Chapter 6 Trauma and the Body

In all the preceding chapters I have illustrated different manifestations of psychic pain that are played out on the body, as it were – desperate attempts often to ‘cure’ the pain through changing the body. In all the cases described, the body was the site that exposed developmental deficits as well as the site for the enactment of psychic conflicts.

Like shedding layers of skin, Almodóvar’s latest narrative painfully unravels to reveal the rawness of losses that cannot be mourned. The skin – that ‘scrim’ on which we project our fantasies and fears (Mifflin, 1997) – is used here to good effect to examine deeply psychoanalytic themes that are very relevant to our understanding of the body.

The title of the film takes its central character’s profession – Dr Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a tormented plastic surgeon – and turns it into a metaphor for exploring two central themes: the complex relationship between the given body and our identity and the particular use made of the body, namely the projection into the body of the object – the use of their body by proxy, as it were – in order to manage traumatic events that cannot be represented in the mind.

In characteristic Almodóvar fashion, as in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), High Heels (1991) and All About My Mother (1999), this most recent offering emphasizes the human body as the site for the negotiation of identity and its traumatic collapse. The Skin I Live In is a timely film that gives pause for thought given contemporary culture’s preoccupation with the body as a project (Giddens, 1991) within which it can be manipulated at will and without conscious acknowledgement of the developmental history imprinted on the body – one that, as this film powerfully reminds us, can never be erased no matter how extensive the transformation of the body (see also Chapters 1, 4 and 5).

The film’s story is based on a French novel by Thierry Jonquet, Mygale, which was eventually turned into a horror film by Georges Franju (Eyes W