- Email: [email protected]
Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius
+Model NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7
ARTICLE IN PRESS Disponible en ligne sur
ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Éditorial/Essai
Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius Louise Bourgeois : d’une mère dépressive à un père coureur de jupons, la naissance d’un génie
Abstract At the age of forty-one, Louise Bourgeois began a psychoanalysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld. She continued her treatment for thirty-three years and stopped it only after the death of her therapist. Psychoanalysis has therefore been central to her life as a woman and an artist. After a brief biographical sketch of the two protagonists, we propose in this essay a new understanding of the role that Louise Bourgeois’ childhood had in the creation of her art so deeply moving. We base this proposal on a psychodynamic analysis based on the theoretical concepts of “dead mother” and “negative Oedipus complex” as well as on the description made by Henry Lowenfeld of the artistic personality of his patient. © 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. Keywords: Louise Bourgeois; Henry Lowenfeld; Creativity; Psycho-analysis
Résumé À l’âge de quarante et un an, Louise Bourgeois a commencé une psychanalyse avec le Dr Henry Lowenfeld. Elle a poursuivi sa cure pendant trente-trois ans et ne l’a arrêtée qu’à la mort de son thérapeute. La psychanalyse a donc eu une place centrale dans sa vie de femme et d’artiste. Après un bref rappel biographique des 2 protagonistes, nous proposons dans cet essai une nouvelle compréhension du rôle que l’enfance de Louise Bourgeois a eu dans la création de son art si profondément émouvant. Nous basons cette proposition sur une analyse psychodynamique à partir des concepts théoriques de « mère morte » et de « complexe d’Œdipe négatif » ainsi que sur la description faite par Henry Lowenfeld de la personnalité artistique de sa patiente. © 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. Tous droits r´eserv´es. Mots clés : Louise Bourgeois ; Henry Lowenfeld ; Créativité ; Psychanalyse
In 1952, soon after her father died and suffering from a deep depression, Louise Bourgeois, aged forty, went into Psychoanalysis. She remained thirty three years in treatment until in 1985 her analyst, Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, passed away. Death is what separated this therapeutic couple. Psychoanalysis therefore had a huge place in her life and its effects played an indisputable role in the unfolding and maturing of her creative process. This essay is a psychoanalytic tribute to her artistic genius (Fig. 1). 1. The myth of the origins: a screen memory When after forty two years of work, Louise Bourgeois suddenly was given what was in 1982 the first large scale sculpture retrospective for a woman at the Museum of Modern Art of New
York, she not only stunned the world of contemporary art with her vast body of work but she also insisted on making public what was to become the quasi-mythical story of her childhood trauma. This is how it went. In 1922, when Louise was aged ten her father hired a young English woman named Sadie Richmond to become the English tutor of the Bourgeois children. Catastrophically for Louise, Sadie became the father’s mistress and even lived in the family home on and off for almost a decade. As Diana Princess of Wales famously said it was a couple of three and obviously there was one too many. Although Louise’s mother had fallen ill before Sadie arrived, her health started deteriorating in 1922 and after ten years of suffering she died in 1932. Note that the last ten years of the mother’s illness approximately
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005 0222-9617/© 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7 2
ARTICLE IN PRESS Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Fig. 1. Louise Bourgeois’ comment on art and mental health.
correspond to the ten years of Sadie’s tenure as teacher of the children and mistress of the father. Every time I hear that story I cannot avoid making the association between the mistresses’ name Sadie and sadism because of the cruelty of this situation and the very real possibility of a causal link between the father’s affair and the mother’ disease and death. At the beginning of the mother’s long illness, Louise accompanied her to various therapeutic spa towns in the South of France. During the last years of her mother’s life she became very involved and fulfilled the functions of a quasi-nurse while somehow managing to also attend drawing, piano and English classes. One easily imagines the traumatic nature of the situation: Louise caring for her mother at one end of the house while at the other end the father is in the company of Sadie. However psychoanalysts are well aware of the fact that such stories frequently are screen memories fooling both their author, the patient, and their audience, the therapist. And in this case, the public at large. So, we must not let ourselves be mentally paralyzed by the fairy tale nature of this story and we should remember that Louise Bourgeois started her psychoanalytic cure soon after the death of her father because of the deep depression she fell into as a result of his passing. We can therefore safely assume that in spite of the traumatic story in which the father is a “quasi ogre”, his daughter deeply loved him to the extent she needed professional help when he died, so profound was her grieving. 2. Louise Bourgeois’ psychoanalyst and his mysterious Viennese patient So, in 1952 because of a painful depression a new character enters Louise Bourgeois’ life: Dr Henry Lowenfeld, who was to become her analyst for the following thirty year. Who was he? Born in 1900, Henry Lowenfeld was a second generation
Freudian very close, when he was young, to two of Freud’s disciples: Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel whom the creator of Psychoanalysis considered to be uncontrollable bolsheviks. The young Lowenfeld was therefore passionate about the human psyche and socialism. He was also very interested by art and artists. In 1938, fleeing Nazi Austria, he emigrated to America where he became a member of the very orthodox New York Society of Psychoanalysis. But, shortly before leaving Vienna, on June 23, 1937, Lowenfeld made a presentation at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. This presentation which drew many researchers’ attention because of its title “Psychic trauma and productive experience in the artist” probably is the reason Louise Bourgeois later chose him to be her analyst [1]. What did Henry Lowenfeld have to say about trauma and creativity before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on June 23, 1937? It took a bit of research to unearth the text of his presentation. Finally, in the archives of the Bibliothèque Sigmund Freud in Paris, I found the complete text of Lowenfeld’s presentation. I have read quite a few publications having to do with Louise Bourgeois’ trajectory as it relates to Psychoanalysis and many authors have spotted Lowenfeld’s text and imagined that one way or another it drew Bourgeois’ attention because of its title. I have however not yet found a publication which deals at length with its actual content. And as you will see it was well worth spending time hunting for it. Let us begin with the description Lowenfeld made of the artist suffering from a creative block who came to consult him. (My translation from the French text.)1 . “A thirty year old woman who started therapy because of worsening anxiety episodes, various somatic problems and since already a few years inhibitions in her creative process. (. . .) She was a vivacious and intelligent woman, she had a pleasant appearance and a slightly unfriendly expression. Her behavior betrayed a combination of fearful timidity and aggressivity. (. . .) She drew and painted. (. . .) She was gifted, original and had a fertile imagination. (. . .) It is between the age of seventeen and twenty two that she achieved the greatest creativity in the artistic field.” “After a sexual relationship with a man older than her, she had a few lesbian affairs in which she played a passive role and from which she derived relative satisfactions. During the same period, she had a few flings with men which left her indifferent until the day she met the man who was to become her husband. In him she saw a powerful and athletic man. This aspect attracted her and it was, according to her, the determinant factor in her choice. However, after their wedding, he opted for a position of total devotion, playing a passive role while she took the active, masculine part to the extent that sometimes she was sadistic and cruel. She was capable of being sexually aroused, but never completely satisfied.”
