Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis

S. Cavanagh, A. Failler, R. Hurst, S. Cavanagh, A. Failler, R. Hurst

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349349418, 9780230365063
• eBook ISBN: 9781137300041
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

An interdisciplinary study of skin bridging cultural and psychoanalytic theory to consider how the body's "exterior" is central to human subjectivity and relations. The authors explore racialization, body modification, self-harm, and comedic representations of skin, drawing from the clinical domain, visual arts, popular culture, and literature.

1

From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope: An Introduction to the Work of Didier Anzieu

Marc Lafrance

In works like The Skin Ego, A Skin for Thought and Psychic Envelopes, French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu presents an unprecedented account of the relationship between mind and body. In this unique approach to human subjectivity, Anzieu sees the body’s surface—its skin—as a crucial constituent of the mind’s structures and functions. As biographer Catherine Chabert (1996) points out, Anzieu’s work on skin and subjectivity has won him widespread recognition as one of France’s most important proponents of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Despite his importance, however, Anzieu is less well-known to Anglo-American cultural theorists than his now legendary predecessor Jacques Lacan. That is, unlike Lacan’s abstract, language-centered theories, Anzieu’s more concrete, body-centered theories are often unfamiliar to or overlooked by those outside the French-speaking world.¹ In what follows, then, I provide a brief introduction to Anzieu’s “psychoanalysis of skin.” I begin by contextualizing his work while explaining how it is in many respects a response to Lacan and what became known in late twentieth-century France as le lacanisme. After having situated Anzieu’s work in relation to Lacan’s, I present his notions of the skin ego and the psychic envelope while describing how they make his developmental model a non-dualist and, indeed, a non-deterministic one. By pointing to the range of ways in which Anzieu’s approach allows for a move beyond dualism and determinism, I hope to show that it has the potential to provide contemporary cultural theorists with new tools for thinking of human subjectivity as “completely psychic, utterly somatic, essentially intersubjective and intercorporeal, constantly changing [...] and fundamentally located in space and time” (Lafrance, 2009, p. 19).

Didier Anzieu and contemporary cultural theory

Cultural theorists have been calling for new approaches to human subjectivity for some time. In her groundbreaking book Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth A. Grosz makes exactly this call and, in doing so, urges cultural theorists to formulate new frameworks for making sense of the self. Grosz writes:

[We] must avoid the impasse posed by dichotomous accounts of the person which divide the subject into the mutually exclusive categories of mind and body. Although within our intellectual heritage there is no language in which to describe such concepts, no terminology that does not succumb to versions of this polarisation, some kind of understanding of embodied subjectivity, of psychical corporeality, needs to be developed. We need an account which refuses reductionism [and] resists dualism. [...] The narrow constraints our culture has put on the ways in which our materiality can be thought means that altogether new conceptions of corporeality [...] need to be developed.

(Grosz, 1994, pp. 21–2)

Grosz suggests that cultural theorists use the model of the moebius strip when attempting to develop “some kind of understanding of embodied subjectivity [or] psychical corporeality.”² A topological construct, the moebius strip can be described as a three-dimensional figure eight or, put differently, a flat ribbon twisted once and attached end-to-end to form a twisted surface. For Grosz, this construct is useful insofar as it illustrates how insides and outsides are both irreducible to and constitutive of one another. The model of the moebius strip can, therefore, be seen as a non-dualist and non-deterministic way of understanding the soma as completely psychic and the psyche as utterly somatic.

In her award-winning book Sexing the Body, Anne Fausto-Sterling reiterates the relevance of Grosz’s model, arguing that in order to arrive at a satisfying account of embodied subjectivity, a “dual systems” approach is necessary. For Fausto-Sterling, this approach requires that three principles be kept in view: first, nature and nurture are “indivisible”; second, “all organisms [...] are active beings from fertilisation until death”; and third, “no single approach” can provide us with the “truth” of the human subject (Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 235). Like Grosz, then, Fausto-Sterling argues for an approach that sees the terms of mind/body, self/other and nature/culture as both produced by and productive of one another.

If Grosz and Fausto-Sterling emphasize the importance of frameworks that allow for “an understanding of selfhood as constituted equally through a substantive materiality and through an attention to affect, beliefs and values,” then Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey emphasize the range of ways in which these sorts of frameworks are now being forged across the field (Shildrick, 2008, p. 31). In their landmark collection Thinking Through the Skin, Ahmed and Stacey argue that many of those forging these frameworks are doing so—at least in part—to challenge the “disembodying” accounts of subjectivity “brought centre-stage by the impact of dominant models of structuralism and poststructuralism, which placed language both literally and metonymically at the centre of theories of culture” (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001, p. 4). The challenge to structuralist and post-structuralist paradigms has resulted in the arrival of two new figures on the Anglo-American scene: phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu. Indeed, according to Ahmed and Stacey, the work of these two figures opens up new ways of thinking about subjectivity as always already embodied and, in doing so, breaks down the binary oppositions that tend to pervade other accounts. Ultimately, the turn to Merleau-Ponty and Anzieu is, as Ahmed and Stacey put it, “symptomatic of a more general move toward a model of embodiment that facilitates an understanding of the processes through which bodies are lived and imagined in more visceral and substantial ways” (p. 9).

