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An Investigation into The Uncanny Nature of Visualising the Internal Body in Artworks

Emilia Couttie​

'Bodies Of Mother (Object 2)', Emilia Couttie (2023)

Introduction

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This dissertation will discuss physical manifestations of invisible internal spaces of the body and their uncanniness when represented through artwork. Our internal bodily spaces are integral to the formation of the self, yet they remain invisible and unknown, inaccessible to our direct perception. Acts of externalising the internal, with the hopes of discovering the unknown, expose the fragility and fluidity of bodily boundaries. This in turn complicates our understanding of the self and the other. The concept of internal non-spaces is not widely discussed in literary sources, thus intensifying their ambiguous nature and our desire to externalise them. 

 

This dissertation will explore philosophical theories and contemporary artworks which challenge the traditional notions of the skin as a container and argue that the skin acts more like a porous threshold. Through this lens, we can understand the body as an interface where the boundaries between the external and internal are no longer fixed but continually negotiated. 

 

Through the artworks of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, the chapters of this dissertation will explore how physicalising bodily non-spaces offers a way for these artists to question the boundaries between interiority and exteriority, particularly when representing non-spaces like the womb. Although the womb already has an organic physical form, its characterisation as non-space in this dissertation can be understood through its voided and liminal interiority. Philosopher, Timothy Morton, and his theory of Hyperobjects (2013) also provides a framework to comprehend the womb as a non-space or hyperobject. Morton’s theory speaks of immense, non-visible objects and our newfound ecological awareness to them in the time of the Anthropocene. Hyperobjects transcend space and time, disconnecting us from a direct tangible understanding of them, despite our experience of feeling their effects. Morton describes them as having an inescapable viscosity that “cause us to reflect on our very place on this earth and in the cosmos” (2013, p.15). A materialisation of the womb would be an unfamiliar and intimate thing, similar to how Morton discusses Hyperobjects as alien yet deeply felt by humans.

 

 

 

 

Research Questions

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With the aim of answering the following research questions, this dissertation will draw on contemporary artwork capturing the sense of the uncanny that arises when internal non-spaces like the womb are physicalised in the external world.

 

How do artists materialise the body’s internal non-spaces to explore the boundaries of the body and the bodily self?

 

How do contemporary feminist writers and artists use the philosophical frameworks of Merleau-Ponty, Sigmund Freud, and Didier Anzieu to discuss the pregnant body and its uncanniness?

Research Methods

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Through research of the following search terms: The In-Between, Non-spaces, Hyperobjects, the pregnant body, porous bodies, trans-corporeality, Body without organs – a number of unrelated works were presented in Loughborough’s library databases, as the specific theme of non-space is not extensively written about. Reading around the topic allowed the research to navigate through feminist writings about the body to find relevant connections between their texts and the dissertation topic. 

 

Reading core philosophical and psychoanalytic theories from Merleau-Ponty, Sigmund Freud, and Didier Anzieu are essential to understanding the underlying context for the dissertation. However, researching contemporary feminist literature has proved more useful in the critical analysis of these theories and their application to the female maternal body. Most of these works are well situated in the theoretical context of the dissertation, often referencing these same key philosophical concepts, alongside other influential feminist authors, highlighting their importance and relevance of to the topic. Further literary sources could be found in their bibliographies, offering new examinations of the philosophical concepts framed in a contemporary art context. This dissertation can only investigate a limited number of artworks which explore a physicalisation of non-spaces. However, works by Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse provide an in-depth analysis of how artists might express a transgression of bodily boundaries to reimagine the female body.

 

Chapter one will examine key philosophical and psychoanalytical theories, providing the framework to later analyse relevant artworks. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh and Didier Anzieu’s theory of the skin ego contribute towards a re-description of the skin and the body. These concepts will challenge our preconceptions of the bodily self, especially when applied to the pregnant body and its transgression of boundaries.

 

Exploring artworks by Eva Hesse, chapter two addresses the uncanniness of the pregnant body and the voided womb. The visible transformation of a swollen belly becomes a key site for investigating how the externalisation of internal non-spaces complicates our understanding of the self. Suggesting these non-spaces are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar in their violation of bodily boundaries, chapter two will use Sigmund Freud’s concept of The Uncanny (1919) to support this idea.  

 

The final chapter will examine artworks that further complicate the boundaries between self and other. Concentrating on the movement from external to internal, chapter three will analyse acts of imagined cannibalism and a desire for a return to the womb manifested in the artworks of Louise Bourgeois.