1 I have taken the liberty of thematically reorganizing Lowenfeld’s paper for the purpose of this lecture.
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7
ARTICLE IN PRESS Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Lowenfeld then tells us about her family: “She described to me her father as a brutal, unpredictable landowner and her mother as a shy, anxious person who spent her time worrying and complaining. The eldest brother was the parents’ favorite. He was an intelligent and disciplined child, whereas she herself was not compliant and therefore judged as disobedient and unbearable by the entire family. She often fought with her father who beat her when he was upset.” And as if that was not bad enough Lowenfeld goes on to tell us that: “She had had a twin brother, a beautiful and robust child, who died when he was only a few months old.” Lowenfeld then describes two important traumatic events, which deeply frightened his patient. The first one occurred at the hands of her father: “She recalled that often, when she was a small child, her father, clumsily trying to demonstrate tenderness towards her, lied on her with his full weight. She couldn’t breathe and was afraid of being crushed, choked. Her cries of protest would trigger in the father fits of rage which would frequently degenerate into violent scenes (. . .) which would terrify her.” The second trauma occurred when she was six or seven years old: “Her father having made a speech at the Chamber, hostile demonstrators tried to break into the house of her parents; windows had to be hastily shut and stones were thrown. Her father was absent and the entire family was terrified.” Lowenfeld then lists his patient’s symptoms which are numerous and multi-faceted: “Since childhood, but more frequently during the last years, she had dreams from which she woke up terrified or engulfed by a feeling of horror. These dreams were essentially dreams of war images: revolutions, bombings, riots from which she was attempting to escape in spite of the fear which paralyzed her.” Also,“her life was marked by alternating periods during which she was looking for exciting experiences (. . .) and periods of escape and withdrawal (. . .) which in turn triggered the return of anguish accompanied by delirious paranoid ideas. (. . .) She sometimes felt abandoned by everybody, incapable to give or receive love. She would then lose all contact with the surrounding world.” This in turn would lead her to esoteric beliefs, which were reinforced by a botched appendectomy making her lose trust in the medical profession. “When she was approximately twenty one years old a famous fortune-teller predicted she would die crazy or commit suicide and warned her against excessive masturbation.” This pseudo-diagnostic contributed to the creative block the patient suffered from because masturbation played an important role in her creative process. Another of these wise professionals told her during a session that “the city where (she) lived would soon be destroyed by a superior divinity.” This led the patient to flee her house. For years, she was convinced that the only way to prevent the annihilation of her city was to constantly think about this catastrophic threat. She then fell into a neurotic regression including a return to the infantile belief
3
in magical thinking associated to doubts concerning her gender along with the certitude she would die upon giving birth. I stop here this list of symptoms which as we saw includes nightmares, panic attacks and delusions leading to a fear of abandonment and to the delirious belief in a frightening divinity triggering paranoid fears. In contemporary psychopathology and contrary to Lowenfeld’s opinion such a patient would surely be diagnosed as suffering from a borderline personality disorder and not just as a neurotic. In any case, she simply was a traumatized human being caught between the devil of a terrifying childhood and the deep blue sea of frightening unconscious beliefs. Lowenfeld then presents his general psychoanalytic understanding of the artistic personality. He begins by stressing the fact that “The coexistence of artistic gifts and the neurotic temperament has been observed since a long time.” He also notes that although Freud clearly stated that, even if the artistic talent itself escapes a psychoanalytic explanation, the fact remains that artists tend to demonstrate a certain type of articulation between their psychical structure and the intense nature of their instincts. Lowenfeld, relying on Kleinian theory, which at the time was cutting edge, suggests that the artist is probably constantly trying to repair the Object (the Mother) he believes he has attacked and damaged during early childhood. He also notes the capacity the artist has to easily access his unconscious which allows him to be in contact with his primitive impulses and to use them as sources of inspiration. Contemporary psychoanalysis would probably be critical of certain aspects of this approach. It would however be in full agreement with Lowenfeld’s next point that “(. . .) the striking element is the importance of trauma in the life of this patient.” It would also be in agreement with the idea that the faculty the artist has to be in touch with unconscious elements feeds creativity. Here we must pause and note the many similarities between the Viennese patient and Louise Bourgeois. Both women suffered from a creative block and of symptoms apparently due to a traumatic childhood. They both were afflicted by a depressed and fragile mother, an unstable, sexually provocative father and frightening, violent events threatening the very existence of the family. The terrible psychological effects of these two very similar childhoods led both women to attempt at healing themselves through art. One of them disappeared in Nazi Vienna, the other fled France and emigrated to America where she went on to become a towering figure of contemporary art. At this is the point, we are going to leave 1930s Vienna and fast forward to the present. Our objective now, equipped with Lowenfeld’s insights as well as with the most recent findings of Psychoanalysis, will be to try to pin down what led to the birth of a contemporary genius: Louise Bourgeois. 3. Beyond the screen memory: a little known but meaningful death As we have shown earlier Louise Bourgeois’ mythical story is a screen memory which does not resist analysis. We demonstrated so much when we pointed to the contradiction between the role of the father as a monster in the myth and the deep
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7 4
ARTICLE IN PRESS Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
depression Bourgeois fell into when he died. In other words she loved him and hated him, she was ambivalent. Ambivalence is a characteristic of the human condition, at every stage of life we love and hate our parents, our siblings, our children, our jobs etc. The coexistence of love and hate for every object is in fact the pulsating heart of the human psyche. The specificity of Louise Bourgeois’ personality was the depth of her ambivalence. For example, she could create a piece titled “The destruction of the father” which emerged from a fantasy where the children would suddenly rush on the father presiding at the dinner table and devour him. She could just as well unashamedly demonstrate, at least this is my interpretation, her tender love for her father in the iconic photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe which shows her tenderly and proudly holding the phallic latex sculpture entitled “Fillette”. This striking image demonstrates Louise Bourgeois’ reconciliation with the male sex and hence with her father. This in spite of him having often made her suffer by reminding her she was a girl and not the boy he had so wished for. Another proof of the saying that “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” The crucial fact on which we are going to focus now is therefore not the presence of ambivalence but its depth, its intensity. The question then becomes: what could have triggered in the little Louise this wide oscillation between contradictory affects, or as the novelist Philip Roth puts it, this “(. . .) multitudinous intensity of polarities, polarities piled shamelessly upon polarities to comprise not a company of players, but this single existence, this theater of one.”[2] Then, a little known fact of Louise Bourgeois’ childhood drew my attention. Throughout her analysis she kept notes and in 1959 she wrote “I wished and feared death (. . .) I always was afraid to die identification with a dead sister.” Further research by authors such as Juliet Mitchell has shown that a baby girl was born before Louise and had died in infancy [3]. We will now show that this sad event had a huge importance in the development of the little Louise. Before we do, I wish to remind you what Lowenfeld had noted concerning his Viennese patient “She had a twin brother, a beautiful and robust child, who died when he was only a few months old”. As we will now see, the death of a baby, during or after pregnancy, is a tragic event which has numerous and long lasting repercussions both for the mother and the surviving siblings. 4. The dead mother One of the most important Freudian psychoanalyst of the second part of the twentieth century is Andre Green (1927–2012). He made a huge contribution in the understanding of narcissism, negativity and the border-line condition. His most famous paper is entitled “The Dead Mother” [4]. In this paper Green, who always based his theoretical contributions on a fine observation of the clinical situation, describes the case of patients who behave in a depressed mode in therapy but manage to have an apparently satisfying life as soon as they leave the analytical setting. In other words the patient is depressed during the session
and not depressed before or after. Put differently, he is depressed only in the presence of the analyst. As we know, Freud created the analytical setting, the couch and the neutral analyst, in order to activate the repetition by the patient of unconscious aspects of a situation or a relationship. In the case described by Green, the patient repeats a depression of which he is not conscious and which occurred when the patient was a child in the presence of a depressing object or Mother. But what could depress a mother if she is in the presence of her baby? Andre Green’s answer: the mother is mourning the loss of another baby, a twin or simply another child. This is the situation he designates by the concept of “The Dead Mother”, a situation where a child is in the presence of an emotionally absent mother and this absence triggers in the child the depression which the analytical situation will reawaken. This hypothesis is brilliant because it explains why the patient is only depressed in the presence of the analyst. It is as if the patient goes into analysis to repeat the depression he experienced in the presence of his mourning mother. The minute the patient walks out he is, apparently, fine again. Apparently because, in fact, the patient is holding within himself a depression which has already occurred but which is secret. And it is secret, because the mother refused to accept the frightening idea that she is mourning in the presence of her new born child. Not to mention the effect of the unavoidable reproaches probably voiced by her husband and family “How can you be sad when you have such a beautiful baby!” The surviving child’s immediate reflex, according to Green, will be self-accusation, he will want to believe that the mother’s emotional absence is his fault. He will want or need to believe that it is his resentment or shortcomings that have caused the mother’s sadness. The child will psychologically swing between hatred of the emotionally absent mother and self-reproaching, in other words he will be deeply ambivalent. We began by asking ourselves what the origin of Louise Bourgeois’ deep ambivalence was, now we know that the death of a sibling can lead to it. André Green further describes the various consequences of the Dead Mother Complex and among those we find “(. . .) artistic creation which becomes the foundation for a fantasy of self-sufficiency”. This is understandable because the child’s relation to the mother is so ambivalent and therefore so painful that an obvious solution for him is to retreat to a position where no one is needed. The artist is in such a situation because he doesn’t need anything other than his creation process. I recall, once I asked Louise Bourgeois “When are you planning to go on vacation?”. She replied “Vacation! I don’t know what that is!” She didn’t need vacations since she was almost self-sufficient. I say almost because, in fact, she needed Jerry Gorovoy, her close friend and assistant for thirty years. This therefore, is André Green’s understanding of the consequences of the death of a new born on his sibling and a key such consequence is, he thinks, to potentially lead to the birth of an artist. At this point, I have tried to add an element to Andre Green’s hypothesis and I have given it a name: The Peter Pan Complex.