To be sure, neither Merleau-Ponty nor Anzieu is—strictly speaking—new to the Anglo-American scene. In fact, both have been discussed and debated by cultural theorists since at least the early 1990s. And although Merleau-Ponty has, over the course of the last two decades, received more attention than Anzieu, current trends in cultural theory suggest that this might be starting to change (see, for instance, Cataldi, 1993; Matthews, 2002; Olkowski and Morley, 1999; Olkowski and Weiss, 2006; Weiss, 1999). Anzieu’s work has been given a prominent place in a number of recent monographs, including Claudia Benthien’s Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (2002), Steven Connor’s The Book of Skin (2004), Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1998) and, above all, Naomi Segal’s Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch (2009). Anzieu’s work has, moreover, been taken up by cultural theorists interested in a wide range of issues such as body image, community relations, fashion, pregnancy and racial identity (Brain, 2002; Pacteau, 1994; Tyler, 2001; Tate, 2005; Walkerdine, 2010). Yet, despite the fact that Anzieu’s psychoanalysis of skin has been taken up in a number of important ways, no clear and comprehensive introduction to it currently exists. In what follows, then, I endeavor to provide precisely this sort of introduction.

Didier Anzieu and contemporary French psychoanalysis

Didier Anzieu is an intriguing figure in contemporary French psychoanalysis. A high-profile critic of Jacques Lacan, Anzieu is remembered by many as “the first to confront the master” (see Petot, 2010).³ The work of the master had, according to Anzieu, become an orthodoxy and—like all orthodoxies—it had become dogmatic. Determined to resist this dogmatism, Anzieu began publicly confronting Lacan in 1953 when, at an international conference, he challenged one of Lacan’s first papers on the role of language in the unconscious. At the end of Lacan’s paper, Anzieu condemned him for having presented language as “representative of the totality of the field of psychoanalysis, and of the totality of human praxis” (Anzieu, 2000b, p. 173).⁴ Fifteen years later, Anzieu’s condemnation continued in an article titled “Against Lacan” and published in La Quinzaine littéraire. In the article, Anzieu argues that Lacan’s work is a “heresy founded on postulates more philosophical than psychoanalytic” characterized by a “triple deviation of thought, speech and practice” (Anzieu, 2000a, p. 181).⁵ Anzieu’s spirited critique of Lacan and his language-driven approach to psychoanalysis reached its peak in the late 1980s when Anzieu was interviewed by fellow psychoanalyst Gilbert Tarrab. Over the course of the interviews, Anzieu argues that he and Lacan differ in two key ways: first, in terms of their models of the unconscious; and second, in terms of their approaches to analytic technique. It is, therefore, to these differences that I now turn.⁶

According to Anzieu, Lacan’s linguistic model of the unconscious is problematic for a number of reasons. Based on the work of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure (1983) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963), this model encourages the analyst to focus on deciphering and dissecting the “key signifiers” of the patient’s free-associations (see Anzieu and Tarrab, 1990, pp. 35–6). Once deciphered and dissected, these signifiers are then used by the analyst to make sense of the patient’s unconscious fantasies. In Anzieu’s view, however, this interpretative approach has little to do with helping the patient resolve the problems associated with his or her mode of mental functioning. Instead, it breeds dependence in the patient and, in doing so, undermines the usefulness of his or her analysis. For Anzieu, then, Lacan’s approach reorients the psychoanalytic project from one based on therapeutic self-exploration to one based on ostentatious and, at times, pernicious linguistic play. As Anzieu puts it:

All too often this consists on the psychoanalyst’s side—but should he still be called a psychoanalyst?—in a pure exercise of linguistic virtuosity. At best he replaces the patient’s word play with his own. At worst, by means of a sort of intellectual terrorism, he arbitrarily covers over the patient’s affective problems with distorting, preconceived knowledge.

(Anzieu and Tarrab, 1990, pp. 35–6)

If Anzieu complains about the nature of Lacan’s interpretations, he also complains about their relative infrequency. In his interview with Tarrab, Anzieu argues that Lacan’s technique de silence—or “systematic silence”—is premised on the idea that the analyst must refuse to act as a narcissistic mirror for the patient (pp. 33–60). By refusing to act in this way, the analyst frustrates the patient to the point where he or she regresses and reveals a range of unconscious fantasies. Face to face with these fantasies, the patient is then in a position to be able to make sense of the repressed desires they represent. Yet, according to Anzieu, Lacan’s systematic silence is an aggressive analytic tactic that has the potential to damage the patient; indeed, not only is Lacan’s refusal to interpret a violation of one of the most basic rules of analytic technique as set out by the International Psychoanalytic Association, but it is also, in some situations, what prompts the patient to relive painful primitive traumas. Anzieu explains: “We consider that the analyst’s essential tool is interpretation, which must be communicated at the appropriate moment, neither too early nor too late, and with restraint” (p. 34). Anything else, according to Anzieu, “can open the way not to the necessary journey through depression, but to a useless and dangerous [collapse]” (p. 37).

