The Skin House: A Psychoanalytic Reading of 3-Iron1

Man has always projected himself into his architectonic objects. He has designed and seen them as anthropomorphic creatures; he has experienced and lived in them as if they were parts of his own Self, where spaces are expanded and shrunk to fit in with his habits and actions, to the point of becoming for him a sort of second skin, made in the image and likeness of his own way of being.

The house has always been present in man's dreams as a projection of the Self's private spaces, as a representation of emotional states or of attempts to provide new meanings. The house is an object that lends itself like no other to symbolize and represent psychic reality, understood as a bridge linking the inner world to the external one.

In a dream or a story, a house can then manifest itself as open, a meeting place where one can socialize with others; or shut, a protective barrier against persecutory objects. Thus, the house manages to communicate through the thickness of its walls and its armour-plated doors the impenetrability of defences built in the distant past against external enemies, or to represent through windows opening over vast balconies an inner space that gets wider and wider the more we explore it, in an ongoing process of rebuilding and restoration.

And so we hear, from dreams or indeed any other analytic narratives, of walls crumbling because of the damage caused by seepages, or of foundations being laid for new buildings. We have doors that open up, one after the other, on ever new spaces, or which, on the contrary, remain forever shut; we share confused trajectories through shadowy rooms, or sunny balconies full of flowers, long corridors leading to countless bedrooms, the discovery of inimaginable spaces, forgotten closets, large empty living rooms, small studies filled with objects.

Cinema has often portrayed with great subtlety and precision these symbolizations, these extensions and representations of the Self, by using the house as a metaphor to c