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model
ARTICLE IN PRESS
NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7
Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
5. Peter Pan or the dead brother The Peter Pan Complex is inspired by the story of the fictional little boy who never ages and lives in Neverland. It is characterized by a personality type which is defensively childish, narcissistic and systematically procrastinating [5]. My definition of the Peter Pan complex is quite different and is based on the tragic events which happened during his childhood to sir James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937) the creator of this very popular character [6]. When James was aged six, his elder brother David died in a skating accident two days before his 14th birthday. Earlier, tragedy had already struck the family: two of James’ siblings died before he was born. James was so saddened by his brother’s death and the devastating effect it had on his mother, for whom David was the favorite child, that he started wearing his dead brother’ s clothes to try to comfort his mourning mother. So, you might ask, how does this new concept of a Peter Pan Complex differ from the Dead Mother Complex described by Andre Green? I suggest that, for the surviving child, in addition to the secret depression, unconscious murderous jealousy has entered the psychic scene. As you certainly recall, the first siblings appearing in the Bible are Cain and Abel and their tragic interaction is paradigmatic: Cain murders Abel. Therefore at the heart of brotherhood lies jealousy and the desire to eliminate the other in the quest for the love of the parents symbolized in the Bible by the attempt to find the most pleasing sacrifice to God. This murderous jealousy repeats itself throughout the generations of the Patriarchs, Abraham and Loth, Isaac and Ismael, Jacob and Esau and on to Joseph and his murderous brothers. Freud described this drive at the heart of sibling dynamics and to illustrate it he tells the story of a little boy who, as he is looking at his newly born brother asks “Where did he come from?” The cryptical answer he is given by his mother is that a stork brought him, the boy immediately answers “Well, let the stork take him away then!” [7] When through a catastrophic and tragic event a sibling dies, be it by accident, by disease or even miscarriage, the surviving child has the frightening impression that his secret thoughts have been realized. To go back to Freud’s example, everything happens as if immediately after his exclamation the little boy sees a real stork flying in the room, capturing the new born child and disappearing in the distance. The death of a newborn is a catastrophic psychic event because it is also the traumatic realization of the unconscious wish of the surviving child. From then on the surviving child will have the impression that the dead brother, or sister will never cease to exist, permanently accusing him of being responsible of his death. And what is a dead child if not a child that will never age. A child who will remain forever young in a fictitious land. In other words a dead child is a Peter Pan in Neverland. It is very likely that James Matthew Barrie created Peter Pan through an artistic process consisting in the sublimation into a perfect little hero of his worst nightmare: the ghost of his dead brother David, permanently there to remind him of the murderous jealousy he felt towards his mother’s favorite child. My proposition is that, on top of the Dead Mother complex described by Green, the surviving child experiences a form of psychic
5
perforation of the frontier between conscious and unconscious. And this perforation, this mental wound if you prefer, is the result of the catastrophic realization of an unconscious wish. I believe that this wound, added to the deep ambivalence resulting from the Dead Mother Complex, is central in the construction of the artist’ s psyche. Let us now return to Louise Bourgeois who we now know suffered both from the consequences of the Dead Mother Complex and of those resulting from the Peter Pan syndrome I have just described. The mythical story she offered to the public did not mention the death of her elder sister. This should not surprise us, Andre Green warned us of the secretive nature of such terrible events. Instead, the mythical story revolved around the figure of the philandering father and his affair with Sadie the English teacher. Now, in the last part of this lecture, I will attempt to show that the father’s philandering, is in fact, from a psychoanalytic point of view, a repetition of the first trauma, the death of the sister. In order to do this I will now refer to what I propose to designate as the Hamlet Syndrome. 6. Hamlet or the failed artist When he first described the Oedipus Complex, Freud illustrated his theory by referring to The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare [7]. Freud’s idea was that the success of the play resides in the fascination the audience has for Hamlet, its central character. Freud analyses this fascination by proposing that it results from Hamlet’s passionate love for his mother the Queen and his murderous rage for his uncle who has taken the place of the dead King. Freud’ s theory is that all boys unconsciously experience these combined passions, love of the mother and murderous fantasies towards the father. It is the fact that the parents both act in limiting these two passions which results in the structuring of the child through his acceptance of the two fundamental human differences: difference of the generations and difference of the sexes. This is what constitutes the famous oedipal triangle. My proposition is that, for Hamlet, the fantasy has become reality: his father the King is dead, assassinated by Claudius, and his mother the Queen, not knowing that Claudius is the murderer, is planning to marry him. By the way note that in this instance also we find a case of murder between two brothers, Claudius has killed his brother the King. To return to my idea, from the point of view of Hamlet, these horrible events are a catastrophic realization of an unconscious wish: the father is dead and for the moment, the mother is available. However, unknowingly, the mother has opted for marrying the murderer of her husband the king. She has not chosen to marry her son, Hamlet. So, Hamlet unconsciously cries “Why not me!” The Prince of Denmark finds himself thrown into another psychic catastrophe, rejection and abandonment. The result is that after having unconsciously wished for the death of his father, he now has to plan for the killing of his uncle. This is due to obvious institutional reasons, Hamlet as Prince cannot allow the murderer of the King, his father, to reign. But from our Psychoanalytic perspective, his murderous rage against his uncle is fed by his jealousy and his mother is both the object of his œdipian love and of his hatred for not
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model
ARTICLE IN PRESS
NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7 6
Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
