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“The cats who were prepared to starve to death in the laboratories [rather than comply with the terms of a behaviorist experiment] were, no doubt about it, frustrated animals. [..] A mare on the point of foaling will not eat or drink if there is insufficient congruence between her sense of the event and the attitudes of the creatures and landscape around her. Children refuse food when they are overloaded with various phoniness disguised as love. And when you take a house cat and put it in a situation in which there is only one choice, that of responding in a linear way to human expectations, the cat won’t eat if eating entails the performance of a kind of ‘pleasing’ that is a violation of the cat’s nature, a distortion of the cat’s duties on the planet. [..] The cat’s job includes making us aware of the invented nature of our expectation” 

[Louise] Bourgeois [...] delivers an important corrective – first, to the fantasy that analysis can rid us of parts of ourselves; and second, to the wish to interpret or understand it all away. She refutes the fantasy of self-reinvention in which the subject gets better by digesting what is restorative and permanently expelling what is difficult. Bourgeois offers another vision of what it means to be cured, which involves taking on all aspects of oneself and becoming even more who one is. The key point is this: you have to find the way to make something of what will never leave you—namely your history and the difficult, endlessly conflictual, feelings engendered by it. She shows us a way of looking after one's conflict and neurotic insolubilities as material that when re-approached, rather than solved, provides a form of vitality, if not immortality – witness the tremendous energy held in her successive variations on the form of the hysterically arched body (Arch of hysteria 1993; Arch of hysteria 2004). Importantly, this capacity to act and rework and twist and even memorialize and embody is a truth that psychoanalysis discovered from its work with hysterical women at its very origin.