Deprived of his overbearing and malevolent presence, she went to pieces; "But they pulled me out of the sack./ And stuck me together with glue./And then I knew what to do./I made a model of you." Although her father lived through her thirties, Bourgeois was equally unable to establish her own sovereignty prior to his death. Subject to episodes of crippling melancholy, she, like the poet, was also obliged to build a monument to his glib authority in order that she could then demolish it. It is a measure of BourgeoisËs superior instinct for self-preservation that she has so often managed to stick herself back together in the process of modeling of the tyrannical patriarch, or, in the case of the Destruction of the father, of creating an image of the desolation caused by her husbandËs death and a vessel for her furious bereavement. Changing passive anguish into active rage, this fantastic "murder" redirected her the suicidal urges that periodically took hold of her. Thus, the symbolic sacrifice of the fatherËs life made possible the continuance of the daughterËs, fulfilling the purpose of such a ritual in actual as well as metaphorical terms.

Genuinely totemic in its function·though as a containing rather than contained entity the formal antithesis of her carved wood pieces of the 1940s and 50s·Destruction of the father transformed aggression into the expiation of filial betrayal and collective revenge into communion by means of a psychological dialectic spelled out in FreudËs description of the sacramental transgression in tribal societies. Paradigmatic of psychological parricide, Freud believed, "The totemic banquet, perhaps the first mankind ever celebrated, was the repetition, the festival of remembrance, of this noteworthy criminal deed."

Acting in concert and with conspicuous cruelty the members of a clan establish the boundaries of conduct and affirm their common heritage through calculated excess and shared culpability. Paradoxically, then, the killing of the father or the consumption of the totem animal in whom he is transubstantiated, serves a commemorative rite and a gesture of contrition and reconciliation.

An analysis of the social resolution of the Oedipal dilemma, FreudËs anthropologically unreliable but psychologically potent hypothesis sheds revealing light on the conflicted motives behind BourgeoisËs ghoulish ceremony. Emotionally seduced and abandoned by her father, and jealous of his love and his arbitrary power over her, she envisions in Destruction of the father a sardonic best of all possible worlds in which one can have oneËs father and eat him too.