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I am pleased to be presenting here three articles about the same film: Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In . This is quite exceptional for our Journal, but then Almodóvar is an exceptional filmmaker, and The Skin I Live In an exceptional movie, which well justifies the interest that psychoanalysis is showing in it. All three essays are informed by analytic thinking yet each author approaches this work from a different perspective. As a result our readers will be able to consider alternative, and often complementary, interpretations of the same filmic text.
Hoping the authors will forgive my oversimplification of the richness of their articles, I will anticipate here that Alessandra Lemma analyses the movie in the context of the experience of loss and of what she calls “the breakdown or perversion of the capacity to mourn”; Caron Harrang focuses on the psychological significance of the skin and on the Kohutian concept of narcissistic rage; and Domenico di Ceglie finds in the film's characters the personality dimensions of systemizing and empathizing, and a link between the inability to mourn the loss of an attachment figure and crossgender identification.