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Figure 1: Julia Reodica ‘HymNext Hymen Project’ (2005)

Chapter 1

Flesh

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To first establish how artists might visualise internal bodily non-spaces, it is important to reconceptualise our understanding of the skin as a container, separating the self from the other. Chapter one will argue that writings from the likes of Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological philosopher, and Didier Anzieu, French psychoanalyst, allow us to consider the skin as a porous threshold, one that complicates our preconceptions of bodily self.  

In Merleau-Ponty’s final work, ‘The Visible and The Invisible’ (1968), he introduces new ideas about embodiment. Developing on his writing in the 1945 ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’, his notion of ‘flesh’ comes from his theory of the reversibility of touch, where Merleau-Ponty conceptualises perception as a two-way, dynamic, and interactive process (Ladkin, 2012). With this context, Merleau-Ponty (1968, p.131) suggests the flesh is the visceral substance to this intercorporeality, that as being irreducible to either the body or the world, and the site of their conjunction. The idea of ‘flesh’ as the ‘stuff’ of materiality, as well as the conduit through which the self and the other is perceived (Ladkin, 2012), evokes a sense of the ‘In-between’, where the boundary between the interior and the exterior becomes blurred. In the simultaneous mutuality of touch and being touched, seeing and being seen, we can understand the flesh (the skin) as a site for tactile encounters. 

This opens up a new way of thinking about the body, further explained by Penelope Deutscher, a professor of philosophy, in her essay ‘Three Touches to the Skin and One Look’ (2001, p.143). Exploring the ideas of desire and embodiment by philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Deutscher claims the skin opens our bodies to other bodies through touch. Thus, the separation of self and other is destabilised in the intimacy of the encounter (2001, p.5-6). Considering this philosophical framework, the following chapters will go on to question how it is possible to be with others differently, if one is always interacting with other bodies in a fleshy society. 

A meeting of the self and the other in the in-between zone or liminal space of the flesh can be seen in Julia Reodica’s ‘HymNext Hymen Project’ [Fig. 1]. Part of her Living Sculpture Series exhibited in the show ‘Sk-interfaces’ in 2005, Reodica is an artist who uses biology to raise questions at the threshold of art and science. In this work, she presents her own vaginal cells in ceremonial boxes, highlighting the locality of the hymen as a symbolic boundary between the inside and the outside of the female body. Here, the hymen membranes are ceremonially represented as ‘flexible and moveable between bodies’ (Harrison, 2013), illustrating the sense of In-Betweenness about the flesh Deutscher’s and Merleau-Ponty’s theories express. ‘Back to Front and Inside Out’ (2013), an essay discussing how it is possible to re-imagine the boundaries of the body through sculpture, sees Harrison quote philosopher and biologist Nicole Karafyllis:

 “The skin is no longer the medium and border of bodies and individuals but rather an imagistic vehicle for designers that should grow either internally or externally” (2008, p.50)

 Harrison argues that a re-description of the skin and the body as ‘more unstable, transient and fragmented’ (2013, p. 72) has influenced the way artists interpret the porous threshold of the body surface, in turn evoking a feeling of the ‘In-between’ in their work.

This feeling of In-betweenness is important to later discuss the uncanniness about the womb’s ability to hold a body inside of a body. If Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ideas about the flesh (1968) contribute to our understanding of the order of the world, how can we understand the bodily self’s separation form intrauterine existence? In their attempts to communicate a re-description of the body, the philosophical frameworks introduced in chapter one present a paradox when applied to the pregnant body, thus evoking a sense of the uncanny, which chapter two will further elaborate on.

1.1 The Skin Ego

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Another of these theories establishing alternative ways to perceive the body through the skin is Anzieu’s concept of the Skin Ego (1989). Building on Freudian and Lacanian theories, he argues that ‘the ego is the projection of the psychic on the surface of the body’ (Ahmed, 2001). If this bodily surface, the skin, has the ability to hold the unconscious of the body, we may consider the skin as a site for the manifestation of the internal.

 

Anzieu claims that the Self derives from the skin, as it is the site of the ego’s self-expression. He describes the skin as the interface, the container for the ego, but also its origin (Webart 2019). The skin-ego begins with a baby's fantasy of sharing skin with their mother, mostly unaware of their own bodily boundaries; they do not understand their selves as a separate being at this stage of development. Like that of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of flesh, infants make sense of the world around them using their bodies and the skin. Esther Bick, a well-known child psychoanalyst, concludes that an infant’s skin can, therefore, be seen as a bodily blueprint for how the fully-fledged ego will construct itself (1968, p. 484).

