Oedipus now an analysis of a patriarchal complex in Louise

Bourgeoisrsquos mythic sculpture

Glen Snow

Oedipus is a soft-sculpture tableau created by Louise Bourgeois in 2003when she was 92 years of age (Fig 1) Her use of a mythological narrative isnoteworthy for although Bourgeois makes much work that appears toinvoke mysteries of a mythic texture she has rarely drawn on actualmythological legend (Morris 2005) In doing so with Oedipus she seems topresent an important retelling of the myth itself in order to engage with itsperennial themes on the riddle of human will

It appears to stage certain roles set outside of any specific mise-en-scene within the tragedy and in doing so places emphasis in differentparts finding lsquosingularitiesrsquo as Deleuze would say that breakthrough arepeated performance and break-up the given lsquoimage of thoughtrsquoproduced by either Sophocles or Freud Bourgeois locates from withinthe ordered representations of Oedipus the King differences or lsquosingularaffectsrsquo from which it is composed that produce a feel for fragility andvulnerability in its images of masculinity (Colebrook 2002) It is as if afterthousands of years of patriarchal theatre the superlative mask has slippedfrom the actor of man

The tableau spectacles the fragility of man in many ways as with theabandoned infant of Oedipus who reaches out into the void for the lovethat is absent The babyrsquos paleness and pose finds some reference to thewhite Christ in the manger of his nativity scene only here his shadowalready casts the cross-shape of his future doom and suffering The kingLaius is shown dead stabbed in the back and no longer able to wield hiswill over others The mask of persona with its self-inflicted blindness seemsa symbol of an unseeing masculine mind whose habitual dividing andreducing reason compartmentalises the self until all it has left is the cogitoof its head removed from its body of experience Yet also the head recallsa decapitated crown and the rejection of patriarchal authority The strangefigure of a youthful Oedipus seems to scry worryingly into a red and

Email glensnowhotmailcom

Psychodynamic PracticeVol 16 No 2 May 2010 213ndash225

ISSN 1475-3634 printISSN 1475-3626 online

2010 Taylor amp Francis

DOI 10108014753631003688217

httpwwwinformaworldcom

bloody orb There is the frail figure of an older Oedipus supported by caneand requiring the strength and sight of the younger woman Antigone togo on ready to enter the other tragedies where eventually Antigone willpit herself against the patriarchal state and its laws Even in his sexualembraces while the male is on top indicated by colour tradition he issprawled passively over the woman who is actively engaged and in controlof her pleasure The new patriarchrsquos dead weight cannot stop the writhingof woman1 beneath him Then to the right a towering dyad of Motherand child and to the far left the strange sight of a uterus enfolded like alotus about the baby it bears forth testify as to manrsquos debt to the primalpower of woman

Moreover although Bourgeoisrsquos tableau of the tragedy possesses aSophoclean scope ndash and in this regard grounds it within the classical forum ndashshe asks us to do much more than look to the Greek She also introduces thebust of the Roman god Janus and her Sphinx is decidedly Egyptian inappearance She apparently gathers into our spacious present three of theworldrsquos first great civilizations and defining moments of Westernconsciousness the Egyptian Greek and Roman In post-Hegelian fashionthen (where she undermines the linear notion of a progressively improvedknowledge through the ages) she seems to indicate that we are able andshould be willing to compare and judge thought from different epochs inorder to find new meaning and critique

With regard to her use of woven fabrics and sewn off-cuts her personalhistory is also profoundly invoked the family business had been in therestoration of antique textiles thus time and stitch are conceptuallyinterwoven Both these features are delivered within the title given to theexhibition of which it was a part called Stitches in Time The work should

Figure 1 Louise Bourgeois Oedipus 2003 Fabric stainless steel wood glass tenelements 7067263600 1778618286914 cm Courtesy Cheim amp Read Hauser ampWirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

214 G Snow

probably be considered synonymous with the notion of repair and not justmaking but also a remaking lsquoThis business of lsquorentrayagersquo remaking orreweaving was a skill at the centre of her mothers industryrsquo (Morris 2005p 24) As Bradley (2005 p 2 of 5) points out Bourgeois had found workfrom the age of 12 lsquoin the family workshop drawing in the missing partsof the tapestries to be restoredrsquo Bourgeois herself has said lsquothat idea ofrestoration and reparation is deep within mersquo (cited in Bradley 2005 p 3 of5) Francis Morris who helped curate Stitches in Time summarisedBourgeoisrsquos work within it as that which lsquounravel[s] and rework[s] manythreads from her pastrsquo (Morris 2005 p 32)

Focussing on her Oedipus moreover her utilizing a language ofstitching unpicking piecing together and rethreading under this namewith its significant cultural references to concepts of agency or ego suggestsshe is unravelling and reweaving more than her own story here

Within the temporal features of the work however there is a sense ofBourgeois reflecting and ranging over her own life This would seem naturalfor one having reached such a grand age yet this autobiographical rangingtraverses a period of time where our sense of self has altered withinstructuralist and post-structuralist discourse She after all has developed anartistic career that takes place within the shifting concerns of modernismthen postmodernism over seven decades (Bradley 2005) Put another waypertinent to this investigation her Oedipus moves our attention from apaternalist ideology where male consciousness is generalised as the standardmodel of human subjectivity to one fragmented opened out and decentredby the differences of gender in culture and consciousness

Our eyes are encouraged to move over the scene in a particular way Forinstance there is a definite front and back though the glass vitrine allows aview from all sides And although a central lsquohubrsquo at the sphinx allows theeye to wander in and out from this point there is also a left to right readingwith its Aristotlean assurance of a beginning middle and end Thishowever is not allowed to settle as the privileged view but only onepossibility in a series of connections Size will also weight the gaze in certaindirections and as this article has been condensed from a larger discussion itsscope will take but two views into the layout starting with the largestobjects and later shifting focus to the sphinx being the smallest in scalealthough it is suggestive of something much greater

The dyad a mask and some viscera beginning with the largest

Size and placement are significant and by far the largest figure is that of anarchetypal mother and child This is perhaps Jocasta and her infantOedipus but is also the most ancient of icons as Mother Goddess andthe Son-of-Mother familiar to the matriarchal religions prior to OlympianGreece and remnant still in Catholicism as Madonna and child

Psychodynamic Practice 215

(Gadon 1989) If we start here this dominating dyad ndash a fluid andsymbiotic or to use a Deleuzian term de-territorializing2 exchange ofdesire ndash is counter weighted only by the monumental mask of a blindedOedipus (Fig 2) the second largest object of the tableau

The mask and the dyad seem to polarize each other creating a tensionas if magnetically repulsed and sweep everything along in their chargedelliptical orbit which appears to dance and revel about the body of the deadpatriarch If this orbit is imagined collecting all the other sculpture withinits magnetic field two appear to be flung out to the corners of the glass boxone being a part-object or lsquodesiring-machinersquo3 like some kind of womb-apparatus complete with birthing baby the other a now old and frail son ofthe dead father with only the younger woman to steady him This woman isOedipusrsquo daughter Antigone (Fig 3) and a transference of roles has takenplace here where the daughter has again become mother to man ndash mirroringthe large dyad in the other corner from where we started

The lsquodesiring-machinersquo at the back of the elderly couple and behind themask a binary connection of flesh birthing new life of viscus matter givingrise to new consciousness is literally an organ without a body It seems toestablish the womb as the undeniable though usually hidden physicalobject of womanrsquos power as having an equally usually denied signifyingrole in the psyche In contrast to its visceral presence the disembodied headof Oedipus seems to be a singular symbolic unit of reason a Democritianatom of abstracted consciousness which in the chaos attempts to weight thesensuous consciousness of mutable relations between mother and child inthe opposed corner with its fixed repressive logic