If, as I mentioned earlier, Anzieu and Lacan differ on analytic technique, then they also differ on how they understand the unconscious. As Anzieu points out: “I myself (and this is both what makes me opposed to Lacan and makes me think that I am profoundly Freudian while at the same time being only moderately orthodox with respect to [prevailing] psychoanalytic theories)—I myself would oppose the formula ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ with a formulation that is implicit in Freud ‘the unconscious is the body’” (p. 43). For Anzieu, Lacan’s model of the unconscious has led to a disproportionate emphasis on language in contemporary psychoanalysis.⁷ In fact, this emphasis has become so disproportionate that it can, according to Anzieu, be viewed as a kind of determinism. Interestingly, French psychoanalyst Didier Houzel argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has been characterized by not one but two kinds of determinism: a linguistic determinism on the one hand and a biological determinism on the other. Houzel writes:

We can say, in fact, that psychoanalytic research in our country was more or less divided between, on the one hand, a rigid structuralism that had no place for any process of transformation, or any sort of psychic dynamic, which evacuated all ideas of psychogenesis in order to privilege a pre-established and transcendental structure, and on the other hand a reductionist view that tied psychic development to its biological foundations, that misrecognized the specifically psychic level of organization characteristic of the human being.

(Houzel, 2000, p. 170)⁸

Houzel credits Anzieu’s approach to the body and, more specifically, the skin with having freed French psychoanalysis from these two determinisms. “The metaphor of the skin ego or the psychic envelope,” explains Houzel, “has [...] given the psyche back its corporeal weight, which structuralism had denied it, without at the same time reducing it to the laws of biology” (p. 170). Indeed if, as Houzel suggests, Anzieu’s work on the skin ego and the psychic envelope has given contemporary French psychoanalysts new tools for thinking beyond dualism and determinism, then I suggest that it can give contemporary cultural theorists the same.

Didier Anzieu and the psychoanalysis of skin

“Since the Renaissance,” remarks Didier Anzieu, “Western thought has been obsessed with a particular epistemological conception, whereby the acquisition of knowledge is seen as a process of breaking through an outer shell to reach an inner core” (Anzieu, 1989, p. 9). In this remark, he is pointing to a long-standing tradition in Western knowledge production: that of privileging inside over outside and depth over surface. This tradition is not, however, to be found in Anzieu’s approach to the subject. In fact, for Anzieu, somatic exteriority has all the explanatory power of psychic interiority and should, therefore, be taken seriously. Over the course of my introduction to his notions of the skin ego and the psychic envelope, I discuss how and why Anzieu takes somatic exteriority as seriously as he does.

The Psychogenesis of the Skin Ego

In the first six months of life, the infant finds itself in a state of what Freud calls Hilflosigkeit or “helplessness” (Freud, 2001c, pp. 283–397). In this state, the infant does not yet have a fully fledged ego; instead, it has what is known as a “body ego.” According to Anzieu, the body ego provides the infant with a range of tools for moving beyond its dependence on the nurturing environment. Both elementary and essential, these tools consist of “a disposition to integrate diverse sensory data [as well as] a tendency to move outwards towards objects and to develop strategies towards them” (Anzieu, 1989, p. 58). In this way, the body ego provides the infant with the building blocks of a fully fledged ego.

Anzieu argues that the body ego is always already a skin ego. To understand why he makes this argument, we must turn our attention to what Freud calls the “primary processes,” for it is in and through these processes that the body ego, or indeed the skin ego, functions. According to Freud, the primary processes refer to the most primitive way of being in the world—one in which the laws of space and time are unfamiliar and the distinctions of inside/outside, subject/object and self/other are for the most part unknown (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988a, pp. 339–41). More importantly, however, the primary processes refer to a mode of mental functioning that comes before thought; indeed, for thought to take place, the ego must be reality-adapted. Without a reality-adapted ego and, by extension, the capacity for thought, the infant makes sense of the world around it in the only way it can: through its body.

Anzieu maintains that many of the functions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates and Prints
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Enfolded: Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis
• 1 From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope: An Introduction to the Work of Didier Anzieu
• 2 Comedic Skin Eruptions: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Austin Powers
• 3 The Surfacing of the Self: The Clothing-Ego
• 4 The Red Thing: Fabrics and Fetishism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
• 5 Writing Skin: Esthetics and Transcendence in Junichiro¯ Tanizaki’s “The Tattooer”
• 6 The Skin-Textile in Cosmetic Surgery
• 7 Narrative Skin Repair: Bearing Witness to Mediatized Representations of Self-Harm
• 8 Split Skin: Adolescent Cutters and the Other
• 9 Disrupting the Skin-Ego: See-Sickness and the Real in The Flagellation of a Virgin
• 10 “White Trash:” Abject Skin in Film Reviews of Monster
• Index