The Psychic Envelope

This term constitutes an open model and covers various fields: sensorial envelopes (tactile, sonorous, olfactory, visual), memory envelope, dream envelope, envelope of excitation, envelope of suffering, envelopes of the psychoanalyst, etc.

The interest in psychic envelopes reveals a change of perspective: attention is turned away from psychic contents and focused on the containers. Incidentally, they are not passive receptacles but rather processual devices with a capacity for transforming what is received. We are indebted to Wilfred Bion for the first studies on the container/contained relationship and for the emphasis placed on the transformations that the maternal container (or analyst) can carry out on the child's projections (or the analysand's). The process is based on what he calls the capacity for reverie, which is an intuitive mode of thinking that makes it possible to transform unassimilable feelings (beta elements) into mentally assimilable elements (alpha elements).

Didier Anzieu developed the notion of psychic envelope into a real concept. Although the term appeared in 1976 in connection with the sound envelope of the ego, and the word “envelope” appears often in the first edition of The Skin-Ego in 1985, it was not until 1986 that the concept was fully developed.

Anzieu distinguishes essentially between two psychic envelopes, which differ in their structure and their form. The external layer, the stimulus barrier, which he considers as a membrane, is turned towards the outer world. The internal layer, considered as a sensitive pellicule, has a receptive interface function. It receives external and internal stimuli and brings them into relationship with each other by giving them a meaning; it is a surface of inscription.

The analytic frame presents in his view a homology with the structure of the psychical apparatus. The rule of abstinence corresponds to the stimulus barrier, and the rule of free association to the surface of inscription. For him the interl