Figure 2 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask

216 G Snow

This head then is the culturally imposed mask of lsquoOedipus as areterritorialization a retimbering of modern man on the lsquolsquorockrsquorsquo ofcastrationrsquo (Deleuze amp Guattari 2004 p 339) The phallic head of reasonand order the mask or persona of ideological masculine authority isblinded rendered impotent in a way that remembers Freudrsquos notion of alsquocastration anxietyrsquo where the depicted loss of an eye is equivalent to thefeared loss of the penis Indeed it is the image on which he founded thisnotion

However the blossoming and visceral part-object (Fig 4) situatedbehind this mask of the patriarch seems to moderate its weighting in thetableau ndash being of an equivalent size ndash with an opposing thesis As a viscusorgan brought into the open and put on display what is usually out of sightis exalted The deeply felt inward experience the insight affects and powerof a procreative womb seems to register Melanie Kleinrsquos agreement with theideas of psychoanalyst Karen Horney where a major background to genderidentity and development and to patriarchal authority within society is infact a lsquowomb-envyrsquo here enshrined by Bourgeois According to such ananalysis and repeatedly represented in this tableau lsquothe mother rather thanthe fatherrsquos body is the major preoccupation of the childrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 3of 14) In fact adjacent to this body-part as if to emphasise the point ayouthful Oedipus embraces an empty red-globe mimicking the cradlingpose of the looming mother and child next to him as if imagining the

Figure 3 Oedipus 2003 detail of Oedipus and Antigone

Psychodynamic Practice 217

experience of a placenta the blood orb of creation he cannot possess In RosMinskyrsquos article exploring gender and psychoanalysis she illustrates that

When the little boy discovers that he is not the same as his apparentlypowerful creative mother he feels he is lacking rather than the girl Theconversation might run like this

Boy lsquoMummy when I grow up Irsquom going to have a baby like yoursquo

Mother lsquobut you wonrsquot be able to because boys canrsquot have babiesrsquo

the small boy has to repress his envy and loss of the powerful physical andemotional meanings of the mother in favour of the cultural power associatedwith the father and the phallus (Minsky 2000 p 4 of 14)

This means lsquothat boys mask and over compensate for their womb-envyby both an over estimation of the penis and displacement on to theintellectual planersquo (Minsky 2000 p 3 of 14) which are culturally conflatedand made superior to anything female As a case in point Bourgeois may bepresenting the head of Oedipus both figuratively castrated and literally castfrom the body as a part-object of the malersquos displaced emphasis then theboyrsquos locus of power within abstracted reason or the cogito This cogito ofthe Oedipal mask may be the only concession Bourgeois gives to Lacanreminiscent as it is of his phallic signifier where self and other aredifferentiated through the acquisition of language which begins during this

Figure 4 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask and womb-like part-object

218 G Snow

phase to handle more sophisticated lsquoshiftersrsquo like the pronoun lsquoIrsquo (Boothby2001)

The emphasis on this head of King Oedipus as underscored by itssizable scale within the tableau is ambiguous though If construed as otherthan symbolic it comes to represent some awful decapitation (Fig 2) Assuch a trophy it might be compared to the grisly severed head of John theBaptist served upon its platter or to a head like the French Kingrsquos LouisXVI signifying a call to revolution Like Salome Bourgeois seems to serveup the head of a chosen prophet rejecting his faith and like the would-beFrench reformists of absolutist rule she demands more representationFreudrsquos Oedipus as lord of the unconscious is removed from power

The violently inflicted blindness of this mask also traces back to thematiclines Bourgeois has worked with previously In a recent publication(Bourgeois 2006) where 300 odd artists present what they think of as theirfirst real artwork Bourgeois presents a piece called The Blind Leading theBlind (Fig 6) While she easily relates it to what she sees as an lsquoabusiversquotransgression of trust within her own childhood (Bourgeois 1998) inrequiring her own blindness to for instance her fatherrsquos philandering and hermotherrsquos anguish (Bourgeois 2006) she also projected this state onto theSurrealists and their theorising When during the War years the Surrealiststurned up in America where she had been established for around two yearsshe was not pleased believing she had left the paternalist ndash peevishly brandingthem lsquofather figuresrsquo ndash and chauvinist chimes of Surrealism behind

Breton and Duchamp made me violent They were too close to me and Iobjected to them violently ndash their pontification Since I was a runaway fatherfigures on these shores rubbed me the wrong way The Blind leading the Blind(1947ndash9) refers to the old men who drive you over the precipice (Bourgeois1998 p 230)

The sphinx beginning in the centre

Within the tableau Bourgeois revisits the woman-as-sphinx both in hercontext within the Sophoclean tragedy and a one-time Surrealist object ofdesire As the latter she has been removed from the femme-fatal fantasies sooften surrounding her and seems to have been returned to a deeperhistorical context where a complex hybridity is restored She achieves thisparticular reference to history by giving her creature that ancient aspect ofthe massive monolithic sculpture at Giza (Fig 5)

Interestingly Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is one of the smallest figures in thetableau yet it commands not only centre-stage but also pushes into theforeground a dominating position Centrally organising the action andplots of the other figures about its visual hub it is neither a beginning norend but is central to all beginnings and endings within our lines of sightThis is clearly an important figure in Bourgeoisrsquos restaging of the drama

Psychodynamic Practice 219

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

bloody orb There is the frail figure of an older Oedipus supported by caneand requiring the strength and sight of the younger woman Antigone togo on ready to enter the other tragedies where eventually Antigone willpit herself against the patriarchal state and its laws Even in his sexualembraces while the male is on top indicated by colour tradition he issprawled passively over the woman who is actively engaged and in controlof her pleasure The new patriarchrsquos dead weight cannot stop the writhingof woman1 beneath him Then to the right a towering dyad of Motherand child and to the far left the strange sight of a uterus enfolded like alotus about the baby it bears forth testify as to manrsquos debt to the primalpower of woman

Moreover although Bourgeoisrsquos tableau of the tragedy possesses aSophoclean scope ndash and in this regard grounds it within the classical forum ndashshe asks us to do much more than look to the Greek She also introduces thebust of the Roman god Janus and her Sphinx is decidedly Egyptian inappearance She apparently gathers into our spacious present three of theworldrsquos first great civilizations and defining moments of Westernconsciousness the Egyptian Greek and Roman In post-Hegelian fashionthen (where she undermines the linear notion of a progressively improvedknowledge through the ages) she seems to indicate that we are able andshould be willing to compare and judge thought from different epochs inorder to find new meaning and critique

With regard to her use of woven fabrics and sewn off-cuts her personalhistory is also profoundly invoked the family business had been in therestoration of antique textiles thus time and stitch are conceptuallyinterwoven Both these features are delivered within the title given to theexhibition of which it was a part called Stitches in Time The work should

Figure 1 Louise Bourgeois Oedipus 2003 Fabric stainless steel wood glass tenelements 7067263600 1778618286914 cm Courtesy Cheim amp Read Hauser ampWirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

214 G Snow

probably be considered synonymous with the notion of repair and not justmaking but also a remaking lsquoThis business of lsquorentrayagersquo remaking orreweaving was a skill at the centre of her mothers industryrsquo (Morris 2005p 24) As Bradley (2005 p 2 of 5) points out Bourgeois had found workfrom the age of 12 lsquoin the family workshop drawing in the missing partsof the tapestries to be restoredrsquo Bourgeois herself has said lsquothat idea ofrestoration and reparation is deep within mersquo (cited in Bradley 2005 p 3 of5) Francis Morris who helped curate Stitches in Time summarisedBourgeoisrsquos work within it as that which lsquounravel[s] and rework[s] manythreads from her pastrsquo (Morris 2005 p 32)

Focussing on her Oedipus moreover her utilizing a language ofstitching unpicking piecing together and rethreading under this namewith its significant cultural references to concepts of agency or ego suggestsshe is unravelling and reweaving more than her own story here