 

Before going through the process of weaning, the skin becomes the centre of consciousness for the infant. Melanie Klein, another influential child psychoanalyst, introduces her theory of the Part-Object in her essay ’Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’ (1952) which support this idea. She argues that the part-object is a form that belongs to the body but is read by the infant as a semi-separate entity – the prime example being the breast. The infant projects onto the part-object their boundless desire but also their rage and envy towards the maternal body when they later gain their own subjectivity and experience a loss of unity from the mother’s skin (Petzinger, 2006). Perhaps this is why we can understand the skin as having a nostalgic reference to and the sense of security from the presence of the mother, a unity which has been lost. However, like Klein, Anzieu also argues that the skin surface can also become a site of conflict, in terms of the Freudian Oedipus complex, where it can hold onto the skin ego’s complaint against its rending from the mother (Ahmed, 2001). While Anzieu’s skin theory only discusses how it is the psyche that is manifested in the skin, the obvious fleshy relationships between mother and infant prompts a sensitivity towards the womb as one of these invisible spaces we can see within the skin. These ideas provide the framework to explore how artists might try to evoke ‘fleshy’, skin-like works to physicalise internal non-spaces of the body. Chapter 2 will examine works from Eva Hesse, such as ‘Contingent’ [Fig. 2] to see how her use of latex displaces the usual context of the skin to evoke the sense of a non-literal body presence.

 

Feminist writer, Imogen Tyler, argues that Anzieu’s Skin Ego is flawed in discussing the pregnant body in her essay ‘Skin-Tight’ (2001). She examines how the pregnant body’s skin surface no longer straightforwardly performs the function of separating self from the non-self, ‘it mutates and expands, growing a new skin inside of itself’ (2001 p.72). Tyler’s essay challenges this philosophy, examining how the maternal body complicates the delineation of the skin as a container, contesting any individual notions of ‘the body’ and ‘the skin’ (2001). She argues the importance of differentiating between bodily others—who are not necessarily distinct entities but who are also not one (2001, p.8). In this way Tyler suggests Anzieu’s theory is impossible at conceptualising pregnant embodiment as anything other than a generative environment. 

 

The displacement of pregnant bodily boundaries can also be seen in the attempts to visualise the foetus photographically (Stabile, 1994, p.84). The construction of the foetal skin in 3D ultrasounds results in the disappearance of the pregnant person's external skin. In order to give an impression of personhood to the body inside of the body, photography practices must differentiate the foetal skin from the other fleshy materials within the mother's womb (Tyler, 2001, p.79). Although the foetus does not fully form a recognisable skin structure until the first two months of development (Tyler 2001, p.79), it must be visualised photographically as having skin so that it can be imagined as its own being. Anzieu refers to the foetal membrane at this development stage as ‘pia mater’ meaning mother skin or skin mother (1989, p.13). The pia mater encapsulating the foetal body is part of the mother's skin and the skin of the other, not yet separate. Tyler argues that it becomes challenging to distinguish between the pregnant person's skin and the foetus’, as those who are pregnant experience the pia mater as part of their self. (2001, p.80). 

 

In her book ‘Art Monsters’, Laura Elkin says that the bodies of women have provoked anxieties about the transgressions of boundaries (2023, p.16). She quotes Anne Carlson from her essay ‘Dirt and Desire: Female Pollution in Antiquity’:

 

“In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses.”

(Carson 1999, p.79)

 

The complex understanding of selves and multiple beings held in the pregnant body creates a sense of strangeness and the unknown within the pregnant subject. It could be argued that this is why the pregnant body has historically been absent from the public eye and conversation. Despite opinions of the female body being solely for reproduction purposes in the past, women often went into confinement to keep their pregnancy veiled (Tyler, 2001, p.71).

Tyler's theory of the pregnant body, applied to Anzieu's Skin Ego, allows us to reimagine the pregnant form as a mysterious site for transformation. It is both familiar and unfamiliar in that we have all originated from this space yet remain unconscious of its nature. Chapter two will explore physical manifestations of pregnant interiority and its uncanny nature. Examining artworks that are suggestive of the pregnant body, womb or flesh evoking a sense of the familiar, unfamiliar. 

