You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The concepts of the primeval skin ego, psychic envelope, and related pre-ego containing and wrapping functions elaborated respectively by Esther Bick, Didier Anzieu, and Francis Tustin occupy an important position in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. The psychic envelope begins as a virtual mental protostructure (“proto” because it is not yet based on fully symbolized representations) that holds the budding mind together pending further developments. With maturity, the enveloping functions adopt symbolized, metaphoric form (for example, the aesthetic use of cloth, the analytic framework), but can regress to more concrete and pathological forms. The aforementioned authors based their ideas on a cluster of specific allusions to the
The current version of this paper was presented at the Fourth Francis Tustin International Conference, “From the Black Hole of Nothingness to the Emergence of Meaning,” May 1-3, 2008, Tel-Aviv, Israel. A previous version of this paper was read before the Israel Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Tel-Aviv, June 2001. Warm thanks to Professor Gerhard Fichtner, Ph.D., Institute of Ethics and the History of Medicine, University of Tübingen, for providing me access to the German language concordances of the texts and correspondence of Sigmund Freud, and to Michael Molnar, Director of Research at the Freud Museum, London, for the use of Freud's personal library.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 64, ed. Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich (Yale University Press, copyright © 2009 by Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich).
idea of a psychic covering, barrier, or envelope in Freud's work. Yet they neglected one reference, hidden in Freud's analysis of the structure of jokes and humor: the “joke envelope”—die witzige Einkleidung. The present essay explores Freud's use of the term Einkleidung, including his intriguing idea that a joke requires three people whereas a dream does not and the fact that Freud nowhere speaks of a “dream envelope.” I take the “joke envelope” beyond its original context and posit a relationship between laughter and the early, normative traumas of breathing, crying, and loss, and the dawn of rhythmic envelopes that enable mentalization. Jokes and joking symbolically repeat the early rupture and rapture of breathing and self-other differentiation and the internalization of maternal containing and envelopment.