Within the temporal features of the work however there is a sense ofBourgeois reflecting and ranging over her own life This would seem naturalfor one having reached such a grand age yet this autobiographical rangingtraverses a period of time where our sense of self has altered withinstructuralist and post-structuralist discourse She after all has developed anartistic career that takes place within the shifting concerns of modernismthen postmodernism over seven decades (Bradley 2005) Put another waypertinent to this investigation her Oedipus moves our attention from apaternalist ideology where male consciousness is generalised as the standardmodel of human subjectivity to one fragmented opened out and decentredby the differences of gender in culture and consciousness

Our eyes are encouraged to move over the scene in a particular way Forinstance there is a definite front and back though the glass vitrine allows aview from all sides And although a central lsquohubrsquo at the sphinx allows theeye to wander in and out from this point there is also a left to right readingwith its Aristotlean assurance of a beginning middle and end Thishowever is not allowed to settle as the privileged view but only onepossibility in a series of connections Size will also weight the gaze in certaindirections and as this article has been condensed from a larger discussion itsscope will take but two views into the layout starting with the largestobjects and later shifting focus to the sphinx being the smallest in scalealthough it is suggestive of something much greater

The dyad a mask and some viscera beginning with the largest

Size and placement are significant and by far the largest figure is that of anarchetypal mother and child This is perhaps Jocasta and her infantOedipus but is also the most ancient of icons as Mother Goddess andthe Son-of-Mother familiar to the matriarchal religions prior to OlympianGreece and remnant still in Catholicism as Madonna and child

Psychodynamic Practice 215

(Gadon 1989) If we start here this dominating dyad ndash a fluid andsymbiotic or to use a Deleuzian term de-territorializing2 exchange ofdesire ndash is counter weighted only by the monumental mask of a blindedOedipus (Fig 2) the second largest object of the tableau

The mask and the dyad seem to polarize each other creating a tensionas if magnetically repulsed and sweep everything along in their chargedelliptical orbit which appears to dance and revel about the body of the deadpatriarch If this orbit is imagined collecting all the other sculpture withinits magnetic field two appear to be flung out to the corners of the glass boxone being a part-object or lsquodesiring-machinersquo3 like some kind of womb-apparatus complete with birthing baby the other a now old and frail son ofthe dead father with only the younger woman to steady him This woman isOedipusrsquo daughter Antigone (Fig 3) and a transference of roles has takenplace here where the daughter has again become mother to man ndash mirroringthe large dyad in the other corner from where we started

The lsquodesiring-machinersquo at the back of the elderly couple and behind themask a binary connection of flesh birthing new life of viscus matter givingrise to new consciousness is literally an organ without a body It seems toestablish the womb as the undeniable though usually hidden physicalobject of womanrsquos power as having an equally usually denied signifyingrole in the psyche In contrast to its visceral presence the disembodied headof Oedipus seems to be a singular symbolic unit of reason a Democritianatom of abstracted consciousness which in the chaos attempts to weight thesensuous consciousness of mutable relations between mother and child inthe opposed corner with its fixed repressive logic

Figure 2 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask

216 G Snow

This head then is the culturally imposed mask of lsquoOedipus as areterritorialization a retimbering of modern man on the lsquolsquorockrsquorsquo ofcastrationrsquo (Deleuze amp Guattari 2004 p 339) The phallic head of reasonand order the mask or persona of ideological masculine authority isblinded rendered impotent in a way that remembers Freudrsquos notion of alsquocastration anxietyrsquo where the depicted loss of an eye is equivalent to thefeared loss of the penis Indeed it is the image on which he founded thisnotion

However the blossoming and visceral part-object (Fig 4) situatedbehind this mask of the patriarch seems to moderate its weighting in thetableau ndash being of an equivalent size ndash with an opposing thesis As a viscusorgan brought into the open and put on display what is usually out of sightis exalted The deeply felt inward experience the insight affects and powerof a procreative womb seems to register Melanie Kleinrsquos agreement with theideas of psychoanalyst Karen Horney where a major background to genderidentity and development and to patriarchal authority within society is infact a lsquowomb-envyrsquo here enshrined by Bourgeois According to such ananalysis and repeatedly represented in this tableau lsquothe mother rather thanthe fatherrsquos body is the major preoccupation of the childrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 3of 14) In fact adjacent to this body-part as if to emphasise the point ayouthful Oedipus embraces an empty red-globe mimicking the cradlingpose of the looming mother and child next to him as if imagining the

Figure 3 Oedipus 2003 detail of Oedipus and Antigone

Psychodynamic Practice 217

experience of a placenta the blood orb of creation he cannot possess In RosMinskyrsquos article exploring gender and psychoanalysis she illustrates that

When the little boy discovers that he is not the same as his apparentlypowerful creative mother he feels he is lacking rather than the girl Theconversation might run like this

Boy lsquoMummy when I grow up Irsquom going to have a baby like yoursquo

Mother lsquobut you wonrsquot be able to because boys canrsquot have babiesrsquo

the small boy has to repress his envy and loss of the powerful physical andemotional meanings of the mother in favour of the cultural power associatedwith the father and the phallus (Minsky 2000 p 4 of 14)

This means lsquothat boys mask and over compensate for their womb-envyby both an over estimation of the penis and displacement on to theintellectual planersquo (Minsky 2000 p 3 of 14) which are culturally conflatedand made superior to anything female As a case in point Bourgeois may bepresenting the head of Oedipus both figuratively castrated and literally castfrom the body as a part-object of the malersquos displaced emphasis then theboyrsquos locus of power within abstracted reason or the cogito This cogito ofthe Oedipal mask may be the only concession Bourgeois gives to Lacanreminiscent as it is of his phallic signifier where self and other aredifferentiated through the acquisition of language which begins during this

Figure 4 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask and womb-like part-object

218 G Snow

phase to handle more sophisticated lsquoshiftersrsquo like the pronoun lsquoIrsquo (Boothby2001)

The emphasis on this head of King Oedipus as underscored by itssizable scale within the tableau is ambiguous though If construed as otherthan symbolic it comes to represent some awful decapitation (Fig 2) Assuch a trophy it might be compared to the grisly severed head of John theBaptist served upon its platter or to a head like the French Kingrsquos LouisXVI signifying a call to revolution Like Salome Bourgeois seems to serveup the head of a chosen prophet rejecting his faith and like the would-beFrench reformists of absolutist rule she demands more representationFreudrsquos Oedipus as lord of the unconscious is removed from power

The violently inflicted blindness of this mask also traces back to thematiclines Bourgeois has worked with previously In a recent publication(Bourgeois 2006) where 300 odd artists present what they think of as theirfirst real artwork Bourgeois presents a piece called The Blind Leading theBlind (Fig 6) While she easily relates it to what she sees as an lsquoabusiversquotransgression of trust within her own childhood (Bourgeois 1998) inrequiring her own blindness to for instance her fatherrsquos philandering and hermotherrsquos anguish (Bourgeois 2006) she also projected this state onto theSurrealists and their theorising When during the War years the Surrealiststurned up in America where she had been established for around two yearsshe was not pleased believing she had left the paternalist ndash peevishly brandingthem lsquofather figuresrsquo ndash and chauvinist chimes of Surrealism behind

Breton and Duchamp made me violent They were too close to me and Iobjected to them violently ndash their pontification Since I was a runaway fatherfigures on these shores rubbed me the wrong way The Blind leading the Blind(1947ndash9) refers to the old men who drive you over the precipice (Bourgeois1998 p 230)

The sphinx beginning in the centre

Within the tableau Bourgeois revisits the woman-as-sphinx both in hercontext within the Sophoclean tragedy and a one-time Surrealist object ofdesire As the latter she has been removed from the femme-fatal fantasies sooften surrounding her and seems to have been returned to a deeperhistorical context where a complex hybridity is restored She achieves thisparticular reference to history by giving her creature that ancient aspect ofthe massive monolithic sculpture at Giza (Fig 5)