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Figure 2: Eva Hesse ‘Contingent’ (1969)

Chapter 2 The Uncanny Maternal Body

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Tyler’s take on Anzieu’s skin ego provides a framework to think about why artists feel a need to physicalise our invisible interior spaces like the womb. Her analysis of the skin ego, when applied to the maternal body, calls Anzieu and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of natural order into question. The way their theories of flesh and skin operate and make sense of the world, fail to make sense of the pregnant body. If the skin and the flesh operate as a threshold between self and other, the bodily boundaries within the pregnant body are no longer simply divided into the internal and the external. In this way the nature of intrauterine existence and pregnant subjectivity become a paradox, prompting familiar and unfamiliar feelings towards the maternal body.

 

In Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) he introduces the concept of the ‘unheimlich’, meaning ‘unhomely’ or ‘not home-like’. He refers to this as the eerie feeling that arises when something that should remain hidden or repressed is made visible, disrupting a normal sense of reality (1919, p.4). Freud’s notion of the uncanny exposes the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible. Encountering the uncanny in artworks can elicit unsettling experiences for viewers; Freud claims ‘that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it’ (1919, p.15). In this way, a viewer’s encounter with uncanny art awakens them to their self-awareness as their repressed fears or desires surface from the subconscious. It is this uncanniness that pushes a need to discover the unknown and the paradox of the pregnant body.

 

Although Freud discusses the womb as an important symbol in his writings, he neglects to notice the pregnant body as an obvious embodiment of the uncanny. Writer, Jenifer Cooke argues that this is the perfect example of uncanniness (2020). Cook describes ‘the pregnant body as an uncanny site and pregnancy as an uncanny experience’. She claims not all pregnant persons adjust easily to the idea of the ‘other’ within. To endure the foetus moving under their skin, experience both radical intimacy with- and radical alienation from – one’s body, as well as the huge bodily transformations they must undergo (2020, p.3) speaks to a feeling of violent unease and strangeness about the pregnant body. 

 

There is also a great sense of the unknown about the womb and intrauterine existence. It can be experienced only indirectly via ultrasounds, external movements through the skin, or bodily sensations. The unseen and inaccessible nature of the womb only makes the pregnant or maternal body more uncanny. It is so unfamiliar, yet as the artist, Yamini Nayar, describes it “there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there” (2023).

 

Artists trying to replicate or recall these feelings of intrauterine existence find they only further its uncanny nature. Creation of the womb or the pregnant body through art means a violation of boundaries when they externalise the internal. The internal is understood to be private, hidden, or protected. Considering the skin as a container, when something that is supposed to be inside is made external, the line between the self and the other becomes blurred. Psychological boundaries disintegrate, as the familiar becomes disrupted, and the self no longer seems to feel like it remains intact. Artworks giving form to the internal body spaces often remind the viewer of the fragility and complexity of their selfhood, creating a deep sense of unease and discomfort. 

 

Anzieu’s developments on the Freudian connection between the skin and the self, address how our ideas of the skin affect how we perceive the body in art. Artwork that is suggestive of flesh, through its materiality, is enough to introduce this uncanny feeling within viewers. The use of latex in ‘Contingent’ [Fig. 2] by Eva Hesse has a translucent quality that carries connotations of the fleshiness observed in human skin. The hanging latex sculptures are soft, lightly coloured, and sensuous, but given its unstable materiality, the latex decays over time. It oxidises, yellows, and hardens, analogous to the decay suffered by the human body as it ages. Analysing her work, Birkhofer states that ‘while not consciously anthropomorphising, Hesse’s work evoked the Freudian concept of the body ego, in which the viewer’s body is felt to be identified with, or related to, the abstract form in a visceral way’ (2010, p.4).

 

A disturbance to the locality of one’s skin can arouse anxiety on the grounds that in the absence of the external holding object, one is unable to hold oneself together in one’s own skin without spilling out and ultimately leaking into a limitless space (Manning, 2009, p.34).

 2.1 The Womb as a Void

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This part of the dissertation will look at artworks engaging with the concept of ‘The Void’ in relation to the body or the womb to provide the space to explore creations of non-spaces and question the limits of human body. Often evoking psychological or emotional responses in viewers, ideas about the void contribute to a re-thinking of the body to induce feelings of the uncanny. In Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ (2000), he says ‘Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female organ; also cavities, ships, and all kinds of vessels’ (2000, p. 223). Here, he claims that it is hollow objects that are often the symbols representing the uterus. In this way, we might consider the womb as a site of potential. An empty non-space capable of giving space to new forms, where everything passes but nothing is retained. A space of in-betweenness where intrauterine existence is neither a being nor a non-being, but an interval between them (Sears, 2017). 

