The Infancy of Affection

Chapter 2 considers Wordsworth’s accounts of very early life and its passions, from early drafts of the poem that would become The Prelude to the 1807 ‘Ode’. It reads Wordsworth’s poems as ambivalent narratives of human development, placing them alongside related accounts of genesis and individuation in psychoanalytic writing and criticism. It puts Wordsworth’s poetics of infancy into dialogue with Didier Anzieu’s tactile account of an early ‘skin ego’ and Mutlu Konik Blasing’s developmental theorization of lyric. In this context, Wordsworth’s poems resist normative narratives of development, and testify to a kind of early pleasure spread so widely that it becomes an inseparable element of perception itself, suggesting a formative role comparable to (but pointedly at odds with) psychoanalytic accounts of an ‘original’ trauma.

Resolving Late Consequences of Prenatal Stress with Dynamic Tandem Hypnotherapy (DTH)

Dynamic Tandem Hypnotherapy (DTH) was evolved more than ten years ago by the authors. It designates a kind of group-hypnotherapy, which is used for resolving late pathological consequences of prenatal traumas. In tandem hypnotherapy sessions more than two persons take part in: the patient and the co-therapist, who touch each other and go into a trance together; while the hypnotherapist keeps the distance. A mutual attunement is developed between the participants being in a tandem trance, which seems as serving for the therapeutic effect. Touch is considered as having the possibility to create calm, safety, and love, which are viewed to be lost or confined by unbearable emotions of prenatal traumas. Moreover, touch is viewed as the mother of perceptions, the ‟skin-ego,” which already functions when there is no central nervous system developed yet. Thus consequences of prenatal stress can be healed with such a therapeutic approach at the same functional level on which the trauma occurred. Four case vignettes will be shown with interpretations upon how DTH works.

Encapsulated Skin-Ego and Anti-Corporeal Manichaean Myth of Femininity in Transmission

We propose, within the context of a Skin Model of Ego Development (SMED), that Didier Anzieu’s work of the skin-ego is a useful entry point into understanding the Manichaean mythic view of femininity as creating an encapsulated skin-ego, that tends to enclose the feminine object in a defensive-isolative capsule, through culturally transmitted ideals, shaped by misogyny. Utilizing this perspective, the unconscious and the myth are seen as being, in general terms, intertwined and expressed in epidermal psychoanalytic dialogue. As a result, the psyche and the body are radically split from one another through the dysfunctioning of the skin-ego that is an asexualized phantasmal-mythic dome of ‘womanhood’, which preserves misogynistic norms and ideals and blocks any possibility of femininity as a subjecthood. Moreover, a culturally transmitted myth-fueled psychic alienation is conveyed through a linguistic mythic time machine, which, in turn, results in transmitting a mythic mindset from one generation to another. In this sense, it is of utmost importance to mention that dysfunctional skin-ego leads to dysfunctional thinking ego therein the result is the isolated mind. Encapsulated thinking ego rejects embodiment, spontaneity, and connectedness with anything that has to do with emotional life. To enrich our discussion, the Matrix movies are used to discuss how the Manichaean system of thought is in motion and survives in transmission.

Superego and Will to Dominate Over Ego

The study of superego and ideology within the context of bodily ego and skin as a psychic wrapping is vital to understanding the intersubjective aspects of those individuals who are living in a mal-attuned or extreme situation. This paper investigates superego’s will to dominate over the skin-ego to satisfy the id by itself and takes an intermediate position between id and external reality. The authors further attempt is to conceptualize superego formation in a skin model of ego development in a synthetic way and redefine ideology within the context of this conceptualization. The term Encapsulated Skin-Ego may explain how when the skin-ego is dysfunctional, a certain part of superego comes into being a psychic wrapping instead of the skin-ego and has left its developmental position. Consequently, the skin-ego takes refuge in the encapsulated skin-ego to be secure. In addition, ideology has a hegemonic character and wishes to control social symbols to continue its domination over people’s minds and bodies. Ideology tries to encapsulate the skin-ego and deprive it of natural sensations to lead it to an isolated corner ultimately to suppress the thinking ego. Two-case studies present the psychoanalytic application of the authors’ ideas.

“The Skin is the Cradle of the Soul”: Didier Anzieu on the Skin-Ego, Boundaries, and Boundlessness

Didier Anzieu’s notion of the skin-ego builds on a long psychoanalytic tradition that began with Freud’s idea that the ego is first and foremost a body ego, a projection in the psyche of the surface of the body, or, in other words, the idea that psychic phenomena are always embodied. An interface, a container for the ego, but also its origin: thus did Anzieu conceptualize the skin’s psychic function. The baby’s fantasy of having a common skin with the mother is the concrete starting point for a development that, through the prohibition on touching, leads to the experience of being a separate and individual person. Psychoanalytic work with severe mental disorders makes it necessary to investigate deficiencies in the skin-ego’s containing function before the patient’s psychic contents can be explored. In the psychoanalytic situation, the analyst’s words replace tactile contact and thereby contribute to healing injuries to the skin-ego. The clinical implications of Anzieu’s theoretical model are illustrated by examples from psychoanalyses of children and adults. The close connection between touch, psychic envelopes, and thinking opens a wider perspective on the necessity of setting limits to violence, against both nature and human beings.

Orwell’s Tattoos: Skin, Guilt, and Magic in ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936)

This paper considers the significance of the talismanic tattoos on Orwell’s hands, which he acquired in Burma during his time as a colonial policeman from 1922 to 1927. It examines historical evidence suggesting that such tattoos were understood differently by British and Burmese people, and concludes that, for Orwell, their meaning was multilayered: first, they were a means of understanding Burmese culture more intimately; second, they were a psychological attempt to cathect his feelings of guilt about his complicity in colonial injustice by remaking his ‘skin-ego’; and third, they were a gesture towards the possibility that inscription—first in the form of tattoos, and later in the written word—might be a way to understand and process his self-alienation. The paper goes on to examine Orwell’s 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ in the light of Orwell’s interest in inscription, and traces its themes of mark-making, magic, and authorship, arguing that these ideas enabled him, at a crucial moment in his development as a writer, to map his experiences of colonialism onto his wider commitment to anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian politics.

‘The skin of words’: trauma and skin in Watt

Michiko Tsushima’s chapter discloses the relationship between trauma and skin in considering Watt as a ‘skin of words’ woven by Beckett—a psychic skin that he tried to recover—and, at the same time, as something that reveals the ‘force and truth’ of trauma. First, with the help of Didier Anzieu’s concept of ‘the Skin Ego’, Tsushima explores the possibility that Beckett’s act of writing Watt can be considered an attempt to recover the psychic skin by weaving a ‘skin of words’. This act of writing has a therapeutic aspect. She also argues that Watt explores the ‘force and truth’ of trauma which cannot be resolved or assimilated. Tsushima shows how the ‘force and truth’ of trauma manifests itself as a violence to the surface of language, a force that disrupts the apparatus of linguistic representation.