Interestingly Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is one of the smallest figures in thetableau yet it commands not only centre-stage but also pushes into theforeground a dominating position Centrally organising the action andplots of the other figures about its visual hub it is neither a beginning norend but is central to all beginnings and endings within our lines of sightThis is clearly an important figure in Bourgeoisrsquos restaging of the drama

Psychodynamic Practice 219

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

probably be considered synonymous with the notion of repair and not justmaking but also a remaking lsquoThis business of lsquorentrayagersquo remaking orreweaving was a skill at the centre of her mothers industryrsquo (Morris 2005p 24) As Bradley (2005 p 2 of 5) points out Bourgeois had found workfrom the age of 12 lsquoin the family workshop drawing in the missing partsof the tapestries to be restoredrsquo Bourgeois herself has said lsquothat idea ofrestoration and reparation is deep within mersquo (cited in Bradley 2005 p 3 of5) Francis Morris who helped curate Stitches in Time summarisedBourgeoisrsquos work within it as that which lsquounravel[s] and rework[s] manythreads from her pastrsquo (Morris 2005 p 32)

Focussing on her Oedipus moreover her utilizing a language ofstitching unpicking piecing together and rethreading under this namewith its significant cultural references to concepts of agency or ego suggestsshe is unravelling and reweaving more than her own story here

Within the temporal features of the work however there is a sense ofBourgeois reflecting and ranging over her own life This would seem naturalfor one having reached such a grand age yet this autobiographical rangingtraverses a period of time where our sense of self has altered withinstructuralist and post-structuralist discourse She after all has developed anartistic career that takes place within the shifting concerns of modernismthen postmodernism over seven decades (Bradley 2005) Put another waypertinent to this investigation her Oedipus moves our attention from apaternalist ideology where male consciousness is generalised as the standardmodel of human subjectivity to one fragmented opened out and decentredby the differences of gender in culture and consciousness

Our eyes are encouraged to move over the scene in a particular way Forinstance there is a definite front and back though the glass vitrine allows aview from all sides And although a central lsquohubrsquo at the sphinx allows theeye to wander in and out from this point there is also a left to right readingwith its Aristotlean assurance of a beginning middle and end Thishowever is not allowed to settle as the privileged view but only onepossibility in a series of connections Size will also weight the gaze in certaindirections and as this article has been condensed from a larger discussion itsscope will take but two views into the layout starting with the largestobjects and later shifting focus to the sphinx being the smallest in scalealthough it is suggestive of something much greater

The dyad a mask and some viscera beginning with the largest

Size and placement are significant and by far the largest figure is that of anarchetypal mother and child This is perhaps Jocasta and her infantOedipus but is also the most ancient of icons as Mother Goddess andthe Son-of-Mother familiar to the matriarchal religions prior to OlympianGreece and remnant still in Catholicism as Madonna and child

Psychodynamic Practice 215

(Gadon 1989) If we start here this dominating dyad ndash a fluid andsymbiotic or to use a Deleuzian term de-territorializing2 exchange ofdesire ndash is counter weighted only by the monumental mask of a blindedOedipus (Fig 2) the second largest object of the tableau

The mask and the dyad seem to polarize each other creating a tensionas if magnetically repulsed and sweep everything along in their chargedelliptical orbit which appears to dance and revel about the body of the deadpatriarch If this orbit is imagined collecting all the other sculpture withinits magnetic field two appear to be flung out to the corners of the glass boxone being a part-object or lsquodesiring-machinersquo3 like some kind of womb-apparatus complete with birthing baby the other a now old and frail son ofthe dead father with only the younger woman to steady him This woman isOedipusrsquo daughter Antigone (Fig 3) and a transference of roles has takenplace here where the daughter has again become mother to man ndash mirroringthe large dyad in the other corner from where we started

The lsquodesiring-machinersquo at the back of the elderly couple and behind themask a binary connection of flesh birthing new life of viscus matter givingrise to new consciousness is literally an organ without a body It seems toestablish the womb as the undeniable though usually hidden physicalobject of womanrsquos power as having an equally usually denied signifyingrole in the psyche In contrast to its visceral presence the disembodied headof Oedipus seems to be a singular symbolic unit of reason a Democritianatom of abstracted consciousness which in the chaos attempts to weight thesensuous consciousness of mutable relations between mother and child inthe opposed corner with its fixed repressive logic

Figure 2 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask

216 G Snow

This head then is the culturally imposed mask of lsquoOedipus as areterritorialization a retimbering of modern man on the lsquolsquorockrsquorsquo ofcastrationrsquo (Deleuze amp Guattari 2004 p 339) The phallic head of reasonand order the mask or persona of ideological masculine authority isblinded rendered impotent in a way that remembers Freudrsquos notion of alsquocastration anxietyrsquo where the depicted loss of an eye is equivalent to thefeared loss of the penis Indeed it is the image on which he founded thisnotion

However the blossoming and visceral part-object (Fig 4) situatedbehind this mask of the patriarch seems to moderate its weighting in thetableau ndash being of an equivalent size ndash with an opposing thesis As a viscusorgan brought into the open and put on display what is usually out of sightis exalted The deeply felt inward experience the insight affects and powerof a procreative womb seems to register Melanie Kleinrsquos agreement with theideas of psychoanalyst Karen Horney where a major background to genderidentity and development and to patriarchal authority within society is infact a lsquowomb-envyrsquo here enshrined by Bourgeois According to such ananalysis and repeatedly represented in this tableau lsquothe mother rather thanthe fatherrsquos body is the major preoccupation of the childrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 3of 14) In fact adjacent to this body-part as if to emphasise the point ayouthful Oedipus embraces an empty red-globe mimicking the cradlingpose of the looming mother and child next to him as if imagining the

Figure 3 Oedipus 2003 detail of Oedipus and Antigone

Psychodynamic Practice 217

experience of a placenta the blood orb of creation he cannot possess In RosMinskyrsquos article exploring gender and psychoanalysis she illustrates that

When the little boy discovers that he is not the same as his apparentlypowerful creative mother he feels he is lacking rather than the girl Theconversation might run like this

Boy lsquoMummy when I grow up Irsquom going to have a baby like yoursquo

Mother lsquobut you wonrsquot be able to because boys canrsquot have babiesrsquo

the small boy has to repress his envy and loss of the powerful physical andemotional meanings of the mother in favour of the cultural power associatedwith the father and the phallus (Minsky 2000 p 4 of 14)

This means lsquothat boys mask and over compensate for their womb-envyby both an over estimation of the penis and displacement on to theintellectual planersquo (Minsky 2000 p 3 of 14) which are culturally conflatedand made superior to anything female As a case in point Bourgeois may bepresenting the head of Oedipus both figuratively castrated and literally castfrom the body as a part-object of the malersquos displaced emphasis then theboyrsquos locus of power within abstracted reason or the cogito This cogito ofthe Oedipal mask may be the only concession Bourgeois gives to Lacanreminiscent as it is of his phallic signifier where self and other aredifferentiated through the acquisition of language which begins during this

Figure 4 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask and womb-like part-object

218 G Snow

phase to handle more sophisticated lsquoshiftersrsquo like the pronoun lsquoIrsquo (Boothby2001)

The emphasis on this head of King Oedipus as underscored by itssizable scale within the tableau is ambiguous though If construed as otherthan symbolic it comes to represent some awful decapitation (Fig 2) Assuch a trophy it might be compared to the grisly severed head of John theBaptist served upon its platter or to a head like the French Kingrsquos LouisXVI signifying a call to revolution Like Salome Bourgeois seems to serveup the head of a chosen prophet rejecting his faith and like the would-beFrench reformists of absolutist rule she demands more representationFreudrsquos Oedipus as lord of the unconscious is removed from power