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of no nothingness from ‘The Visible and The Invisible’ (1968) when applied to the womb can help define it as an internal non-space. Merleau-Ponty argues a nothing that has potential is therefore not an indefinite nothingness but a determined nothing, one determined by the external - the world (1968).

“…Determined nothing: not this glass, not this table, not this room, my emptiness is not indefinite, and to this extent at least my nothingness is filled or nullified… A philosophy that really thinks the negation, that is, that thinks it as what it is not through and through, is also a philosophy of being” (1968, p.53)

In other words, ‘nothing as annihilation’ only has meaning relative to the something that existed before it was annihilated (Bergson, 1911, p.299)

The complexity of the womb being a void and capable of holding a liminal being speaks to the paradoxical nature of the body’s ‘skins in a skin’ or ‘body in a body’, amplifying the womb’s uncanniness. In works like ‘Accession II’ [Fig. 3] and ‘Hang Up’ by Hesse, the tension between absence and presence, the known and the unknown, adopts this notion of the void.

‘Accession II’ [Fig. 3], a box made from galvanised steel screens with over 30,000 hand-poked pieces of rubber tubing, embodies both the industrial and the organic. It presents something both familiar and inviting yet strange and repulsive to the viewer (Birkhofer, 2010). Here, Hesse allows the body to be made strange and dissipated into a big-nothing; it is negated and rendered void (Birkhofer, 2010). The external form of ‘Accession II’ [Fig. 3] appears controlled and fixed in a systematic grid, while the interior is suggestive of the female genitalia and has a textural and sensual quality that feels as though it has the gravity to pull you inside. The interior is so inviting and familiar that it once provoked a person to try and climb inside it as an exhibition, as Yve-Alain Bois put it, in a “return to the womb fantasy” (2006). Eliciting the need for a safe protective space, ‘Accession II’ [Fig. 3] embodies the desire for an intimate encounter, and a wanting to fill the void, through the physicalisation of a non-space.

 

 

 

  Severed from its recognisable context, the bodily nature of ‘Accession II’ [Fig. 3] recalls Klein’s Part-Object theory (1952). The rending of internal and external made apparent in this sculpture destabilises our distinction between self and other, thus uncannily recalling the pre-subjective state Klein’s theory also refers to (Kurczynski, 2007, p. 45). 

 

Hesse’s employment of the void in her sculptures further resonates with Melanie Klein’s metaphor for blank space in ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations’ (1929). This theory describes a young girl’s desire to rob the mother’s body of all its contents and a fear that the girl’s own body will then in turn be mutilated by the mother (Klein, 1929). The voided spaces these acts might create would cause a field of emptiness within the body, one that relates to the loss and mourning of the maternal object - a vacant space that can never be filled. The drama of Klein’s theory of feminine anxiety suggests the mother’s body inaugurates a tension between interior and exterior (Laubender, 2019, p.37). It is it’s unknowable, uncontrollable, and invisible interiority which provokes the young girl’s attack on the mothers imagined internal objects. In this way, Kleins theory narrates the female reproductive organs as a simultaneously present but invisible non-space, “introducing the child to its first epistemological quandary” (Laubender, 2019, p.37). Like that of Freud’s dream symbolism, the negative space can be understood as a metaphor for the womb. Writer Briony Fer recognises this feeling of the loss of self and threatened body in works like ‘Accession II’ [Fig. 3] by Hesse. She connects the artist’s subconscious interest in the destruction of the mother with the loss of her mother to suicide at an early age (Fer, 1997).

 

The pregnant body's physical transformation disrupts the familiarity of the human. To see the swollen belly of a mother awakens people to the voided internal space underneath her stretched skin. This chapter has explored works by Eva Hesse that capture an uncanniness about the maternal body and its violation of bodily boundaries when externalising the internal. The following chapter will examine artworks that further complicate the boundaries between self and other. Concentrating instead on the movement from external to internal, chapter three will review acts of imagined cannibalism and a desire for a return to the womb.

