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This reviewer's informal and random sampling of reactions to the English title of Le Moi-peau turned up associations consistently on the violent side of the connotative spectrum: a movie about cannibalism, lamp shades, and desiccated skin separated from the body it originally covered. It is reasonable to suppose that the verb to
skin influences these associations. In French such a verb is not a cognate of the noun. Moreover, idioms about skin include many about comfort and protection: être bien dans la peau means to feel comfortable with oneself; avoir la peau douce, literally, to have soft skin, also means to be a comforting, welcoming person. Since one of Anzieu's main tenets is that important functions of the Skin Ego involve supporting, containing and making coherent the representations of the body/self, this semantic incongruity makes The Skin Ego most difficult to approach and appreciate where it is most effective, as an evocation of subjective states of fragility and identity confusion.
At a metaphoric level, The Skin Ego sensitizes clinicians to the connections between subjective states of physical vulnerability, incompleteness and body part confusion, and the representations of those body states in language especially as the words appear in the discourse of severely narcissistic, borderline, and psychotic patients. Anzieu's concept of the Skin Ego is a welcome elaboration of the shape in which the body ego is experienced by these patients and on the clinical utility of making them aware of it.
It would be helpful to summarize the concept of the Skin Ego in more detail, but the idea is so multifunctional, its presentation by Anzieu at once so elusive and so overconcrete, that the task is extremely difficult. Here, instead, is one of Anzieu's more explicit definitions:
a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of t