having chosen him. Here again we find profound ambivalence. And since Hamlet opts for a political destiny rather than an artistic career he becomes mentally fragile. He too, in contemporary psychopathology, would qualify for a borderline personality disorder diagnosis: he is melancholic, he procrastinates, he is fascinated by death, he experiences sudden bursts of violence, and is suicidal. This is worrying behavior with no visible solution such as sublimation through artistic creation and because of the acting out it entails it leads to Hamlet’s death. Therefore, I propose that the Hamlet Syndrome is the same as the Peter Pan syndrome: both are the consequence of the traumatic realization of an unconscious wish. We can now go back to Louise Bourgeois and conclude. 7. Louise Bourgeois: from the depressed mother to the philandering father, the birth of a genius First of all, we must recall that a feminine version of the Oedipus complex exists, it is called the Negative Oedipus Complex [8]. In this complex the little girl unconsciously wishes her mother dead in order to marry her father. From the point of view of the little Louise, when her father abandons his wife to have an affair with Sadie, it also appears as a catastrophic realization of her unconscious wish. The mother is abandoned, which means symbolically dead, so the father is apparently available. But, as we know, a second catastrophe unfolds, the father does not pick the little Louise, he seduces Sadie. Bear in mind that as this happens Louise is eleven years old, her situation at a conscious level is one of sadness and maybe hatred of the father, but at the unconscious level the resounding question she asks herself is “Why not me?” Just like Hamlet. My theoretical-clinical proposition [9] is that Louise Bourgeois suffered as a child from the psychic consequences of a catastrophic series of trauma. To begin with she was confronted with the effects of the “Dead Mother” syndrome because, when she was born, her mother was mourning the death of the preceding baby girl. Louise Bourgeois was also twice inflicted the traumatic realization of her unconscious wishes. Even though it occurred before she was born, the death of her elder sister triggered in Louise the Peter Pan syndrome resulting from the illusion that this tragic death was the consequence of her murderous jealousy. This is what we designated as the Peter Pan syndrome. As an adolescent, the affair her father had with Sadie and the symbolic abandonment of the Mother it entailed, led Louise to suffer from the unthinkable conviction that instead of choosing her, he preferred the young English teacher. The resulting feelings of abandonment and murderous jealousy are what we described as the Hamlet Syndrome. This cumulative trauma had, I believe, a decisive role in the constitution of her artistic capacity [10]. It does not, however, constitute a psychopathology. It creates a destiny. The destiny of a genius. 8. The payment of a personal debt Louise Bourgeois was very clear. She did not want to be the object of unsolicited curiosity. The mythical story she offered the
world was a screen story and she used it as the beginning and the end of any so-called confession. Her body of work was there to speak in her name. Also, it is a well-known and justified criticism of psychoanalytic biographies that any interpretation made in the absence of the patient is a form of abuse and very possibly telling more about the analyst than about the person he is attempting to understand. There is therefore a double interdiction: a person’s intimacy cannot be disregarded and psychoanalytic unsolicited interpretations are a grave error. So why, you may ask, did I allow myself to disrespect these two ethical laws? Because I owed it to Louise Bourgeois and I am now going to tell you why. In the spring of 2003 my wife Chantal and I were given the opportunity, thanks to Jerry Gorovoy, to meet Louise Bourgeois. We arrived in the early afternoon at her Chelsea house with a bouquet of red, white and blue anemones symbolizing the French flag. Jerry let us in the house and we entered the small living room where Louise Bourgeois was sitting at her working table, precisely at the border of the kitchen and the salon. We sat opposite her and were confronted by her piercing blue eyes, at once welcoming, curious and guarded. The question immediately came: “Why did you come to visit me?” After a brief silence, I answered that we had been at the inauguration of the Tate Modern in London which had opened with an amazing exhibition of specially commissioned works by Louise Bourgeois. Inside the Turbine Hall were a gigantic spider titled “Maman” and three metal towers each about 20 meters high. They were titled “I do, I redo and I undo.” These three towers were so tall and large that spectators could go inside, climb the staircase and reach the high platforms. One of the towers, however, had its staircase circling around its outside. I had waited for my turn and finally started to climb the stairs. About halfway, I suddenly felt vertigo and was not able to reach the platform, painfully I had to accept I was not going to make it to the top. As I was telling Louise this story, her eyes narrowed and she leaned to get closer to me. Suddenly she asked “Physically, how did it feel?”. I answered dutifully and talked about the reactions of my body to that vertigo, even dwelling into intimate details. Louise Bourgeois was a woman interested in the authentic even painful stories some of her visitors shared with her because, as far as she was concerned, she felt, rightly, that she had done her share of disclosing. Not with her mythical story but with her body of work in its intimacy and poignancy. Our meeting with her was expected to last an hour or so. By the time we left night had fallen. We had spent 6 hours with Louise Bourgeois and Jerry. We flew back to Paris. Knowing that I was training to become an analyst Louise started writing to me. She was asking theoretical questions. I remember two: “At what age does jealousy begin?” and “What is a good mother”. I would then write a few pages to try to answer as best as I could and fax them over to her. In other words we had a correspondence. Louise Bourgeois’ anniversary was on the day of Christmas and Chantal and I would each year think hard about what present to buy her. On Christmas Day, we would call her and wish her a happy birthday. Each year she asked “When are you coming?” I would answer something like “Oh, we don’t
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model
ARTICLE IN PRESS
NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7
Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
know, maybe later in the year.” I thought it was a polite question she was asking the people who were calling on her birthday. Then, in 2010, Louise Bourgeois died. One day, I asked Jerry what he made of Louise’s ritual Christmas question. Jerry said, “You know, she really meant it. She wanted you to come visit her again.” I then realized that I had not understood the authenticity of her request. Maybe she wanted me to visit because she knew I had something to say about her. To her. I failed to do that and regret it bitterly. Writing this text I understood that in doing so, my unconscious objective was to pay my debt to Louise Bourgeois. I do it with gratitude because she taught me a very important lesson: the compatibility and even the synergy between Psychoanalysis and Art which were to become the two pillars of my life. I owe her so much. I just hope that from the other side of silence, where time has stopped, she can somehow hear me saying to her: “Thank you Louise, I love you.” Disclosure of interest The author declares that he has no competing interest. References
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
7
Tran Van Khal: Traumatisme psychique et expérience créatrice chez l’artiste, in Psychanalyse à l’université, Vol. 2, No.8, Paris, 1977]. Roth P. Sabbath’s Theater. London: Jonathan Cape; 1995. Mitchell J. The sublime jealousy of Louise Bourgeois. In: Larratt-Smith P, editor. The return of the repressed. London: Violette; 2012. Green A. The dead mother. In: On private madness. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis; 1986. Kiley D. The Peter Pan syndrome: men who have never grown up. London: Avon Books; 1984. Barrie J.M, Peter and Wendy, London, 1911. Freud S. (1900–1) The interpretation of dreams. In: Strachey J, editor. The standard edition of the complete psychological works, IV–V. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis; 1964. Freud S. (1931) On feminine sexuality, GW XIV. In: Strachery J, editor. The standard edition of the complete psychological works, IV–V. London: The Hogarth press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis; 1964. Milman D. Activation and unfolding of the unconscious wish of eviction of the rival as observed among healthy siblings of children with cancer. Doctoral Thesis. Paris: University Paris VII, Doctoral School of Research in Psychoanalysis; 2006. Khan M. (1963) Ego distortion, cumulative trauma and the role of reconstruction in the analytic situation. The privacy of the self. London: Karnak Books; 1974.