The violently inflicted blindness of this mask also traces back to thematiclines Bourgeois has worked with previously In a recent publication(Bourgeois 2006) where 300 odd artists present what they think of as theirfirst real artwork Bourgeois presents a piece called The Blind Leading theBlind (Fig 6) While she easily relates it to what she sees as an lsquoabusiversquotransgression of trust within her own childhood (Bourgeois 1998) inrequiring her own blindness to for instance her fatherrsquos philandering and hermotherrsquos anguish (Bourgeois 2006) she also projected this state onto theSurrealists and their theorising When during the War years the Surrealiststurned up in America where she had been established for around two yearsshe was not pleased believing she had left the paternalist ndash peevishly brandingthem lsquofather figuresrsquo ndash and chauvinist chimes of Surrealism behind

Breton and Duchamp made me violent They were too close to me and Iobjected to them violently ndash their pontification Since I was a runaway fatherfigures on these shores rubbed me the wrong way The Blind leading the Blind(1947ndash9) refers to the old men who drive you over the precipice (Bourgeois1998 p 230)

The sphinx beginning in the centre

Within the tableau Bourgeois revisits the woman-as-sphinx both in hercontext within the Sophoclean tragedy and a one-time Surrealist object ofdesire As the latter she has been removed from the femme-fatal fantasies sooften surrounding her and seems to have been returned to a deeperhistorical context where a complex hybridity is restored She achieves thisparticular reference to history by giving her creature that ancient aspect ofthe massive monolithic sculpture at Giza (Fig 5)

Interestingly Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is one of the smallest figures in thetableau yet it commands not only centre-stage but also pushes into theforeground a dominating position Centrally organising the action andplots of the other figures about its visual hub it is neither a beginning norend but is central to all beginnings and endings within our lines of sightThis is clearly an important figure in Bourgeoisrsquos restaging of the drama

Psychodynamic Practice 219

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

(Gadon 1989) If we start here this dominating dyad ndash a fluid andsymbiotic or to use a Deleuzian term de-territorializing2 exchange ofdesire ndash is counter weighted only by the monumental mask of a blindedOedipus (Fig 2) the second largest object of the tableau

The mask and the dyad seem to polarize each other creating a tensionas if magnetically repulsed and sweep everything along in their chargedelliptical orbit which appears to dance and revel about the body of the deadpatriarch If this orbit is imagined collecting all the other sculpture withinits magnetic field two appear to be flung out to the corners of the glass boxone being a part-object or lsquodesiring-machinersquo3 like some kind of womb-apparatus complete with birthing baby the other a now old and frail son ofthe dead father with only the younger woman to steady him This woman isOedipusrsquo daughter Antigone (Fig 3) and a transference of roles has takenplace here where the daughter has again become mother to man ndash mirroringthe large dyad in the other corner from where we started

The lsquodesiring-machinersquo at the back of the elderly couple and behind themask a binary connection of flesh birthing new life of viscus matter givingrise to new consciousness is literally an organ without a body It seems toestablish the womb as the undeniable though usually hidden physicalobject of womanrsquos power as having an equally usually denied signifyingrole in the psyche In contrast to its visceral presence the disembodied headof Oedipus seems to be a singular symbolic unit of reason a Democritianatom of abstracted consciousness which in the chaos attempts to weight thesensuous consciousness of mutable relations between mother and child inthe opposed corner with its fixed repressive logic

Figure 2 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask

216 G Snow

This head then is the culturally imposed mask of lsquoOedipus as areterritorialization a retimbering of modern man on the lsquolsquorockrsquorsquo ofcastrationrsquo (Deleuze amp Guattari 2004 p 339) The phallic head of reasonand order the mask or persona of ideological masculine authority isblinded rendered impotent in a way that remembers Freudrsquos notion of alsquocastration anxietyrsquo where the depicted loss of an eye is equivalent to thefeared loss of the penis Indeed it is the image on which he founded thisnotion

However the blossoming and visceral part-object (Fig 4) situatedbehind this mask of the patriarch seems to moderate its weighting in thetableau ndash being of an equivalent size ndash with an opposing thesis As a viscusorgan brought into the open and put on display what is usually out of sightis exalted The deeply felt inward experience the insight affects and powerof a procreative womb seems to register Melanie Kleinrsquos agreement with theideas of psychoanalyst Karen Horney where a major background to genderidentity and development and to patriarchal authority within society is infact a lsquowomb-envyrsquo here enshrined by Bourgeois According to such ananalysis and repeatedly represented in this tableau lsquothe mother rather thanthe fatherrsquos body is the major preoccupation of the childrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 3of 14) In fact adjacent to this body-part as if to emphasise the point ayouthful Oedipus embraces an empty red-globe mimicking the cradlingpose of the looming mother and child next to him as if imagining the

Figure 3 Oedipus 2003 detail of Oedipus and Antigone

Psychodynamic Practice 217

experience of a placenta the blood orb of creation he cannot possess In RosMinskyrsquos article exploring gender and psychoanalysis she illustrates that

When the little boy discovers that he is not the same as his apparentlypowerful creative mother he feels he is lacking rather than the girl Theconversation might run like this

Boy lsquoMummy when I grow up Irsquom going to have a baby like yoursquo

Mother lsquobut you wonrsquot be able to because boys canrsquot have babiesrsquo

the small boy has to repress his envy and loss of the powerful physical andemotional meanings of the mother in favour of the cultural power associatedwith the father and the phallus (Minsky 2000 p 4 of 14)

This means lsquothat boys mask and over compensate for their womb-envyby both an over estimation of the penis and displacement on to theintellectual planersquo (Minsky 2000 p 3 of 14) which are culturally conflatedand made superior to anything female As a case in point Bourgeois may bepresenting the head of Oedipus both figuratively castrated and literally castfrom the body as a part-object of the malersquos displaced emphasis then theboyrsquos locus of power within abstracted reason or the cogito This cogito ofthe Oedipal mask may be the only concession Bourgeois gives to Lacanreminiscent as it is of his phallic signifier where self and other aredifferentiated through the acquisition of language which begins during this

Figure 4 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask and womb-like part-object

218 G Snow

phase to handle more sophisticated lsquoshiftersrsquo like the pronoun lsquoIrsquo (Boothby2001)

The emphasis on this head of King Oedipus as underscored by itssizable scale within the tableau is ambiguous though If construed as otherthan symbolic it comes to represent some awful decapitation (Fig 2) Assuch a trophy it might be compared to the grisly severed head of John theBaptist served upon its platter or to a head like the French Kingrsquos LouisXVI signifying a call to revolution Like Salome Bourgeois seems to serveup the head of a chosen prophet rejecting his faith and like the would-beFrench reformists of absolutist rule she demands more representationFreudrsquos Oedipus as lord of the unconscious is removed from power

The violently inflicted blindness of this mask also traces back to thematiclines Bourgeois has worked with previously In a recent publication(Bourgeois 2006) where 300 odd artists present what they think of as theirfirst real artwork Bourgeois presents a piece called The Blind Leading theBlind (Fig 6) While she easily relates it to what she sees as an lsquoabusiversquotransgression of trust within her own childhood (Bourgeois 1998) inrequiring her own blindness to for instance her fatherrsquos philandering and hermotherrsquos anguish (Bourgeois 2006) she also projected this state onto theSurrealists and their theorising When during the War years the Surrealiststurned up in America where she had been established for around two yearsshe was not pleased believing she had left the paternalist ndash peevishly brandingthem lsquofather figuresrsquo ndash and chauvinist chimes of Surrealism behind

Breton and Duchamp made me violent They were too close to me and Iobjected to them violently ndash their pontification Since I was a runaway fatherfigures on these shores rubbed me the wrong way The Blind leading the Blind(1947ndash9) refers to the old men who drive you over the precipice (Bourgeois1998 p 230)

