La peau et le toucher (thème et variations)

Abstract

The skin, a very sophisticated organ, strong and fragile, demarcates, includes and wraps up. It is the most visible and can be hidden or modified. The skin succumbs to its environment feelings, to the look, to the gestural or symbolic touch of the emotions. In the first weeks of infancy, the nerve and skin cells are confused. Although these two tissues will separate, information will never cease to circulate between them. The mother-child strong bond is anchored through the skin. The touch is the very first sense to appear and, of all the sensory organs, is the most critical. After the presentation of this central theme, the author will explain many variations. (1) The skin allows us to take into account the sensory clinical realm. Is there, for the psychoanalysts, a censorship of the touch concept? This prohibition, necessary for a psychoanalytic cure, however allows a kind of acknowledgment of the touch and skin. In the psychoanalytic relaxation, and specifically for the input of inductions, the touch takes its meaning when it enters a process that contains and develops it. (2) Over the course of human history, the skin has always been subject to cares and of embellishment. It also represents a form of social language and a wish for differentiation. It is the utmost organ for intimate relationship. The religious language teaches us that Adam and Eve looked at each other, each discovering the other and the sex differentials. Texts on touch and its prohibition seem to come from the Christian New Testament. “Noli me tangere” (“Don’t touch me”) is a reminder of a major taboo in all cultures with respect to touch. The psychoanalysis was born in the western culture but was strongly influenced by the Christian culture. (3) Of course, the Skin Ego, a wrapping of mothering, is discussed with a psychanalytic viewpoint, with notions of psychic envelopes, of container, of borders, of surface and as an exchange area. The very first relation known by the child with her mother comes through the touch (skins contacts) and her mother's voice. The quality of this relation will give the child a feeling of security that he needs and to better live his missing and arousals, otherwise too hard for him. On the skin of each person are visible, hidden, invisible, changed, modified marks linked with its contacts with his first objects. The skin wraps the whole body, the Skin Ego wraps all the psychic complex. (4) The psychopathological and psychosomatic variations of the skin are rich. The psychological consequences of dermatosis are known. As all sensory organs, the skin is the seat of neurotic phenomenon of classic conversion. It is all too natural to discuss the psychosomatic aspects. This has always been a critical opening. Any affective state comes with a somatic state. We very well know that a child in face of a deaf environment to his psychic suffering will use his somatic suffering to grasp her mother's attention that he is missing. Critical shortcomings in such a relation will favour the pathological realm, especially the somatisation, somatic outcome of repressed feelings or drives. Other pathologies can appear like the psychosomatic aspects whereby the patient gives visible material, but meaningless material other than what is offered or the allergic object relation, a kind of mental process “inscribed” and set very early in infancy. Looking for the psychic origin of an illness begins to appear as a false problem. The skin, at the junction of the self and the other, is an infinite place of exchanges with the external world.