Curator and writer Philip Larratt-Smith writes that Bourgeois was mistrustful of psychoanalysis’s process of bringing the unconscious to light through dreams, slips of the tongue, and somatic symptoms and, instead, preferred to access her unconscious through sculpture—through the body: “In Bourgeois’s terms, the successful realization of a sculpture functions to make conscious what was previously unconscious—that is, repressed and inaccessible—and to discharge unwelcome or unmanageable instinctual impulses.”

Without dance to help me live, my symptoms continued to present as unwelcome, unmanageable impulses. I was accused, in equal measure, of dehumanizing pleasure-seeking and being too broken to have healthy desire. Desire, contained by bodily capability, was difficult to gauge. My body was cold, my appendages blue, my bedroom a mausoleum of pills and too-bright lights. How to warm myself, circulate blood? Sometimes the heat of sex seemed the only possible antidote, and my anguished desperation overwhelmed my companion. At other times, when a man crawled into my bed, I articulated my state in staccato gestures: the opiates on the nightstand, the eleventh hour on the clock, a new rash, the lack of sensation in my toes. I’d sense his disappointment, or his suspicion that this was all a product of vanity. I would feel his interest lift like a fog—for me, a relief.

Bourgeois frequently wrote of her inability to make herself loved and of her struggle to relate to men sexually and emotionally. She experienced herself as a void, one who existed as a woman only in relation to a man: “The empty house / means that I am identified with / the void, it isn’t out there any longer / I am the void.” Psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell writes, “Bourgeois shows that what psychoanalysis considers to be inevitable is, in fact, the impossible condition of a woman’s sexuality within patriarchy.”