The sphinx beginning in the centre

Within the tableau Bourgeois revisits the woman-as-sphinx both in hercontext within the Sophoclean tragedy and a one-time Surrealist object ofdesire As the latter she has been removed from the femme-fatal fantasies sooften surrounding her and seems to have been returned to a deeperhistorical context where a complex hybridity is restored She achieves thisparticular reference to history by giving her creature that ancient aspect ofthe massive monolithic sculpture at Giza (Fig 5)

Interestingly Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is one of the smallest figures in thetableau yet it commands not only centre-stage but also pushes into theforeground a dominating position Centrally organising the action andplots of the other figures about its visual hub it is neither a beginning norend but is central to all beginnings and endings within our lines of sightThis is clearly an important figure in Bourgeoisrsquos restaging of the drama

Psychodynamic Practice 219

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

This head then is the culturally imposed mask of lsquoOedipus as areterritorialization a retimbering of modern man on the lsquolsquorockrsquorsquo ofcastrationrsquo (Deleuze amp Guattari 2004 p 339) The phallic head of reasonand order the mask or persona of ideological masculine authority isblinded rendered impotent in a way that remembers Freudrsquos notion of alsquocastration anxietyrsquo where the depicted loss of an eye is equivalent to thefeared loss of the penis Indeed it is the image on which he founded thisnotion

However the blossoming and visceral part-object (Fig 4) situatedbehind this mask of the patriarch seems to moderate its weighting in thetableau ndash being of an equivalent size ndash with an opposing thesis As a viscusorgan brought into the open and put on display what is usually out of sightis exalted The deeply felt inward experience the insight affects and powerof a procreative womb seems to register Melanie Kleinrsquos agreement with theideas of psychoanalyst Karen Horney where a major background to genderidentity and development and to patriarchal authority within society is infact a lsquowomb-envyrsquo here enshrined by Bourgeois According to such ananalysis and repeatedly represented in this tableau lsquothe mother rather thanthe fatherrsquos body is the major preoccupation of the childrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 3of 14) In fact adjacent to this body-part as if to emphasise the point ayouthful Oedipus embraces an empty red-globe mimicking the cradlingpose of the looming mother and child next to him as if imagining the

Figure 3 Oedipus 2003 detail of Oedipus and Antigone

Psychodynamic Practice 217

experience of a placenta the blood orb of creation he cannot possess In RosMinskyrsquos article exploring gender and psychoanalysis she illustrates that

When the little boy discovers that he is not the same as his apparentlypowerful creative mother he feels he is lacking rather than the girl Theconversation might run like this

Boy lsquoMummy when I grow up Irsquom going to have a baby like yoursquo

Mother lsquobut you wonrsquot be able to because boys canrsquot have babiesrsquo

the small boy has to repress his envy and loss of the powerful physical andemotional meanings of the mother in favour of the cultural power associatedwith the father and the phallus (Minsky 2000 p 4 of 14)

This means lsquothat boys mask and over compensate for their womb-envyby both an over estimation of the penis and displacement on to theintellectual planersquo (Minsky 2000 p 3 of 14) which are culturally conflatedand made superior to anything female As a case in point Bourgeois may bepresenting the head of Oedipus both figuratively castrated and literally castfrom the body as a part-object of the malersquos displaced emphasis then theboyrsquos locus of power within abstracted reason or the cogito This cogito ofthe Oedipal mask may be the only concession Bourgeois gives to Lacanreminiscent as it is of his phallic signifier where self and other aredifferentiated through the acquisition of language which begins during this

Figure 4 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask and womb-like part-object

218 G Snow

phase to handle more sophisticated lsquoshiftersrsquo like the pronoun lsquoIrsquo (Boothby2001)

The emphasis on this head of King Oedipus as underscored by itssizable scale within the tableau is ambiguous though If construed as otherthan symbolic it comes to represent some awful decapitation (Fig 2) Assuch a trophy it might be compared to the grisly severed head of John theBaptist served upon its platter or to a head like the French Kingrsquos LouisXVI signifying a call to revolution Like Salome Bourgeois seems to serveup the head of a chosen prophet rejecting his faith and like the would-beFrench reformists of absolutist rule she demands more representationFreudrsquos Oedipus as lord of the unconscious is removed from power

The violently inflicted blindness of this mask also traces back to thematiclines Bourgeois has worked with previously In a recent publication(Bourgeois 2006) where 300 odd artists present what they think of as theirfirst real artwork Bourgeois presents a piece called The Blind Leading theBlind (Fig 6) While she easily relates it to what she sees as an lsquoabusiversquotransgression of trust within her own childhood (Bourgeois 1998) inrequiring her own blindness to for instance her fatherrsquos philandering and hermotherrsquos anguish (Bourgeois 2006) she also projected this state onto theSurrealists and their theorising When during the War years the Surrealiststurned up in America where she had been established for around two yearsshe was not pleased believing she had left the paternalist ndash peevishly brandingthem lsquofather figuresrsquo ndash and chauvinist chimes of Surrealism behind

Breton and Duchamp made me violent They were too close to me and Iobjected to them violently ndash their pontification Since I was a runaway fatherfigures on these shores rubbed me the wrong way The Blind leading the Blind(1947ndash9) refers to the old men who drive you over the precipice (Bourgeois1998 p 230)

The sphinx beginning in the centre

Within the tableau Bourgeois revisits the woman-as-sphinx both in hercontext within the Sophoclean tragedy and a one-time Surrealist object ofdesire As the latter she has been removed from the femme-fatal fantasies sooften surrounding her and seems to have been returned to a deeperhistorical context where a complex hybridity is restored She achieves thisparticular reference to history by giving her creature that ancient aspect ofthe massive monolithic sculpture at Giza (Fig 5)

Interestingly Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is one of the smallest figures in thetableau yet it commands not only centre-stage but also pushes into theforeground a dominating position Centrally organising the action andplots of the other figures about its visual hub it is neither a beginning norend but is central to all beginnings and endings within our lines of sightThis is clearly an important figure in Bourgeoisrsquos restaging of the drama

Psychodynamic Practice 219

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

experience of a placenta the blood orb of creation he cannot possess In RosMinskyrsquos article exploring gender and psychoanalysis she illustrates that

When the little boy discovers that he is not the same as his apparentlypowerful creative mother he feels he is lacking rather than the girl Theconversation might run like this

Boy lsquoMummy when I grow up Irsquom going to have a baby like yoursquo

Mother lsquobut you wonrsquot be able to because boys canrsquot have babiesrsquo

the small boy has to repress his envy and loss of the powerful physical andemotional meanings of the mother in favour of the cultural power associatedwith the father and the phallus (Minsky 2000 p 4 of 14)

This means lsquothat boys mask and over compensate for their womb-envyby both an over estimation of the penis and displacement on to theintellectual planersquo (Minsky 2000 p 3 of 14) which are culturally conflatedand made superior to anything female As a case in point Bourgeois may bepresenting the head of Oedipus both figuratively castrated and literally castfrom the body as a part-object of the malersquos displaced emphasis then theboyrsquos locus of power within abstracted reason or the cogito This cogito ofthe Oedipal mask may be the only concession Bourgeois gives to Lacanreminiscent as it is of his phallic signifier where self and other aredifferentiated through the acquisition of language which begins during this

Figure 4 Oedipus 2003 detail of mask and womb-like part-object

218 G Snow

phase to handle more sophisticated lsquoshiftersrsquo like the pronoun lsquoIrsquo (Boothby2001)

The emphasis on this head of King Oedipus as underscored by itssizable scale within the tableau is ambiguous though If construed as otherthan symbolic it comes to represent some awful decapitation (Fig 2) Assuch a trophy it might be compared to the grisly severed head of John theBaptist served upon its platter or to a head like the French Kingrsquos LouisXVI signifying a call to revolution Like Salome Bourgeois seems to serveup the head of a chosen prophet rejecting his faith and like the would-beFrench reformists of absolutist rule she demands more representationFreudrsquos Oedipus as lord of the unconscious is removed from power