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Figure 3: Eva Hesse ‘Accession II’ (1969)

Chapter 3 Knowing the Other from the Inside

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Chapter explores artworks that express the desires of ingesting or absorbing the other to gain a knowledge of the internal. Freudian theories claim that the ego wants to incorporate the object into itself (Freud, 1917, p.249). This can be achieved through acts of imaged cannibalism, love, and sex (though these are fundamentally the same fantasy - the desire for a return to the womb).  Britt-Marie Schiller, psychoanalytic writer and professor of philosophy, explains that eating the other and having the other allows you to actually be the other (2020, p.383). The cannibalistic dream assures that the object will never leave you, providing the possibility to know the unknown or see the invisible internal. Similarly, in Freud’s ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915) he notes that the first sexual aim is expressed in a desire to incorporate or devour the other, with the aim of abolishing their separate existences (Schiller, 2020, p. 365). 

 

Louise Bourgeois, a French-American artist, expressed these notions of destruction and absorption in her practice and did not shy away from the taboo of cannibalistic impulses. This chapter examines her artworks expressing the fantasies of cannibalism and a return to the womb. Covering the works of Bourgeois; ‘Destruction of the Father’ [Fig. 4 & Fig. 5] and ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ [Fig. 6] chapter three explores Bourgeois’ desire to seek, inhabit, and know the other from the inside, and how she translates her own internal non-spaces to the external.

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3.1 Cannibalistic Fantasies 

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There has been little work produced about cannibalism in the twentieth century. The world being mostly occupied with war for the first half of the century saw the concepts of devouring or being devoured take a more active form (Walton, 2004, p.3). It wasn’t until the 1950s that the cannibalistic fantasy rose to popularity again in film, Monsters characterised as flesh-eaters and invaders of the body spoke to our repressed desires of consuming the other. René Girard, French historian and literary critic argues that cannibalism is the lesser studied taboo related to the Oedipus complex:

“We are perhaps more distracted by incest than cannibalism, but only because cannibalism has not yet found its Freud and been promoted to the status of major contemporary myth.” (1977 p. 276-7)

In Freud’s oral phase of sexual development, he claims that individuals begin life in a state of oneness of the world (1905). This concept, first introduced in chapter one, can be developed further in its characterisation as a cannibalistic experience. In this development phase, most interactions for the infant occur through the mouth. Feeding at the mother’s breast, the infant’s primary source of pleasure becomes oral gratification. It is this oral phase where the infant is only aware of its mother’s breast and has no sense of its own separation from the world. The infant does not see the mother’s breast as a separate object but something that can be taken inside itself and as part of itself (Kilgour, 1998, p.244). Thus describing this process as a cannibalistic one, where the experience of fluid boundaries between self and world are orally joined in a symbiotic oneness. 

 

Freud describes all pathology of stemming from either fixation in or regression to the earlier stages of life (1916, p.77-101). However, he also claims that despite our eventual rending of this oral cannibal stage, infantile development never completely involves a total break with the past but an incremental one (Kilgour, 1998, p.244). This is particularly relevant during the oral phase, where the physical process of ingestion serves as a blueprint for subsequent acts of psychic introjection, identification, and internalization, all of which contribute to the formation of individual identity. Kilgour, an English professor, and writer, supports this idea, saying that:

 

 “The price for individual identity is the awareness of the loss of a greater corporate identification, the original symbiosis with the mother. The primal state of total satisfaction of desire, of an utter coincidence between inside and outside, influences our later models of contentment.” (1998, p.245)

 

The ego's advancement toward independence creates a simultaneous desire to return to our original state of unity and oneness with the world, symbolized through acts of cannibalism, as an attempt for a return to the womb fantasy. This repressed instinct’s persisting tension could give insight into an internalised rage towards our separation from this lost unity (Kilgour, 1998, p.246). We can see these violent cannibalistic fantasies sensitively conveyed in Louise Bourgeois’ ‘Destruction of the Father’ [Fig. 4 & 5].

There is an undeniable tension and duality in the artworks of Bourgeois. 

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Figure 4: Louise Bourgeois ‘Destruction of The Father’ (1974)

 There is an undeniable tension and duality in the artworks of Bourgeois. ‘Destruction of the Father’ expresses both her love and hatred of her father, and the repressed cannibalistic impulses she experiences. The use of ‘the’ father rather than ‘a’ father in the title confirms it is a work that specifically addresses and challenges her own childhood desires and fears. In her youth, Bourgeois describes her father as a complicated parental figure. Although she grew to love her father later in life, Bourgeois felt betrayed by him in his acts of adultery and oppressive pontification at the family dinner table. Her childhood experiences of her father became a source of emotional abuse and trauma, influencing her artworks such as ‘Destruction of the father’ [Fig. 4 & 5]. Here Bourgeois describes this installation:

