ABSTRACT
The inner child invites people to get in touch with shares little with the commonplaces of contemporary therapy culture. It places people in a contradictory mental space that they share with the child figures of Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, and Louise Bourgeois. Proust's depictions of childhood make him a landmark in the history of autobiographical, fictional and semi-fictional recits d'enfance. Childhood as a source of creativity: Beckett destroys the cliche and rebuilds it as a compulsion. Childhood memories and storytelling as metaphors for each other, both rescuing images from chaos, also structure much of Beckett's work. The stories Bourgeois tells about her own work seem at first to position it in the same way as Proust and Beckett's in relation to childhood memory. However, important aspects of Bourgeois's work evade narrative analysis, whilst bringing the viewer into contact with birth and childhood as connected to the origins of an artwork.