The violently inflicted blindness of this mask also traces back to thematiclines Bourgeois has worked with previously In a recent publication(Bourgeois 2006) where 300 odd artists present what they think of as theirfirst real artwork Bourgeois presents a piece called The Blind Leading theBlind (Fig 6) While she easily relates it to what she sees as an lsquoabusiversquotransgression of trust within her own childhood (Bourgeois 1998) inrequiring her own blindness to for instance her fatherrsquos philandering and hermotherrsquos anguish (Bourgeois 2006) she also projected this state onto theSurrealists and their theorising When during the War years the Surrealiststurned up in America where she had been established for around two yearsshe was not pleased believing she had left the paternalist ndash peevishly brandingthem lsquofather figuresrsquo ndash and chauvinist chimes of Surrealism behind

Breton and Duchamp made me violent They were too close to me and Iobjected to them violently ndash their pontification Since I was a runaway fatherfigures on these shores rubbed me the wrong way The Blind leading the Blind(1947ndash9) refers to the old men who drive you over the precipice (Bourgeois1998 p 230)

The sphinx beginning in the centre

Within the tableau Bourgeois revisits the woman-as-sphinx both in hercontext within the Sophoclean tragedy and a one-time Surrealist object ofdesire As the latter she has been removed from the femme-fatal fantasies sooften surrounding her and seems to have been returned to a deeperhistorical context where a complex hybridity is restored She achieves thisparticular reference to history by giving her creature that ancient aspect ofthe massive monolithic sculpture at Giza (Fig 5)

Interestingly Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is one of the smallest figures in thetableau yet it commands not only centre-stage but also pushes into theforeground a dominating position Centrally organising the action andplots of the other figures about its visual hub it is neither a beginning norend but is central to all beginnings and endings within our lines of sightThis is clearly an important figure in Bourgeoisrsquos restaging of the drama

Psychodynamic Practice 219

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

phase to handle more sophisticated lsquoshiftersrsquo like the pronoun lsquoIrsquo (Boothby2001)

The emphasis on this head of King Oedipus as underscored by itssizable scale within the tableau is ambiguous though If construed as otherthan symbolic it comes to represent some awful decapitation (Fig 2) Assuch a trophy it might be compared to the grisly severed head of John theBaptist served upon its platter or to a head like the French Kingrsquos LouisXVI signifying a call to revolution Like Salome Bourgeois seems to serveup the head of a chosen prophet rejecting his faith and like the would-beFrench reformists of absolutist rule she demands more representationFreudrsquos Oedipus as lord of the unconscious is removed from power

The violently inflicted blindness of this mask also traces back to thematiclines Bourgeois has worked with previously In a recent publication(Bourgeois 2006) where 300 odd artists present what they think of as theirfirst real artwork Bourgeois presents a piece called The Blind Leading theBlind (Fig 6) While she easily relates it to what she sees as an lsquoabusiversquotransgression of trust within her own childhood (Bourgeois 1998) inrequiring her own blindness to for instance her fatherrsquos philandering and hermotherrsquos anguish (Bourgeois 2006) she also projected this state onto theSurrealists and their theorising When during the War years the Surrealiststurned up in America where she had been established for around two yearsshe was not pleased believing she had left the paternalist ndash peevishly brandingthem lsquofather figuresrsquo ndash and chauvinist chimes of Surrealism behind

Breton and Duchamp made me violent They were too close to me and Iobjected to them violently ndash their pontification Since I was a runaway fatherfigures on these shores rubbed me the wrong way The Blind leading the Blind(1947ndash9) refers to the old men who drive you over the precipice (Bourgeois1998 p 230)

The sphinx beginning in the centre

Within the tableau Bourgeois revisits the woman-as-sphinx both in hercontext within the Sophoclean tragedy and a one-time Surrealist object ofdesire As the latter she has been removed from the femme-fatal fantasies sooften surrounding her and seems to have been returned to a deeperhistorical context where a complex hybridity is restored She achieves thisparticular reference to history by giving her creature that ancient aspect ofthe massive monolithic sculpture at Giza (Fig 5)

Interestingly Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is one of the smallest figures in thetableau yet it commands not only centre-stage but also pushes into theforeground a dominating position Centrally organising the action andplots of the other figures about its visual hub it is neither a beginning norend but is central to all beginnings and endings within our lines of sightThis is clearly an important figure in Bourgeoisrsquos restaging of the drama

Psychodynamic Practice 219

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

For Sophocles the sphinx was central to Oedipus becoming the Thebanhero enabling him to exercise a muscularity-of-mind over her primitivenature Bourgeois rather seems to make her very primitive nature pivotalAt a late date in the Sphinx of Gizarsquos huge history it was identified withKheperi-Re-Atum inscribed onto a stele placed between its great paws Thisis not one but three names of the deified-sun at different phases of the daydawn noon and evening Such a reference to the three aspects of the sunmakes for a tidy analogy to the riddle that Sophocles would put into themouth of his own sphinx but the riddle could have had its origin in anumber of places as it seems to be a particularly ubiquitous one (Anon2006) One form of this riddle runs along the lines of

What goes on four legs at dawn two legs at midday and three legs at sunsetand is weakest when it has the most support (Walker 1983 p 957)

Bourgeois places this riddle centrally then along with its reference tolsquoManrsquo the riddlersquos answer and his implicated life cycle by making thesphinx central to her tableau She is at the head of a broad triangle withthe dyad and womb-apparatus forming its other angles and therebyemphasising again womanrsquos biological importance to manrsquos psychologicallife

For Sophocles as mentioned it is Oedipusrsquos triumph over the sphinxwhich makes him a hero worthy of the throne at Thebes But lsquomanrsquondash with asmall lsquomrsquo here ndash does not stand tall on his lsquotwo legsrsquo in Bourgeoisrsquos tableau Onone side of the sphinx the vulnerable lsquodawnrsquo of the boy-Oedipusrsquos life (Fig 1)perhaps also referencing the infant Son ofMan and on the other the lsquoeveningrsquo

Figure 5 Oedipus 2003 detail of sphinx

220 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

of the old Patriarch requiring the support of the younger woman At lsquonoonrsquoposition in the bed of the queen who can make him lord he seems limp andineffectual Although his body dominates hers it is she with raised head andleg who provides all the action His only ever apparent dominance and hergreater creative and protective power as the mother of which he is ignorantseems to be the point The slumped Oedipus is not a figure of sexual potencyor masculine libido but seems as hapless as the babe in arms

The phallus is a subject of my tenderness Itrsquos about vulnerability andprotection After all I lived with four men with my husband and three sons Iwas the protector (Bourgeois 1998 p 223)

With the lsquonoonrsquo couple a disproportionate balance even inversion ofstereotyped masculine and feminine assertive and passive energies nomatter how much he tries to dominate ndash to keep her beneath him with thephallus or Lacanian signifier ndash is reminiscent of that primal situation ofdifference between mother and son Bourgeois presents the lsquopredicament ofpsychical dependence on womenrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) The womb-envy is invoked and the dependence lsquosets the scene for both womenrsquosdenigration [and] at other times also her idealisation as the lost partof the manrsquos identity to which he secretly longs to regain access bybecoming her lover Male phantasies of women strongly suggest this swingfrom denigration to idealisationrsquo (Minsky 2000 p 5 of 14) with her beingstyled as anything from witch to whore to doll through to angel or museCertainly this type of objectification could be found amongst the attitudes

Figure 6 Louise Bourgeois The Blind leading the Blind 1947ndash1949 Wood paintedred and black 671frasl86643frasl86161frasl400 1704616356412 cm Courtesy Cheim amp ReadHauser amp Wirth and Galerie Karsten Greve Photo Christopher Burke

