Tate Modern, Hauser & Wirth, W1

A vast spider has scuttled on to the banks of the Thames. It stands, poised on tiptoe, outside Tate Modern, protecting its cluster of pale marble eggs. Who can pass beneath it without feeling the pull of its spindle-legged presence, without feeling the frisson of its psychological embrace?

This creature is Maman, by Louise Bourgeois. You will most likely recognise it. It first crawled into Britain when Tate Modern opened. Then it paused for a moment in the Turbine Hall spaces like the spider that pauses as it crosses the kitchen flags. Now, with the opening of a big retrospective of Louise Bourgeois’ work, the giant steel arachnid creeps back up through the plug-hole of the psyche. It returns from the drains of the artist’s imagination where, over the course of more than nine decades, her memories have slowly gathered and clogged.

Her work draws on a deep underworld of infant recollections. “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama,” she once explained. She invites spectators into the vivid imaginative lands of an obsessive little girl who, born in Paris in 1911, grew up in the country in an outwardly respectable family whose business was repairing antique tapestries.

By the age of 12, Bourgeois was helping out; making the drawings for the parts of designs that had been lost. But her father, Louis, was a tyrannical philanderer who indulged in a long affair with his daughter’s English tutor while his wife, “an intelligent, patient and enduring, if not calculating, person”, decided it was easier to turn a blind eye.

The alert little girl, however, was aware of everything. She hoarded her memories in the diaries she kept from before she was in her teens. When, after briefly studying mathematics at the Sorbonne, she decided to return to her artistic talents (enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts before going on to study in various ateliers), it was to her past that she turned. In its traumas and tensions she discovered her creative impulse.

“My memories are moth-eaten . . . I have taken my memories into my arms and have soothed them,” she said. Her sculptures feel to her like exorcisms. Intriguing and unsettling, tantalising and threatening, they become the stage on which the deep introspective complexities of the mind’s hidden dramas can be played out.

Moving through this vast and largely chronological show (it covers almost seven decades and incorporates some 200 works), her development can be traced from her earliest beginnings as a painter, through the totemic forms of her first geometrical sculptures towards her growing interest in more amorphous shapes and the malleable possibilities of such materials as plaster, latex and wax. We see her emerging fascination with the pure, hard simplicity of marble; with the dramatic possibilities of room-sized installations and with the haunting memories that, for a child brought up among needleworkers, become the weft and warp of every piece of fabric. We see her move on from the distanced allusions of the abstract, through the creation of an intricate metaphorical language and on to an almost literal figurative style.

Bourgeois is restlessly inventive. She may be well into her nineties, but she still continues to experiment, as a concurrent show of new pieces at Hauser and Wirth’s Old Bond Street galleries makes plain. Here are leaky red drawings (“drawings are thought feathers; they are ideas that I seize in mid-flight and put down on paper”) and pale painted bronzes and an intriguing vitrine, all made earlier this year.

As the spectator drifts through successions of styles and the chapters in her life story, he can of course discover how she slots into art history. A pupil of Fernand Léger, a friend of Constantin Brancusi and Marchel Duchamp, an admirer of Albert Giacometti and Francis Bacon, and the wife of Robert Goldwater, the founding director of New York’s Museum of Primitive Art, she tapped into a cultural world whose traces – Primitivism, for instance, or Cubism or Surrealism – can all be spotted in her pieces. It is easy, also, to see her profound influence on contemporary culture. Tracey Emin’s embroidered scrawls or Sarah Lucas’s mutant rag dollies are like fragments lifted directly from Bourgeois’ oeuvre.

But the real impetus of her work remains always the personal response. Disregarding contemporary developments – shunning the big splashy experiments of Abstract Expressionism, for instance, or the pared down aesthetic of Minimalism – she pursued the fiercely antagonistic vision of an individual who believed that not to be on the attack was to be all but dead. Curators now try to reflect this. They accompany this show not with a conventional catalogue of explanatory texts but with a glossary of terms. These, through extensive quotation, guide the viewer into the densely symbolic realm of an artist who shuns critical explanations (“I do not need the musing of philosophers to tell me what I am doing”) as resolutely as she resists the clichés of Freudian analysis or the feminist cause.

Bourgeois’ imagination feels a bit like some spookily fetishistic labyrinth. The spectator enters a land of orifices and excrescences, of caves and protuberances, of toppling towers and cluttered assemblages, of things that dangle and squat and scuttle and sprout. Spiders and prostheses, needles and nightshirts, fabrics and foxes, bones and phobias, mirrors and mammaries, medical cupping jars and entire water towers start to accrue a personal significance. They are the vocabulary through which Bourgeois can speak of such dark things as castration fantasies, dreams of cannibalism, and vows such as the one that she, as a young woman, made beside her mother’s deathbed. If her mother survived until the next morning, she swore, she would promise never to have sex again.

But Bourgeois sculptures are never straightforwardly descriptive. They play upon paradoxes. The pure and the corrupted, the nasty and the intriguing, the erotic and the repulsive, the dangerous and the seductive all meet in her pieces. Her sculpture is less about form than about the feelings that these forms can make tangible. They work on a visceral level. They slice open the skin of experience, or carefully unpick the armour of custom, to leave the still-breathing innards of our emotional lives bared.

The power of her work is that, precisely because she tries to stay so true to her own fiercely vivid and individualistic vision, she has had to find a language that can communicate on a fundamental level. It draws from the common well of the psyche. No wonder so many of her images might almost have come straight from our horror movies. Here are gloopily-tentacled octopuses, egg-laying mothers (Alien) and serial killers’ lairs (Silence of the Lambs) aplenty.

Yet, within the context of her distinctive iconography, her images are rescued from cliché. Beneath fetishistic titillation, deeper feelings are disturbed. Like a giant mother spider, her work weaves secret webs. It gathers the world up into a menacing embrace.

Louise Bourgeois is at Tate Modern and New Works at Hauser & Wirth, Old Bond Street, W1 (020-7287 2300), from October 10 2007

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