The psychic skin between individual and collective states of mind in trauma

Abstract

This article attempts to develop an argument about a relationship between the individual intra-psychic functioning and the social and political life in trauma. This relationship, it is argued, is mediated by the skin and sensations related to touch and the imagination of it. The deepest transformations of the individual self and a group’s political and social life seem to go through a rearrangement of the psychic skin as a means of development. Three examples show how the psychic skin operates at the point of intersection between the individual and group states of mind reshaping the individual self and group identity. One example is about the relationship between the fascist architecture in the city of Rome and the 1930s fascist political project of shaping a ‘New Man’; another is my understanding of the post-traumatic suffering and changes of my refugee patients who have survived torture, which is a trauma inflicted by a collective; and third, it is an hypothesis of the role which the Western Wall in Jerusalem had in reshaping Israeli identities on the backdrop of traumatic history and wider tensions of two peoples on that disputed territory.