Professor Juliet Mitchell presents a brand-new view of the artist Louise Bourgeois as part of this major exhibition of Jacques Lacan.

Embracing the theme of ‘Psychoanalysis and Art’ and drawing on five seminal images displayed in the gallery in Metz, Professor Mitchell will discuss Bourgeois's thinking about Lacan. She will also consider what Bourgeois meant by her inability ‘to transcend insomnia’ in the Insomnia Drawings as a foretaste of her final work. This work is exemplified by the cloth heads which Professor Mitchell argues are a statement of why Bourgeois's difference led to her quasi-rejection of the psychoanalysis she had always ‘carried in her art’.

Juliet Mitchell is currently writing a book on Louise Bourgeois, based on 1,000 pages of previously forgotten personal notes that Bourgeois made as a full-time patient in intensive and extensive psychoanalytical treatment with Henry Lowenfeld.