“The piece is basically a table, the awful, terrifying family dinner table headed by the father who sits and gloats. And the others, the wife, the children, what can they do? They sit there, in silence. The mother, of course, tries to satisfy the tyrant, her husband. The children are full of exasperation [ . . . ] So, in exasperation, we grabbed the man, threw him on the table, dismembered him and proceeded to devour him.” (Bourgeois, as cited in Morris, 2008, p. 102)

‘Destruction of The Father’ conjures a giant carnivorous mouth, embodying the children’s revenge fuelled killing and devouring of the father (Schiller, 2020). Found in a secret hidden room inside the exhibition, the installation is immediately set in a liminal, in-between space. Its curation composes an ambiguous form, resembling it to a fireplace or oven in the recess of the wall. This relates back to the dream symbolism in chapter two, in which Freud (2000) relates hollow objects to the female genitalia. In this way ‘Destruction of the Father’ [Fig. 4] evokes the sensation of an interior womb-like space (Martin, 2023). 

 

Inside the installation we find soft and fleshy cushions surrounding a table, protruding from the floors, and hanging from the ceiling - the roof of the mouth (Martin, 2023). Sensuous forms resembling the stalactites and stalagmites like that of an underground cave (Schiller, 2020, p.382) creates a paradoxical space which is uninviting yet intimate and familiar. Artist, Molly Martin examines ‘Destruction of the Father’ [Fig.4] as ‘an open mouth full of teeth while also being a safe and secluded cave within a dark rock’ (2023). The installation’s inaccessible nature forces a separation of us from the immersive experience. This space is an internal non-space, belonging to Bourgeois’ thoughts and her internal psyche, somewhere which (as much as we desire it) is impossible for us to truly be inside of.

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Figure 4: Louise Bourgeois ‘Destruction of The Father’ (1974)

make the fleshy body parts seen on the table [Fig. 5] Bourgeois casted pieces of mutton in plaster and then rubber. This created textured yellowy surfaces that fold and crease like human skin to form an almost singular disjointed body.

However, when situated under the red lights [Fig. 4] the familiarity of the human is discarded, and the installation instead is reminiscent of an other-worldly interior space. 

 

Bourgeois’ brutal devouring of the father is not only an act of furious revenge but an attempt at eliminating her separation and difference from him. Freud (2012) argues that through cannibalisation one can accomplish their identification with the other and obtain a ‘magical bond’. This, however, is a paradoxical fantasy; although eating the other means you never have to lose the other, it does require you kill the object in the process, giving way to feelings of melancholia (Schiller, 2020, p.365-6). In this degree ‘Destruction of the Father’ conveys not only a notion of absorption but a notion of destruction, in its feeding of the self with the other.

 

Cannibalising the other means a violation of bodily boundaries where the once private and singular internal becomes one with and part of the devourer. Similar to that of the pregnant body, the lack of a clear delineation between bodily selves presents a paradox about ‘a body inside of a body’. Whether it is the cannibalised other or intrauterine existence, we are unable to see where one body ends and another begins. Bourgeois’ imagined acts of cannibalism provide an insight into how she breaches the borders of the body to physicalise her own internal non-spaces to the external.

 

3.2 A Return to the Womb

Beneath Louise Bourgeois' violent expressions of anger lies a profound fear of abandonment. Otto Rank (1929), Austrian psychoanalyst and writer, explains this feeling of abandonment comes from the original trauma - being born. We can see this trauma and fury manifest itself in Bourgeois’ artworks and writing, with a diary of entry of hers once saying the following:

 

“The abandonment

I want revenge

I want tears for having been born

I want apologies

I want blood

I want to do to others what has been done to me

To be born is to be ejected

To be abandoned, from there comes the fury.”

[as cited in Morris, 2008, p. 20] 

 

Here, Bourgeois communicates conflicting thoughts about the previous unity she once shared with her mother and the feelings of abandonment she experienced in her eviction from the womb.

 

 In Rank’s referral to birth as the ‘expulsion from paradise’ (1929, p.75), the apparent solution to get ‘un-born’ would be through a regression back into the mother’s body (Herren, 2014, p.237). The sense of security that intrauterine existence offers, gestures toward a longing for a return to the maternal womb. Like the cannibalistic dream, the return to the womb fantasy provides a permanent connection and belonging with the other, which is reminiscent of the unity experienced with the mother during infantile development stages and intrauterine existence.