D. Milman, PhD 6, Balfour street, 6521116 Tel Aviv, Israel E-mail address: [email protected]
[1] Lowenfeld H. Psychic trauma and productive experience in the artist. Vienna psychoanalytic society; 1937 [Translated in French by Michelle
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
ARTICLE IN PRESS Disponible en ligne sur
ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Éditorial/Essai
Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius Louise Bourgeois : d’une mère dépressive à un père coureur de jupons, la naissance d’un génie
Abstract At the age of forty-one, Louise Bourgeois began a psychoanalysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld. She continued her treatment for thirty-three years and stopped it only after the death of her therapist. Psychoanalysis has therefore been central to her life as a woman and an artist. After a brief biographical sketch of the two protagonists, we propose in this essay a new understanding of the role that Louise Bourgeois’ childhood had in the creation of her art so deeply moving. We base this proposal on a psychodynamic analysis based on the theoretical concepts of “dead mother” and “negative Oedipus complex” as well as on the description made by Henry Lowenfeld of the artistic personality of his patient. © 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. Keywords: Louise Bourgeois; Henry Lowenfeld; Creativity; Psycho-analysis
Résumé À l’âge de quarante et un an, Louise Bourgeois a commencé une psychanalyse avec le Dr Henry Lowenfeld. Elle a poursuivi sa cure pendant trente-trois ans et ne l’a arrêtée qu’à la mort de son thérapeute. La psychanalyse a donc eu une place centrale dans sa vie de femme et d’artiste. Après un bref rappel biographique des 2 protagonistes, nous proposons dans cet essai une nouvelle compréhension du rôle que l’enfance de Louise Bourgeois a eu dans la création de son art si profondément émouvant. Nous basons cette proposition sur une analyse psychodynamique à partir des concepts théoriques de « mère morte » et de « complexe d’Œdipe négatif » ainsi que sur la description faite par Henry Lowenfeld de la personnalité artistique de sa patiente. © 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. Tous droits r´eserv´es. Mots clés : Louise Bourgeois ; Henry Lowenfeld ; Créativité ; Psychanalyse
In 1952, soon after her father died and suffering from a deep depression, Louise Bourgeois, aged forty, went into Psychoanalysis. She remained thirty three years in treatment until in 1985 her analyst, Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, passed away. Death is what separated this therapeutic couple. Psychoanalysis therefore had a huge place in her life and its effects played an indisputable role in the unfolding and maturing of her creative process. This essay is a psychoanalytic tribute to her artistic genius (Fig. 1). 1. The myth of the origins: a screen memory When after forty two years of work, Louise Bourgeois suddenly was given what was in 1982 the first large scale sculpture retrospective for a woman at the Museum of Modern Art of New
York, she not only stunned the world of contemporary art with her vast body of work but she also insisted on making public what was to become the quasi-mythical story of her childhood trauma. This is how it went. In 1922, when Louise was aged ten her father hired a young English woman named Sadie Richmond to become the English tutor of the Bourgeois children. Catastrophically for Louise, Sadie became the father’s mistress and even lived in the family home on and off for almost a decade. As Diana Princess of Wales famously said it was a couple of three and obviously there was one too many. Although Louise’s mother had fallen ill before Sadie arrived, her health started deteriorating in 1922 and after ten years of suffering she died in 1932. Note that the last ten years of the mother’s illness approximately
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005 0222-9617/© 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7 2
ARTICLE IN PRESS Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Fig. 1. Louise Bourgeois’ comment on art and mental health.
correspond to the ten years of Sadie’s tenure as teacher of the children and mistress of the father. Every time I hear that story I cannot avoid making the association between the mistresses’ name Sadie and sadism because of the cruelty of this situation and the very real possibility of a causal link between the father’s affair and the mother’ disease and death. At the beginning of the mother’s long illness, Louise accompanied her to various therapeutic spa towns in the South of France. During the last years of her mother’s life she became very involved and fulfilled the functions of a quasi-nurse while somehow managing to also attend drawing, piano and English classes. One easily imagines the traumatic nature of the situation: Louise caring for her mother at one end of the house while at the other end the father is in the company of Sadie. However psychoanalysts are well aware of the fact that such stories frequently are screen memories fooling both their author, the patient, and their audience, the therapist. And in this case, the public at large. So, we must not let ourselves be mentally paralyzed by the fairy tale nature of this story and we should remember that Louise Bourgeois started her psychoanalytic cure soon after the death of her father because of the deep depression she fell into as a result of his passing. We can therefore safely assume that in spite of the traumatic story in which the father is a “quasi ogre”, his daughter deeply loved him to the extent she needed professional help when he died, so profound was her grieving. 2. Louise Bourgeois’ psychoanalyst and his mysterious Viennese patient So, in 1952 because of a painful depression a new character enters Louise Bourgeois’ life: Dr Henry Lowenfeld, who was to become her analyst for the following thirty year. Who was he? Born in 1900, Henry Lowenfeld was a second generation
Freudian very close, when he was young, to two of Freud’s disciples: Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel whom the creator of Psychoanalysis considered to be uncontrollable bolsheviks. The young Lowenfeld was therefore passionate about the human psyche and socialism. He was also very interested by art and artists. In 1938, fleeing Nazi Austria, he emigrated to America where he became a member of the very orthodox New York Society of Psychoanalysis. But, shortly before leaving Vienna, on June 23, 1937, Lowenfeld made a presentation at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. This presentation which drew many researchers’ attention because of its title “Psychic trauma and productive experience in the artist” probably is the reason Louise Bourgeois later chose him to be her analyst [1]. What did Henry Lowenfeld have to say about trauma and creativity before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on June 23, 1937? It took a bit of research to unearth the text of his presentation. Finally, in the archives of the Bibliothèque Sigmund Freud in Paris, I found the complete text of Lowenfeld’s presentation. I have read quite a few publications having to do with Louise Bourgeois’ trajectory as it relates to Psychoanalysis and many authors have spotted Lowenfeld’s text and imagined that one way or another it drew Bourgeois’ attention because of its title. I have however not yet found a publication which deals at length with its actual content. And as you will see it was well worth spending time hunting for it. Let us begin with the description Lowenfeld made of the artist suffering from a creative block who came to consult him. (My translation from the French text.)1 . “A thirty year old woman who started therapy because of worsening anxiety episodes, various somatic problems and since already a few years inhibitions in her creative process. (. . .) She was a vivacious and intelligent woman, she had a pleasant appearance and a slightly unfriendly expression. Her behavior betrayed a combination of fearful timidity and aggressivity. (. . .) She drew and painted. (. . .) She was gifted, original and had a fertile imagination. (. . .) It is between the age of seventeen and twenty two that she achieved the greatest creativity in the artistic field.” “After a sexual relationship with a man older than her, she had a few lesbian affairs in which she played a passive role and from which she derived relative satisfactions. During the same period, she had a few flings with men which left her indifferent until the day she met the man who was to become her husband. In him she saw a powerful and athletic man. This aspect attracted her and it was, according to her, the determinant factor in her choice. However, after their wedding, he opted for a position of total devotion, playing a passive role while she took the active, masculine part to the extent that sometimes she was sadistic and cruel. She was capable of being sexually aroused, but never completely satisfied.”
