The Skin-Ego

“I'm going to read this book by Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego”, the patient said at the beginning of her session. She had had a dream that had interrupted her sleep and left her in a great state of anxiety: she was having her shower when, all of a sudden, her skin became detached from her body and covered the shower wall panels. At that time, she felt abandoned by everything: her husband was interested in another woman, her work colleagues wanted her to leave and she had had to undergo a biopsy for a dark spot on her skin that she feared might be a melanoma. All this made her feel depressed. The biopsy turned out to be negative, but there was a story connected with the dark skin. She was of mixed race, and her mother had found her too dark, darker than her brothers and sisters. When she was small, her mother had even advised her to drink a lot of milk to whiten her skin.

She was right to want to read Anzieu's (2016 [1985]) The Skin-Ego. Equally, her therapist was right not to count too much on this reading for reconciling her with her skin. If she had thought of a book to give meaning to her dream, it was perhaps because she did not feel well contained in her sessions. Was the “psychic skin” to which Anzieu refers lacking at this moment? In what respect could psychic treatment deprive her of her personal identity? Could the container, the shower closet, appropriate the content? She associated: “Did

my mother want my hide? (“Ma mere voulait-elle ma peau?”). Psychic treatment recreates conditions that are favourable to such an experience of persecution through the great proximity that it affords, stimulating the “instinct for attachment”, the baby's primitive instinct of attachment to its mother (John Bowlby, taken up by Didier Anzieu), but also the heart-wrenching feelings that can follow separations, if the attachment is formed in the pathological mode of “adhesive identification”, according to Donald Meltzer. As the holidays were approaching, this patient said she