James L. Weinberg Distinguished Lecture
Louise Bourgeois famously called art her “guarantee of sanity,” and she managed her aggression throughout her life by giving it physical form as art objects. Yet psychoanalysis also played a critical role in sustaining her. Without the support of Henry Lowenfeld, the brilliant analyst she often saw several days each week, she would perhaps have lost her ability to access art as a lifeline. Donald Kuspit argues that Bourgeois was, in psychoanalytic terms, a psychotic—she had "a personality pattern typified by aggressiveness and interpersonal hostility," to quote the psychologist Hans Eysenck—and that her art-making was a compulsion that allowed her to carry on, if not to heal. For Louise Bourgeois, making art was literally a matter of life and death.