1 I have taken the liberty of thematically reorganizing Lowenfeld’s paper for the purpose of this lecture.
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7
ARTICLE IN PRESS Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Lowenfeld then tells us about her family: “She described to me her father as a brutal, unpredictable landowner and her mother as a shy, anxious person who spent her time worrying and complaining. The eldest brother was the parents’ favorite. He was an intelligent and disciplined child, whereas she herself was not compliant and therefore judged as disobedient and unbearable by the entire family. She often fought with her father who beat her when he was upset.” And as if that was not bad enough Lowenfeld goes on to tell us that: “She had had a twin brother, a beautiful and robust child, who died when he was only a few months old.” Lowenfeld then describes two important traumatic events, which deeply frightened his patient. The first one occurred at the hands of her father: “She recalled that often, when she was a small child, her father, clumsily trying to demonstrate tenderness towards her, lied on her with his full weight. She couldn’t breathe and was afraid of being crushed, choked. Her cries of protest would trigger in the father fits of rage which would frequently degenerate into violent scenes (. . .) which would terrify her.” The second trauma occurred when she was six or seven years old: “Her father having made a speech at the Chamber, hostile demonstrators tried to break into the house of her parents; windows had to be hastily shut and stones were thrown. Her father was absent and the entire family was terrified.” Lowenfeld then lists his patient’s symptoms which are numerous and multi-faceted: “Since childhood, but more frequently during the last years, she had dreams from which she woke up terrified or engulfed by a feeling of horror. These dreams were essentially dreams of war images: revolutions, bombings, riots from which she was attempting to escape in spite of the fear which paralyzed her.” Also,“her life was marked by alternating periods during which she was looking for exciting experiences (. . .) and periods of escape and withdrawal (. . .) which in turn triggered the return of anguish accompanied by delirious paranoid ideas. (. . .) She sometimes felt abandoned by everybody, incapable to give or receive love. She would then lose all contact with the surrounding world.” This in turn would lead her to esoteric beliefs, which were reinforced by a botched appendectomy making her lose trust in the medical profession. “When she was approximately twenty one years old a famous fortune-teller predicted she would die crazy or commit suicide and warned her against excessive masturbation.” This pseudo-diagnostic contributed to the creative block the patient suffered from because masturbation played an important role in her creative process. Another of these wise professionals told her during a session that “the city where (she) lived would soon be destroyed by a superior divinity.” This led the patient to flee her house. For years, she was convinced that the only way to prevent the annihilation of her city was to constantly think about this catastrophic threat. She then fell into a neurotic regression including a return to the infantile belief
3
in magical thinking associated to doubts concerning her gender along with the certitude she would die upon giving birth. I stop here this list of symptoms which as we saw includes nightmares, panic attacks and delusions leading to a fear of abandonment and to the delirious belief in a frightening divinity triggering paranoid fears. In contemporary psychopathology and contrary to Lowenfeld’s opinion such a patient would surely be diagnosed as suffering from a borderline personality disorder and not just as a neurotic. In any case, she simply was a traumatized human being caught between the devil of a terrifying childhood and the deep blue sea of frightening unconscious beliefs. Lowenfeld then presents his general psychoanalytic understanding of the artistic personality. He begins by stressing the fact that “The coexistence of artistic gifts and the neurotic temperament has been observed since a long time.” He also notes that although Freud clearly stated that, even if the artistic talent itself escapes a psychoanalytic explanation, the fact remains that artists tend to demonstrate a certain type of articulation between their psychical structure and the intense nature of their instincts. Lowenfeld, relying on Kleinian theory, which at the time was cutting edge, suggests that the artist is probably constantly trying to repair the Object (the Mother) he believes he has attacked and damaged during early childhood. He also notes the capacity the artist has to easily access his unconscious which allows him to be in contact with his primitive impulses and to use them as sources of inspiration. Contemporary psychoanalysis would probably be critical of certain aspects of this approach. It would however be in full agreement with Lowenfeld’s next point that “(. . .) the striking element is the importance of trauma in the life of this patient.” It would also be in agreement with the idea that the faculty the artist has to be in touch with unconscious elements feeds creativity. Here we must pause and note the many similarities between the Viennese patient and Louise Bourgeois. Both women suffered from a creative block and of symptoms apparently due to a traumatic childhood. They both were afflicted by a depressed and fragile mother, an unstable, sexually provocative father and frightening, violent events threatening the very existence of the family. The terrible psychological effects of these two very similar childhoods led both women to attempt at healing themselves through art. One of them disappeared in Nazi Vienna, the other fled France and emigrated to America where she went on to become a towering figure of contemporary art. At this is the point, we are going to leave 1930s Vienna and fast forward to the present. Our objective now, equipped with Lowenfeld’s insights as well as with the most recent findings of Psychoanalysis, will be to try to pin down what led to the birth of a contemporary genius: Louise Bourgeois. 3. Beyond the screen memory: a little known but meaningful death As we have shown earlier Louise Bourgeois’ mythical story is a screen memory which does not resist analysis. We demonstrated so much when we pointed to the contradiction between the role of the father as a monster in the myth and the deep
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7 4
ARTICLE IN PRESS Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
depression Bourgeois fell into when he died. In other words she loved him and hated him, she was ambivalent. Ambivalence is a characteristic of the human condition, at every stage of life we love and hate our parents, our siblings, our children, our jobs etc. The coexistence of love and hate for every object is in fact the pulsating heart of the human psyche. The specificity of Louise Bourgeois’ personality was the depth of her ambivalence. For example, she could create a piece titled “The destruction of the father” which emerged from a fantasy where the children would suddenly rush on the father presiding at the dinner table and devour him. She could just as well unashamedly demonstrate, at least this is my interpretation, her tender love for her father in the iconic photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe which shows her tenderly and proudly holding the phallic latex sculpture entitled “Fillette”. This striking image demonstrates Louise Bourgeois’ reconciliation with the male sex and hence with her father. This in spite of him having often made her suffer by reminding her she was a girl and not the boy he had so wished for. Another proof of the saying that “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” The crucial fact on which we are going to focus now is therefore not the presence of ambivalence but its depth, its intensity. The question then becomes: what could have triggered in the little Louise this wide oscillation between contradictory affects, or as the novelist Philip Roth puts it, this “(. . .) multitudinous intensity of polarities, polarities piled shamelessly upon polarities to comprise not a company of players, but this single existence, this theater of one.”[2] Then, a little known fact of Louise Bourgeois’ childhood drew my attention. Throughout her analysis she kept notes and in 1959 she wrote “I wished and feared death (. . .) I always was afraid to die identification with a dead sister.” Further research by authors such as Juliet Mitchell has shown that a baby girl was born before Louise and had died in infancy [3]. We will now show that this sad event had a huge importance in the development of the little Louise. Before we do, I wish to remind you what Lowenfeld had noted concerning his Viennese patient “She had a twin brother, a beautiful and robust child, who died when he was only a few months old”. As we will now see, the death of a baby, during or after pregnancy, is a tragic event which has numerous and long lasting repercussions both for the mother and the surviving siblings. 4. The dead mother One of the most important Freudian psychoanalyst of the second part of the twentieth century is Andre Green (1927–2012). He made a huge contribution in the understanding of narcissism, negativity and the border-line condition. His most famous paper is entitled “The Dead Mother” [4]. In this paper Green, who always based his theoretical contributions on a fine observation of the clinical situation, describes the case of patients who behave in a depressed mode in therapy but manage to have an apparently satisfying life as soon as they leave the analytical setting. In other words the patient is depressed during the session
and not depressed before or after. Put differently, he is depressed only in the presence of the analyst. As we know, Freud created the analytical setting, the couch and the neutral analyst, in order to activate the repetition by the patient of unconscious aspects of a situation or a relationship. In the case described by Green, the patient repeats a depression of which he is not conscious and which occurred when the patient was a child in the presence of a depressing object or Mother. But what could depress a mother if she is in the presence of her baby? Andre Green’s answer: the mother is mourning the loss of another baby, a twin or simply another child. This is the situation he designates by the concept of “The Dead Mother”, a situation where a child is in the presence of an emotionally absent mother and this absence triggers in the child the depression which the analytical situation will reawaken. This hypothesis is brilliant because it explains why the patient is only depressed in the presence of the analyst. It is as if the patient goes into analysis to repeat the depression he experienced in the presence of his mourning mother. The minute the patient walks out he is, apparently, fine again. Apparently because, in fact, the patient is holding within himself a depression which has already occurred but which is secret. And it is secret, because the mother refused to accept the frightening idea that she is mourning in the presence of her new born child. Not to mention the effect of the unavoidable reproaches probably voiced by her husband and family “How can you be sad when you have such a beautiful baby!” The surviving child’s immediate reflex, according to Green, will be self-accusation, he will want to believe that the mother’s emotional absence is his fault. He will want or need to believe that it is his resentment or shortcomings that have caused the mother’s sadness. The child will psychologically swing between hatred of the emotionally absent mother and self-reproaching, in other words he will be deeply ambivalent. We began by asking ourselves what the origin of Louise Bourgeois’ deep ambivalence was, now we know that the death of a sibling can lead to it. André Green further describes the various consequences of the Dead Mother Complex and among those we find “(. . .) artistic creation which becomes the foundation for a fantasy of self-sufficiency”. This is understandable because the child’s relation to the mother is so ambivalent and therefore so painful that an obvious solution for him is to retreat to a position where no one is needed. The artist is in such a situation because he doesn’t need anything other than his creation process. I recall, once I asked Louise Bourgeois “When are you planning to go on vacation?”. She replied “Vacation! I don’t know what that is!” She didn’t need vacations since she was almost self-sufficient. I say almost because, in fact, she needed Jerry Gorovoy, her close friend and assistant for thirty years. This therefore, is André Green’s understanding of the consequences of the death of a new born on his sibling and a key such consequence is, he thinks, to potentially lead to the birth of an artist. At this point, I have tried to add an element to Andre Green’s hypothesis and I have given it a name: The Peter Pan Complex.
