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Jorge Ulnik has written an impressive book investigating the psychic skin and its usefulness in psychoanalysis. The book will be of interest to analytical psychologists as well as psychoanalysts who work with infantile mental states, attachment disorders, and difficulties which revolve around both the physical and the psychic skin. Ulnik looks at the skin and its disorders from a number of different perspectives. As a
psychoanalyst trained and practising in Argentina he has focused his professional life on the understanding and treatment of psychosomatic disorders, especially those which involved dermatology and in particular eczema and psoriasis. For a number of years he has been a psychoanalytic consultant to a department of dermatology in Buenos Aires.
The first three chapters summarize and reflect upon the work of Freud, Didier Anzieu and other psychoanalysts as they relate to the study of the psychic skin. According to Freud, ‘the skin is the erogenous zone par excellence, and according to Ulnik it is also ‘the entrance and the exit door for many emotions and situations which mark us’. Freud's understanding of the skin as a privileged erotogenic zone comes from his study of infantile sexuality (oral, anal, genital stages) and the expression of affect (blushing, goose pimples, etc.).
While Ulnik looks carefully at Freud's writing on the skin in relationship to the theory of drives, and traces Freud's conceptualization of the skin in terms of infantile sexuality, I found it curious that he did not mention an important footnote that appears in ‘The ego and the id’ (Freud , p. 26). In that footnote Freud states,
The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body (the skin). It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides … representing the superficies of the mental apparatus.
It is possible that Ulnik's project was to emphasize classical Freudian drive theory, and to look