The thought of our innermost dreams and secrets revealed to the world even if we are long dead is petrifying. Diaries and letters however, are the stuff of biography.

Louise Bourgeois, currently the subject of a fascinating deposit of her lifelong hand-written and typed journal entries and other loose sheets of tormented musings at the Jewish Museum in the exhibition Freud's Daughter, transformed her dreams and fears into concrete objects, also on view. Curator Philip Larratt-Smith writes in a dense essay that these two efforts of the talented 33 year long (!) analysand were parallel but came from the same wellspring of despair over her tortured relation to her father, her lack of artistic production (she stopped working entirely for 5 years), her jealousies of her husband's career, her inept feelings of motherhood, and consequent suicidal tendencies.

In English (her psychoanalysis was in NY) and in French, often within the same sentence, Bourgeois parses her life, a "dangerous passage", trying to give form to what we all know to be formless: fear, despair, at 2:30 am , with "no plans, no hope, no interests, as oscillating as a feuille de mimosa". Her convoluted stacks and cratered circles, pendulous balls and tetraploid spiders find their home in the writing. But these terrorized, depressed writings are also shown themselves to be works of art.

Previous retrospectives of Bourgeois's work did not tackle head-on this darker but defining aspect of her career. It's tough stuff but riveting. I have only read the catalog, but the reveal of such personal material is often startling.

Hysterical , 2001, The Easton Foundation, (ARS) Photo: Christopher Burke