Psychodynamic Practice 221

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

of the Surrealists It has been well documented that in relation toSurrealism

the only real role for a woman within their movement was that of a muse tobe worshipped either as a sphinx a seer a seductress or an enchanted wildchild Never was there a question of one being the creative or intellectual equalof men (Storr 2003 p 41ndash42)

It is this attitude culturally encouraged within the Oedipal prioritising ofthe phallus that Bourgeois attempts to shift

Bourgeoisrsquos sphinx is female though the Great Sphinx of Giza whose faceshe borrows is male Moreover what had been male in Egyptian cosmologyhad eventually become female when reaching Mesopotamia (Anon 2006)which ultimately marked her fall of status within political shifts to laterpatriarchal rulership (Gadon 1989 Graves 1960 Walker 1983)

When considering her presence within the Sophoclean theatre whichBourgeois recreates here and then considering how Bourgeois flags up thecreaturersquos tremendous antiquity by giving her that Egyptian aspect presentsthe possibility of reading her as a sign of all those things prior to the Greekrationality of the Periclean hero4 Along these lines it is interesting tospeculate how by employing the device of the sphinx Sophocles himselfintended to emphasise this same pre-rational aspect It is possible the sphinxhere within the tragedy of Oedipus the King is no more than a Sophocleaninvention as certainly Homer and Hesoid some three hundred odd yearspreviously make no mention of a sphinx connected to Oedipus (Anon2006)

To the Athenians of Sophoclesrsquo fifth century BC the way the Egyptiansand more archaic societies had given their deities animal parts was a sourceof amusement and supposedly a mark of their primitive bearing The sphinxalong with its functions had long disappeared in Greece but its image hadsuddenly re-emerged in the seventh century BC as a popular motif thatprovided a merely decorative element in painting and sculpture (Anon2006)

For the Egyptians animals seemed to bear witness to the force ofNature as an eternal unchanging cyclical and instinctually repeatingpresence (Anon 2006) For the Greeks however nature or physis wasoften countered to nomos (custom written law and the determinationsof convention) which was always a particularly male occupation in thepolis as was logos (reason argument and speech) (Sedley 2003 Urmson1990)

In the tragedy Oedipus as the new king and the example of Pericleanpatriarchy deposes the primal nature of the sphinx with his superior logosThis image of conquering and cultured intelligence over baser instinctualand apparently more feminine impulses is a theme replete within the history

222 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

of the patriarchy It is the same cultural model which infuses FreudrsquosOedipus Complex He kept a favoured reproduction of Ingresrsquos Oedipus andthe Sphinx (Fig 7 illustrates one version) in his study at the end of hisanalytical couch (Jones 2006 Nixon 2005) It depicts this hero of assuredintellect opposing the beast who bears her seductive and well-highlightedbreasts with no more than his reasoning finger perhaps punning on theerect penis as well as probing mind It is against this symbolism of superiormale mind and inferior female flesh so easily subsumed within Surrealistmetaphors that Bourgeois takes her stand Her sphinx is not an object ofdesire and does not display its flesh in femme-fatal fashion before any otherin the tableau She looks upon no one and catches no gaze making herselfunavailable to games of seduction One is left with her deceptively smallstature within the tableau and her primitive heritage like an ancientarchaeological treasure and its consequent sense of timeless mystery aboutits nature and our own ancient natures

Conclusion

Bourgeoisrsquos Oedipus is a significant sculpture within her oeuvre andsuggests an adjustment of focus away from the phallus as a mastersignifier within the psyche looking instead to the significance of thewomb She returns to Sophoclesrsquo theatre as the site on which Freudcentred his own analysis to find fresh readings of subjective experiencethere revealing other ways in which to think the drama By visuallyrestaging the myth of Oedipus she has reframed the Western thought andattitudes as woven within it so that her Oedipus is neither the Rex of

Figure 7 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx about 1826 National Gallery London

Psychodynamic Practice 223

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

classical antiquity nor that beloved Complex of the Moderns but acomprehension transformed from their different places in history Sheinserts her art as a corrective asking questions within different matricesand through her we come closer not only to her psyche but to our own asone who is a part of our age

Notes

1 Here I am also thinking of lsquowomanrsquo symbolically as the notion of lsquoothernessrsquocountering standardised ideas within patriarchal norms More particularlyDeleuzersquos term lsquobecoming-womanrsquo is invoked in referencing a sense of selfcontinually becoming-other fluid and moving outside any fixed identitysubject gender or centre (Buchanon 2000 Colebrook 2002 Deleuze ampGuattari 2004)

2 Deleuzersquos de-territorialisation can be defined as a withdrawal from any imposedrigidity of a hierarchical nature that frames life within discrete categories ofsingular identities towards a shifting identity that ever multiplies becomingmore

3 The desiring-machine describes a process where desire is a positive andproductive motive-force in a universe of productive force and machine lookingfor a term that moves beyond notions of a centrally organising subjectivitydescribes identities as no more than the connections made With this Deleuze andGuattari oppose Freudian ideas of desire being a response to lack

4 Meaning a representative of the fifth-century BC classical man

References

Anon (2006) The Classic Pages Oedipus and the Sphinx (internet) Available from5httpwwwusersglobalnetcouk-loxiassphinxhtm4 (Accessed 3 April2006)

Boothby Richard (2001) Freud As Philosopher Metapsychology After LacanRoutledge

Bourgeois Louise (2006) No 1 First Works by 362 Artists In Francesca Richer ampMatthew Rosenzweig (Eds) Thames and Hudson

Bourgeois Louise (2003) lsquoInterview Paulo Herkenhoff in Conversation with LouiseBourgeoisrsquo Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (ed) (p 6) Robert Storr Paulo HerkenhoffAllan Schwartzman Louise Bourgeois Phaidon Press

Bourgeois Louise (1998) Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father Reconstructionof the Father Writings and Interviews 1923ndash1997 In Marie-Laure Bernadac ampHans-Ulrich Obrist (Eds) London Violette Editions

Bradley Fiona (2005) Archive Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time (internet)Edinburgh The Fruit Market Gallery Available from5httpwwwfruitmarketcoukarchive1(LB)html4 (Accessed 25 April 2006)

Buchanon Ian (2000) Deleuzism A Metacommentary Edinburgh University PressColebrook Claire (2002) Gilles Deleuze London and New York RoutledgeDeleuze and Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia London

New York ContinuumGadon Elinor W (1989) The Once and Future Goddess A Symbol of our Time The

Aquarian PressGraves Robert (1960) lsquo105 Oedipusrsquo The Greek Myths Volume 2 Penguin Books

224 G Snow

Jones Jonathan (2006) The Secret Sigmund The Guardian Culture 9506 119Farrington Rd London E Guardian Newspapers Limited pp 22ndash23

Minsky Ros (2000) lsquoToo Much of a Good Thing Control or Containment in Copingwith Changersquo In Rebort M Young (Ed) Free Associations Psychoanalysis andthe Public Sphere (internet) Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies University ofSheffield Available from 5httphuman-naturecomfree-associationsminskychangehtml4 (Accessed 24 November 2005)

Morris Frances (2005) Louise Bourgeois Stitches in Time August ProjectsLondon

Nixon Mignon (2005) Fantastic Reality Louise Bourgeois and A Story of ModernArt Cambridge Massachusetts MIT Press

Sedley David (2003) lsquoGlossaryrsquo In David Sedley (Ed) The Cambridge Companionto Greek and Roman Philosophy Cambridge University Press

Storr Robert (2003) lsquoSurvey A Sketch for a Portrait Louise Bourgeoisrsquo In RobertStorr Paulo Herkenhoff amp Allan Schwartzman (Eds) Louise Bourgeois p 26Phaidon Press

Urmson JO (1990) The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary DuckworthWalker Barbara G (1983) The Womenrsquos Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets San

Francisco Harper and Row

Psychodynamic Practice 225

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