Spirals abound in Louise Bourgeois’s art. She says they make her think of control and freedom, and of strangling someone. So it’s perfect that her retrospective, seen in London and Paris, is now in the looping rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. It looks great there, clean but organic — fecund, tumid, enwrapping — and unclassically classical.

Ms. Bourgeois, 96, has been prolific. For her art is not a job; it is a life. It is what you do when you get up in the morning, and what you continue to do all day, through headaches and phone calls, breakups and breakdowns, silences and celebrations. It is what you keep doing after dark, and when you can’t sleep at night.

We have been looking at the products of that life for some time, solidly for the past 25 years, since her watershed 1982 survey at the Museum of Modern Art, and sporadically for decades before. Her art is a museum staple. She is an art-world presence, a personality and a loquacious one, ever ready to share her history.

From that history we know of her childhood in France, and how she learned to draw and sew while restoring antique tapestries in her family’s business. We’ve learned of the psychic damage inflicted by her father’s marital infidelities (the person she wants to strangle is his mistress); of her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater; of motherhood (they had three sons); of making her way as an artist in an all-male game; and of her struggles with depression, anger, insomnia, agoraphobia, guilt and other lacerating but paradoxically stimulating disabilities.

We’ve heard about all of this many times, and that’s O.K. “There is one story and one story only that will prove worth your telling,” says the poet. The trouble is, even the most intriguing story has its limits, its fixed set of characters and situations. And Ms. Bourgeois’s story — Robert Storr makes this point in the exhibition catalog — has been the sole lens through which her art is viewed, so faithfully and consistently that you would be very surprised to find any surprises in a retrospective.

But there are surprises, beginning with what the exhibition reveals about the shape of her long career, and specifically, its departure from the linear shape that “career” implies.

The Guggenheim’s chief curator, Nancy Spector, has arranged the work more or less by date, from early to late, up the rotunda ramp. And some clear period markers are evident. Oil-on-canvas painting drops out of the account right away. Ms. Bourgeois abandoned the medium in 1949, and with it overt links to the European Surrealists she knew, and had mixed feelings about, in New York during World War II. (She had moved to the city, where she still lives, with Mr. Goldwater in 1938.)

Certain materials came and went with time. Many early sculptures, like some of the tall, rail-thin, on-tiptoe “Personages” from the 1940s, were carved from construction wood found on Manhattan streets. Free and portable, it was just the thing for an artist on a budget, whose studio space was an apartment-building roof. In the 1980s and 1990s came ponderous stone and metal work, requiring cranes and moving crews. Late sculptures high on the Guggenheim’s ramps are made of stitched fabric, light and soft, suggesting practical concessions to age.

But in terms of ideas, the career doesn’t fit the standard learning curve of developmental progress. If anything, it is an example of antiprogress, a process of doing, then undoing, rethinking and revisiting. Over the show’s 60-year span Ms. Bourgeois doesn’t get “better” as much as she gets different. As you walk through, you spend far less time working out the logic of how this came from that than wondering, “What will she think of next?”

She is a restless and inventive maker. She has said that she works in response to emotions: fury at the past and fear of the present among them. But on the evidence of the survey, she is equally impelled by formal options — what she can do with her hands. That includes drawing, etching, molding, carving in stone, casting in metal, constructing with wood, sewing, embroidering, and turning antique shop and Dumpster salvage into walk-in assemblages.

Those installations, called “Cells,” show Ms. Bourgeois at her most obviously theatrical, though it is her objects that deliver the keenest shock: a squashy, fecal-like little abstraction hollowed like a pot (“Lair,” 1963); a multibreasted, hermaphroditic beast carved from pink marble (“Nature Study,” 1984-94); a latex-and-plaster penis that is also a vagina and floats like a mobile (“Filette,” 1968).

Such images surely relate to the childhood trauma; she seems to have resigned herself long ago to being a lifer in that psychic prison. But they point to other narratives too. The big one for me is the story of how one artist figured out that by staying personal and getting messy with opposites — exquisiteness and grossness, Bernini and bathroom jokes — and being willing to go “too far” without being reckless, she could make art that was the equivalent of a certain kind of diary writing: purgative, but rigorously poetic. (Ms. Bourgeois herself is a lifelong daily diarist.)

What she was doing initially had scant connection with the concerns of the larger art world, but she was by no means isolated from that world. Just the opposite: she was deeply networked. The catalog is sprinkled with snapshots of her posing with superstars, all of them men. Yet when it came to work, she was out there on a limb, doing her own thing.

Many artists since have taken notice of what she did. If you squint, the Guggenheim survey can start to look like a big group show, a Louise Bourgeois homage. There’s a Bruce Nauman, a Carl Andre, a Kiki Smith, a Paul Thek, a Zoe Leonard, a Robert Gober, as well as contributions by most of the hip young international figures who were in “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century” at the New Museum last year.

The point is, Ms. Bourgeois was there. And she too is a product of influences, from specific figures like Brancusi, Léger and Duchamp, to whole art historical fields (Baroque and Hellenistic sculpture, Surrealism, African art). She’s quick to acknowledge them because she knows that being influenced is unimportant. It’s how you personalize influence — reshape it, mock it, brutalize it, tickle it, lift it up — that counts.

Her unorthodoxies did not make for easy going. By the 1960s and ’70s, when the woman’s movement was turning cultural givens inside out, she was already a resistance veteran. People saw this and made a hero of her, and she played along. She seems to like acting the sage — there are worse crimes — and she is very good at it.

And now she is part of the liberation, less for what she says than for how she lives her life, which is her work. Certain artists inspire by formal example, other by giving permission. Ms. Bourgeois is a permission-giver.

Your daily life is propelled by fear? Draw fear. You can. Impossible to sleep at night? Make night your studio, the cloth you embroider with needs and dreams. The past is an obsession you can neither embrace nor release? Make an image of obsession, any image will do. And you’ll feel better for a while. Ms. Bourgeois has made many such images. One at the Guggenheim is a bronze sculpture of a tiny, childlike, nude figure engulfed in the anaconda squeeze of a wrap-around phallus. The piece is titled “Spiral Woman” (1984). Ms. Bourgeois calls it a self-portrait.

It is hilariously cruel, this cartoon of suffocation, a sick joke the artist has turned on herself and on the world. It is also beautiful — petite, delicate, burnished a gleaming gold. It is probably heavy, but suspended by a cord, it looks like a cloud, a twisty cloud, floating free.