment, entrapment, revulsion, and hostility—diffuse senses of murder-
ous impulse rearticulated in a sublimated mode as devouring held in ten-
sion with spitting out. The horror of slipping back into the
autistic-contiguous mode of experience constitutes abjection. Bourgeois
is able to linger on this threshold of the abject (rather than flee) and to
transform the primitive edge of experience into a primitive edge of cre-
ativity, though “she sometimes feels dazed, shattered . . . speechless,

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

dazed, and confused; her biggest fear is of chaos: To go from bad to

worse. To go from disorder or confusion to chaos” (Kuspit 2008, p. 296).
This work shows how a creative psyche can make order and meaning out
of disintegrating chaos, in particular how the dynamic movement between
regression and sublimation captures passions experienced in a lower, less
differentiated position.

F a n ta s i e s o f C a n n i b a l i s m a n d
F o r m a l A s p e ct s o f T h e W o r k

Freud argues in Totem and Taboo that a totemic meal is a repetition of the
original parricide, a wishful fantasy of killing and devouring the father
(Freud 1912–1913). The tyrannical father is overwhelmed and killed by
his sons, who then repeat the crime over and over again in sacrificial and
festive rituals. “One day the brothers who had been driven out came
together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patri-
archal horde” (p. 141). The spectacle of the totem meal is slaughtering the
totem and devouring it raw—blood, flesh, and bones (p. 140). The totem
is a substitute for the father, whose destruction, unceremoniously repre-
sented, is memorialized in Bourgeois’s sculptural installation.
To memorialize is to honor, and for Freud, the ambivalence of the
sons turns into the father’s greatest triumph, as hostility diminishes while
longing, love, and admiration elevate the murdered father into a god. The
Destruction of the Father gestures toward this fantasied triumph over the
father, as a secular rather than religious memorial of the evening meal.
The daughter’s ambivalence turns into her artistic triumph. There is no
religious reverence expressed, no hint of expiation in the cannibalistic
savagery represented here.
There is, however, an artistic gesture to religious works of art depict-
ing the Last Supper, another meal involving cannibalism and the trauma
of betrayal (Collins 2016). The most famous image of this old and tradi-
tional theme is, of course, Leonardo da Vinci’s mural in Milan. More
intriguing in this context, however, is the Last Supper, or Mystical Supper
(1685; Figure 9), of the Russian icon painter Simon Ushakov. The icon
portrays the twelve apostles surrounding Jesus at the table, thirteen in all.
Bourgeois’s Evening Meal shows thirteen bulbous forms on the floor, sur-
rounding the table. These forms are partly covered in richly textured
cloth, much as the apostles’ bodies in the icon are wrapped in mantles,

245
 Britt-Marie Schiller

some of which have gathered in deep folds at the lower backs of their
bodies. Only twelve figures, however, are depicted with halos, since
Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus, is denied one. In Bourgeois’s instal-
lation, only twelve bulbous forms are suspended from the ceiling. Red is
the predominant color in both works, and at the back of each hangs a red
drape. The other color in Bourgeois’s installation is gold, recalling the
haloes in the icon. Formally, The Destruction of the Father thus echoes
Ushakov’s icon quite closely.
As the family dismembered and devoured its tyrant father, as the sons
killed and devoured the tyrannical father, so the apostles devoured the
body and blood of Christ (Collins 2016): “And as they were eating, Jesus
took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and he gave it to the disciples, and
said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And he took the cup, and gave thanks,
and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the
new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins’” (Matt.
26:26–28, King James version). Bourgeois has translated her personal
childhood experience into a universal fantasy (Collins 2016), and joined
the lineage of artists inspired by the betrayal and symbolic cannibalism of
the Last Supper.

C o n cl u s i o n

In Hanna Segal’s approach to art, artistic activity is reparative and akin to

the depressive position. Both are characterized by a struggle to counter
aggression, and Bourgeois’s creations appear to be re-creations of once
loved but now lost and ruined objects (Segal 1952, p. 199). In creativity,
the reparative act lies in the creation of the symbol; thus, “achieving
something in the external world is essential to [the artist’s] feeling of a
completed reparation” (Segal 1991, p. 96). Segal also theorizes that art
provides relief from despair over fantasied damage through the aesthetic
pleasure in the formal aspects of the work. The destruction presented in
the content is compensated for and repaired by the harmony and beauty of
the formal aspects of the work of art. This is demonstrated in Ushakov’s
icon. The Destruction of the Father, however, seems not to counter or
relieve aggression, but instead to acknowledge and embrace it.
Abella (2010) argues that the classical values of beauty as order, har-
mony, and perfection are not pursued in contemporary art. The dialectic
between destructive fantasy and compensatory beauty of form is left behind

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 The Primitive Edge of Creativity

for intense and powerful expressions that include raw ugliness, violence,
and disorder (p. 172). The satisfying symmetry, then, of the depressive
position and artistic activity as reunifications of split good and bad part
objects is abandoned for art “as a container of primitive and destructive
phantasies which rarely find an outlet in everyday life” (p. 177). In other
words, this art object can be seen as a container for fantasies generated in
the autistic-contiguous position—intense, inchoate, and cannibalistic.
Oscillating between the extreme modes of generating experience, the
depressive and the autistic-contiguous positions, between destructive and
reparative impulses, Louise Bourgeois was in masterful control of her art,
her sculptural language, even as she delved with remarkable fearlessness
into her psychic imaginary and creatively interpreted the fantasies that
shaped the primitive edge of her creativity.

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