The Skin Ego - 1

    My research has kept bringing me back to Didier Anzieu's theory of the skin ego throughout the last five weeks. Therefore, I find it relevant to examine his body-mind-centered approach to psychoanalysis.

    Didier Anzieu (1923–1999) was a French psychoanalyst and theorist whose work brought the body back to the center of psychoanalytic enquiry. While he was a significant figure, he is not as well known outside of France as his predecessor, Jacques Lacan. In contrast to Lacan's abstract, language-centered theories, Anzieu's more concrete, body-centered approach seems to be overlooked. He also displaces Freud's oedipal complex with an alternative developmental model that avoids sexism and gendered essentialism.  

    According to Anzieu, 'Since the Renaissance, Western thought has been obsessed with a particular epistemological conception, whereby the acquisition of knowledge is seen as a process of breaking through an outer shell to reach an inner core.'' By saying this, he is pointing out this tradition of privileging inside over outside and depth over surface.

    The newborn baby, has a rudimentary understanding of where its own body ends and others begin. As a result of this border unawareness, the baby perceives the caregiver's skin as its own, which Anzieu calls "shared skin." According to Freud, in the first six months (helpnessness stage), there is a body-ego, which provides the building blocks for a fully-fledged ego with sensory data. And Anzieu thinks this body ego is already a skin ego. Skin ego is taking on the pre-ego functions of containment, protection, and inscription while operating as a surrogate ego. The skin ego is not given directly to the infant, it must be gained. Through the tactile exchanges between the child and caregiver, baby gradually develops its own bodily space. This enables the baby to understand its body as a container, with insides and outsides, and this gradually develops the sense of containment and individuality. Acquisition of individual skin, and the skin ego, is accompanied by the rending of shared skin, a traumatic loss, and is a key moment in an infant's development.