Years before French-American artist Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis (1952–1985), her work was indebted to memory—those impressionistic threads of narrative chronicling an interior life marked by irresolvable conflicts buried in a roiling unconscious. Bourgeois’s papers from the 1940s onward confirm that she welcomed Freud’s familiar description of neurotics, hysterics, and artists as suffering from reminiscences—repressed memory traces that are stirred up later in life under the guise of hysterical symptoms, including disorders of language, movement, speech, and shell shock. W. R. D. Fairbairn identified the last of these as war neuroses in 1943, just a few years before Bourgeois debuted her first mature sculptures, talismanic figures that she described as cathartic, defensive, and warlike. Called “personages,” these melancholy, wraithlike, abstract pieces evoked traumatic memory as Bourgeois converted destructive feelings (“bad internal objects”) into something beautiful and acceptable (the “good” art object). Two papers published by Fairbairn in 1938 extended the inner world of the individual into the field of object relations via the transposition of the symbolically “restored object.” In advancing a psychology of aesthetics that takes as fundamental the “schizoid” or split aspects of the modern personality, the Scottish psychoanalyst conceived the radical notion of restitution, the mental process of repairing damage in the artist’s inner object world. Fairbairn’s principles are deeply resonant with Bourgeois’s métier, in which the “art-work” becomes a hard-won tribute—a Hegelian synthesis of libidinal instinct and rational form—ushering in a phenomenal, aesthetic experience that satisfies the unconscious emotional needs of artist and beholder alike.