Old Bones and Cocktail Dresses: Louise Bourgeois and the Question of Age

Abstract

3. I am referring to the game Freud observed his grandson playing in which he discerned the precipitation of the boy into the Symbolic chain firstly through a repeated gesture of throwing away a toy and retrieving it and secondly through uttering sounds that related to each gesture and could be interpreted as fort (gone) and da (here). The performance was related to the anxiety occasioned by the mother's absence, which anxiety Freud imagined the child was mastering by this symbolic play. 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' [19201 in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis,Volume 11, The Penguin Freud Library, (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 269-338. The fort-da game with its compulsion to repeat became the basis for Freud's theory of the death drive. It has also been variously interpreted by Lacan in relation to the coming of the signifier and other readings of the significance of the play of absence and presence are reviewed by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger and related to the gestures of art making in The Matrixial Gaze, (Feminist Arts and Histories Network Press at the