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Figure 6: Louise Bourgeois ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ State IV of VII (1999)

We can see this desire for a re-connection and re-entering of the internal in Bourgeois’ series of drawings ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ [Fig. 6]. The drawings depict a child floating in the air next to a seated mother, connected by their umbilical cord which stretches from navel to navel (Schiller, 2018). The infant's form resembles an arch, suggesting it has recently emerged from its mother's lap or is about to settle onto it. The arch form the infant takes represents its separation from the mother’s breast; the negative space its body bends around lacks the object it desires and once deemed part of itself. As the title indicates, the connection between mother and infant is now fragile and filled with abandonment anxiety (Schiller, 2020, p.389). The scene takes place on a circular stage with the mother and child encased in a glass bell jar, symbolising a reimagining of the protective embrace of the womb, our initial sanctuary.

The Infant, still connected by the umbilical cord highlights Bourgeois’ strong desire to remain connected to the mother despite her anxiety and fury over being abandoned (Schiller, 2020). The desire to return to the internal holding container may only be mediated through the paradoxical guarantee of cannibalism, in which the absorption of the object destroys it in the process. The ego, reluctant to separate from the object, keeps in its presence in an act of melancholic mourning (Schiller, 2020, p.389). 

In these artworks we are able to see into Bourgeois’ internal landscape and visualise her anxieties and desires. We are given an insight in Bourgeois’ private interior through her externalisation of invisible interiority. This physicalisation appeals to our own desires of knowing the unknown in internal bodily spaces. Bourgeois herself argues that we need to expose what is inside our external facades; ‘Inversion is the dynamic law of Bourgeois’ physical universe—what faces in must face out’ (Storr, as cited in Morris, 2008, p. 29).

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Conclusion

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In contemporary art, the externalisation of internal bodily spaces only intensifies a sense of the uncanny. Artworks by Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois bring these hidden aspects of the body into the open, using materials and form to evoke flesh, skin, and the womb. This dissertation has discovered that manifestations of internal non-spaces reveal a porous, unstable nature of the bodily boundaries between internal and external. This confronts our preconceptions of the body, and we are forced to reconsider our notions of selfhood as something more volatile.

 

Ultimately, physicalising internal bodily spaces is not just a way to challenge boundaries, but also a way to confront the inherent instability of the body and the self. When this process is applied to contemporary artworks, it evokes a sense of the uncanny; the internal and the external become difficult to discern, disrupting a normal sense of the uncanny. The artworks mentioned in this dissertation, such as ‘Accession II’ [Fig. 3], ‘Destruction of the Father’ [Fig. 4 & 5], and ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ [Fig. 6] specifically relate to the female body in their depictions and notions of the womb and intrauterine existence. The psychoanalytical theories presented in this dissertation have confirmed that the maternal body and the womb are so deeply entrenched in the psyche that it becomes impossible to disentangle 'self in the womb' from 'self as a womb'. This unsettling realisation that the body we thought we knew is both ours and not ours at the same time is the manifestation of the uncanny. To many people the idea of being buried alive is the uncanniest thing of all. Yet the psychoanalytic theories we visit in chapters one and two have taught us that this terrifying fantasy is only a transformation of another fantasy, one filled with a certain lustful pleasure, the fantasy - intrauterine existence and a return to the womb.

Article by Emilia Couttie
April 2025

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List of Figures

 

 

Figure 1: Julia Reodica, HymNext Hymen Project (2005) Sculpture, Available at: https://www.fact.co.uk/artwork/hymnext-hymen-project-2004-2008 (Accessed: 29 December 2024)

 

Figure 2: Eva Hesse, Contingent (1969) sculpture, Available at: https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object/49353 (Accessed: 29 December 2024)

 

Figure 3: Eva Hesse, Accession II (1969) Sculpture, Available at: https://dia.org/collection/accession-ii-47951 (Accessed: 29 December 2024)

 

Figure 4: Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of The Father (1974) Installation under red lights, Available at: https://www.hauserwirth.com/viewing-room/25849-louise-bourgeois-freuds-daughter/ (Accessed: 4 January 2025)

 

Figure 5: Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of The Father (1974) Installation, Available at: https://www.thelondonlist.com/culture/louise-bourgeois (Accessed: 4 January 2025)

 

Figure 6: Louise Bourgeois, Do Not Abandon Me, State IV of VII (1999) Drypoint, Available at: https://www.moma.org/s/lb/collection_lb/object/object_objid-84407.html (Accessed: 6 January 2025)

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