ABSTRACT
Around the time of Louise Bourgeois's death in 2010, four boxes of notes were discovered; hundreds of pages of writings and drawings, some documenting her three decades in psychoanalysis. The notes, a number of which are on display in the museum, prompt questions about the aims of clinical psychoanalysis, and whether "cure" is a relevant topic for analysts and their patients—perhaps especially for those patients who are artists. "Cure" has been an extremely labile idea in the history of analysis. In Freud's writings from the late 1890s people keep getting better. He reviews this position as he goes along until, reading "Analysis Terminable and Interminable". Louise Bourgeois also makes an inverse link between art production and mental anguish in her famous quote, "Art is a guarantee of sanity." Evidently art-making seemed to her to help more than an endless, sometimes boring, cat and mouse game.
