3 ideas
In Child Abuse, Bourgeois describes her English governess Sadie living in the family home as her father's mistress, and frames this as a betrayal by both her father and Sadie. She also condemns her mother for tolerating the arrangement, and she keeps returning to this episode as a source of her work.
Bourgeois's mother restored old tapestries in the family workshop, and Bourgeois recast the spider as that mother: patient, clever, protective, and occupied with mending what has been torn. The spider stops being a threat and becomes a figure of repair, because weaving and reweaving is how it survives damage. Its meaning comes from a specific person and a specific kind of labour, not from a general symbolic vocabulary.
Bourgeois describes making sculpture as a way of exorcising fear and hostility, turning an unmanageable feeling into a material problem she can work on. She also values expression and the viewer's emotional response, so exorcism sits alongside communication in her account rather than replacing it. Because the relief does not last, she returns to the same fears repeatedly in her work.