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model
ARTICLE IN PRESS
NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7
Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
5. Peter Pan or the dead brother The Peter Pan Complex is inspired by the story of the fictional little boy who never ages and lives in Neverland. It is characterized by a personality type which is defensively childish, narcissistic and systematically procrastinating [5]. My definition of the Peter Pan complex is quite different and is based on the tragic events which happened during his childhood to sir James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937) the creator of this very popular character [6]. When James was aged six, his elder brother David died in a skating accident two days before his 14th birthday. Earlier, tragedy had already struck the family: two of James’ siblings died before he was born. James was so saddened by his brother’s death and the devastating effect it had on his mother, for whom David was the favorite child, that he started wearing his dead brother’ s clothes to try to comfort his mourning mother. So, you might ask, how does this new concept of a Peter Pan Complex differ from the Dead Mother Complex described by Andre Green? I suggest that, for the surviving child, in addition to the secret depression, unconscious murderous jealousy has entered the psychic scene. As you certainly recall, the first siblings appearing in the Bible are Cain and Abel and their tragic interaction is paradigmatic: Cain murders Abel. Therefore at the heart of brotherhood lies jealousy and the desire to eliminate the other in the quest for the love of the parents symbolized in the Bible by the attempt to find the most pleasing sacrifice to God. This murderous jealousy repeats itself throughout the generations of the Patriarchs, Abraham and Loth, Isaac and Ismael, Jacob and Esau and on to Joseph and his murderous brothers. Freud described this drive at the heart of sibling dynamics and to illustrate it he tells the story of a little boy who, as he is looking at his newly born brother asks “Where did he come from?” The cryptical answer he is given by his mother is that a stork brought him, the boy immediately answers “Well, let the stork take him away then!” [7] When through a catastrophic and tragic event a sibling dies, be it by accident, by disease or even miscarriage, the surviving child has the frightening impression that his secret thoughts have been realized. To go back to Freud’s example, everything happens as if immediately after his exclamation the little boy sees a real stork flying in the room, capturing the new born child and disappearing in the distance. The death of a newborn is a catastrophic psychic event because it is also the traumatic realization of the unconscious wish of the surviving child. From then on the surviving child will have the impression that the dead brother, or sister will never cease to exist, permanently accusing him of being responsible of his death. And what is a dead child if not a child that will never age. A child who will remain forever young in a fictitious land. In other words a dead child is a Peter Pan in Neverland. It is very likely that James Matthew Barrie created Peter Pan through an artistic process consisting in the sublimation into a perfect little hero of his worst nightmare: the ghost of his dead brother David, permanently there to remind him of the murderous jealousy he felt towards his mother’s favorite child. My proposition is that, on top of the Dead Mother complex described by Green, the surviving child experiences a form of psychic
5
perforation of the frontier between conscious and unconscious. And this perforation, this mental wound if you prefer, is the result of the catastrophic realization of an unconscious wish. I believe that this wound, added to the deep ambivalence resulting from the Dead Mother Complex, is central in the construction of the artist’ s psyche. Let us now return to Louise Bourgeois who we now know suffered both from the consequences of the Dead Mother Complex and of those resulting from the Peter Pan syndrome I have just described. The mythical story she offered to the public did not mention the death of her elder sister. This should not surprise us, Andre Green warned us of the secretive nature of such terrible events. Instead, the mythical story revolved around the figure of the philandering father and his affair with Sadie the English teacher. Now, in the last part of this lecture, I will attempt to show that the father’s philandering, is in fact, from a psychoanalytic point of view, a repetition of the first trauma, the death of the sister. In order to do this I will now refer to what I propose to designate as the Hamlet Syndrome. 6. Hamlet or the failed artist When he first described the Oedipus Complex, Freud illustrated his theory by referring to The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare [7]. Freud’s idea was that the success of the play resides in the fascination the audience has for Hamlet, its central character. Freud analyses this fascination by proposing that it results from Hamlet’s passionate love for his mother the Queen and his murderous rage for his uncle who has taken the place of the dead King. Freud’ s theory is that all boys unconsciously experience these combined passions, love of the mother and murderous fantasies towards the father. It is the fact that the parents both act in limiting these two passions which results in the structuring of the child through his acceptance of the two fundamental human differences: difference of the generations and difference of the sexes. This is what constitutes the famous oedipal triangle. My proposition is that, for Hamlet, the fantasy has become reality: his father the King is dead, assassinated by Claudius, and his mother the Queen, not knowing that Claudius is the murderer, is planning to marry him. By the way note that in this instance also we find a case of murder between two brothers, Claudius has killed his brother the King. To return to my idea, from the point of view of Hamlet, these horrible events are a catastrophic realization of an unconscious wish: the father is dead and for the moment, the mother is available. However, unknowingly, the mother has opted for marrying the murderer of her husband the king. She has not chosen to marry her son, Hamlet. So, Hamlet unconsciously cries “Why not me!” The Prince of Denmark finds himself thrown into another psychic catastrophe, rejection and abandonment. The result is that after having unconsciously wished for the death of his father, he now has to plan for the killing of his uncle. This is due to obvious institutional reasons, Hamlet as Prince cannot allow the murderer of the King, his father, to reign. But from our Psychoanalytic perspective, his murderous rage against his uncle is fed by his jealousy and his mother is both the object of his œdipian love and of his hatred for not
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model
ARTICLE IN PRESS
NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7 6
Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
