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In this contribution to psychoanalytic theory, the distinguished French psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieu, has brought together and expanded several of his papers revolving around his original concept of 'the skin ego'. Readers of his work in the French literature will be familiar with most of the ideas elaborated here (the author estimates, however, that about half his material is new). Those unfamiliar with Anzieu will discover a wide-ranging, scholarly, and literate analytic sensibility, whose focus is on the mapping of early psychic experience, its roots in bodily functions, and the development of the self in an interpersonal matrix. This attention to the earliest phase of development is in the tradition of Melanie Klein and analysts of the English object-relations school influenced by her, who, like Anzieu, were attempting to conceptualize the psychopathology of schizoid and borderline patients. The author approaches this subject through many avenues, including biology and physiology, mythology and literature, theory and research in infant development, and clinical studies. The result is a very complex amalgam that is alternately original and stimulating and obscure and frustrating, covering an enormous range of psychoanalytic topics.
One mark of this complexity is the reviewer's inability to present a concise summary of what the concept 'skin ego' is meant to convey. The term appears to refer to at least four related, but by no means identical constructs. (1) The skin ego is a structure of the mind, 'preprogrammed' at birth (p. 5) in potential form (p. 102), a precursor to the ego (p. 115) or 'the ego in its original state' (p. 84), deriving as Freud noted from the body surface as a projection of that surface (pp. 136, 153); thus, a contribution to ego psychology and the early development of the emerging structure, 'ego'. (2) It is a mental representation (p. 101) of maternal holding. 'The skin ego is part of the mother' (p. 98), that is, a chronologically