These emotional inventories, with all their tangled logic, were Bourgeois's way of thinking, of working through. It was the art critic Peter Frank who encouraged her to jot down these free associations, not Lowenfeld: "It is not either my medicine nor my duty," she wrote in reference to Frank's suggestion; "I write because I have always felt that if people knew me really, they could not fail to like me. I write or make sculpture to be loved (for what I am)." Bourgeois admitted that this was a lost cause and was dismissive of their worth, suggesting that their meaning immediately evaporated, like Chinese calligraphy brushed on to stone with water: "Tout de mes notes seems remote + foreign except when in the process of being written, they communicate nothing not even to me."
But, ultimately, Bourgeois felt that analysis had little to offer the artist. "The truth is that Freud did nothing for artists, or for the artist's problem, the artist's torment," Bourgeois wrote in "Freud's Toys", as if in frustration with the process to which she submitted for so many years, "to be an artist involves some suffering. That's why artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure." Lowenfeld had died four years earlier, ending her analysis but evidently not her pain, which continued to fuel her work. In his essay "Dostoevesky and Parricide" (1926), Freud himself admitted: "Before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms."
To art historians her free associations and doodles not only suggest clues as to the personal relationships and conflicts that inform all her work, but seem to offer direct links to her creative process (one Isis-like sketch is displayed here next to a similar multi-breasted sculpture, as fecund as the Venus of Willendorf). In an aborted letter to "Mon cher Papa", Bourgeois wrote: "In the 20th century the best work has been produced by those people whose exclusive concern was themselves." Her father was a tyrannical philanderer who had a 10-year affair with a live-in English governess, the discovery of which was the central trauma to which Bourgeois endlessly returned in her confessional work.