having chosen him. Here again we find profound ambivalence. And since Hamlet opts for a political destiny rather than an artistic career he becomes mentally fragile. He too, in contemporary psychopathology, would qualify for a borderline personality disorder diagnosis: he is melancholic, he procrastinates, he is fascinated by death, he experiences sudden bursts of violence, and is suicidal. This is worrying behavior with no visible solution such as sublimation through artistic creation and because of the acting out it entails it leads to Hamlet’s death. Therefore, I propose that the Hamlet Syndrome is the same as the Peter Pan syndrome: both are the consequence of the traumatic realization of an unconscious wish. We can now go back to Louise Bourgeois and conclude. 7. Louise Bourgeois: from the depressed mother to the philandering father, the birth of a genius First of all, we must recall that a feminine version of the Oedipus complex exists, it is called the Negative Oedipus Complex [8]. In this complex the little girl unconsciously wishes her mother dead in order to marry her father. From the point of view of the little Louise, when her father abandons his wife to have an affair with Sadie, it also appears as a catastrophic realization of her unconscious wish. The mother is abandoned, which means symbolically dead, so the father is apparently available. But, as we know, a second catastrophe unfolds, the father does not pick the little Louise, he seduces Sadie. Bear in mind that as this happens Louise is eleven years old, her situation at a conscious level is one of sadness and maybe hatred of the father, but at the unconscious level the resounding question she asks herself is “Why not me?” Just like Hamlet. My theoretical-clinical proposition [9] is that Louise Bourgeois suffered as a child from the psychic consequences of a catastrophic series of trauma. To begin with she was confronted with the effects of the “Dead Mother” syndrome because, when she was born, her mother was mourning the death of the preceding baby girl. Louise Bourgeois was also twice inflicted the traumatic realization of her unconscious wishes. Even though it occurred before she was born, the death of her elder sister triggered in Louise the Peter Pan syndrome resulting from the illusion that this tragic death was the consequence of her murderous jealousy. This is what we designated as the Peter Pan syndrome. As an adolescent, the affair her father had with Sadie and the symbolic abandonment of the Mother it entailed, led Louise to suffer from the unthinkable conviction that instead of choosing her, he preferred the young English teacher. The resulting feelings of abandonment and murderous jealousy are what we described as the Hamlet Syndrome. This cumulative trauma had, I believe, a decisive role in the constitution of her artistic capacity [10]. It does not, however, constitute a psychopathology. It creates a destiny. The destiny of a genius. 8. The payment of a personal debt Louise Bourgeois was very clear. She did not want to be the object of unsolicited curiosity. The mythical story she offered the
world was a screen story and she used it as the beginning and the end of any so-called confession. Her body of work was there to speak in her name. Also, it is a well-known and justified criticism of psychoanalytic biographies that any interpretation made in the absence of the patient is a form of abuse and very possibly telling more about the analyst than about the person he is attempting to understand. There is therefore a double interdiction: a person’s intimacy cannot be disregarded and psychoanalytic unsolicited interpretations are a grave error. So why, you may ask, did I allow myself to disrespect these two ethical laws? Because I owed it to Louise Bourgeois and I am now going to tell you why. In the spring of 2003 my wife Chantal and I were given the opportunity, thanks to Jerry Gorovoy, to meet Louise Bourgeois. We arrived in the early afternoon at her Chelsea house with a bouquet of red, white and blue anemones symbolizing the French flag. Jerry let us in the house and we entered the small living room where Louise Bourgeois was sitting at her working table, precisely at the border of the kitchen and the salon. We sat opposite her and were confronted by her piercing blue eyes, at once welcoming, curious and guarded. The question immediately came: “Why did you come to visit me?” After a brief silence, I answered that we had been at the inauguration of the Tate Modern in London which had opened with an amazing exhibition of specially commissioned works by Louise Bourgeois. Inside the Turbine Hall were a gigantic spider titled “Maman” and three metal towers each about 20 meters high. They were titled “I do, I redo and I undo.” These three towers were so tall and large that spectators could go inside, climb the staircase and reach the high platforms. One of the towers, however, had its staircase circling around its outside. I had waited for my turn and finally started to climb the stairs. About halfway, I suddenly felt vertigo and was not able to reach the platform, painfully I had to accept I was not going to make it to the top. As I was telling Louise this story, her eyes narrowed and she leaned to get closer to me. Suddenly she asked “Physically, how did it feel?”. I answered dutifully and talked about the reactions of my body to that vertigo, even dwelling into intimate details. Louise Bourgeois was a woman interested in the authentic even painful stories some of her visitors shared with her because, as far as she was concerned, she felt, rightly, that she had done her share of disclosing. Not with her mythical story but with her body of work in its intimacy and poignancy. Our meeting with her was expected to last an hour or so. By the time we left night had fallen. We had spent 6 hours with Louise Bourgeois and Jerry. We flew back to Paris. Knowing that I was training to become an analyst Louise started writing to me. She was asking theoretical questions. I remember two: “At what age does jealousy begin?” and “What is a good mother”. I would then write a few pages to try to answer as best as I could and fax them over to her. In other words we had a correspondence. Louise Bourgeois’ anniversary was on the day of Christmas and Chantal and I would each year think hard about what present to buy her. On Christmas Day, we would call her and wish her a happy birthday. Each year she asked “When are you coming?” I would answer something like “Oh, we don’t
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005
+Model
ARTICLE IN PRESS
NEUADO-1227; No. of Pages 7
Éditorial/Essai / Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
know, maybe later in the year.” I thought it was a polite question she was asking the people who were calling on her birthday. Then, in 2010, Louise Bourgeois died. One day, I asked Jerry what he made of Louise’s ritual Christmas question. Jerry said, “You know, she really meant it. She wanted you to come visit her again.” I then realized that I had not understood the authenticity of her request. Maybe she wanted me to visit because she knew I had something to say about her. To her. I failed to do that and regret it bitterly. Writing this text I understood that in doing so, my unconscious objective was to pay my debt to Louise Bourgeois. I do it with gratitude because she taught me a very important lesson: the compatibility and even the synergy between Psychoanalysis and Art which were to become the two pillars of my life. I owe her so much. I just hope that from the other side of silence, where time has stopped, she can somehow hear me saying to her: “Thank you Louise, I love you.” Disclosure of interest The author declares that he has no competing interest. References
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
7
Tran Van Khal: Traumatisme psychique et expérience créatrice chez l’artiste, in Psychanalyse à l’université, Vol. 2, No.8, Paris, 1977]. Roth P. Sabbath’s Theater. London: Jonathan Cape; 1995. Mitchell J. The sublime jealousy of Louise Bourgeois. In: Larratt-Smith P, editor. The return of the repressed. London: Violette; 2012. Green A. The dead mother. In: On private madness. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis; 1986. Kiley D. The Peter Pan syndrome: men who have never grown up. London: Avon Books; 1984. Barrie J.M, Peter and Wendy, London, 1911. Freud S. (1900–1) The interpretation of dreams. In: Strachey J, editor. The standard edition of the complete psychological works, IV–V. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis; 1964. Freud S. (1931) On feminine sexuality, GW XIV. In: Strachery J, editor. The standard edition of the complete psychological works, IV–V. London: The Hogarth press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis; 1964. Milman D. Activation and unfolding of the unconscious wish of eviction of the rival as observed among healthy siblings of children with cancer. Doctoral Thesis. Paris: University Paris VII, Doctoral School of Research in Psychoanalysis; 2006. Khan M. (1963) Ego distortion, cumulative trauma and the role of reconstruction in the analytic situation. The privacy of the self. London: Karnak Books; 1974.
D. Milman, PhD 6, Balfour street, 6521116 Tel Aviv, Israel E-mail address: [email protected]
[1] Lowenfeld H. Psychic trauma and productive experience in the artist. Vienna psychoanalytic society; 1937 [Translated in French by Michelle
Please cite this article in press as: Milman, PhD D. Louise Bourgeois: From depressed mother to philandering father, the birth of a genius. Neuropsychiatr Enfance Adolesc (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurenf.2018.02.005