PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION

From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope: An

Introduction to the Work of Didier Anzieu

Marc Lafrance
Concordia University

To cite this article: Lafrance, M. (2013). From the skin ego to the psychic envelope: An
introduction to the work of Didier Anzieu. In S. L. Cavanagh, A. Failler & R. A. J. Hurst
(Eds.), Skin, culture and psychoanalysis (pp. 16-44). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300041_2

PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope: An
Introduction to the Work of Didier Anzieu1

Marc Lafrance
Concordia University

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.2 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 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:
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 2

[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’. 3 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 poststructuralist
paradigms has resulted in the arrival of two new figures on the Anglo-American scene:
Lafrance 3

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
towards 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, Steven Connor’s The
Book of Skin, Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1994), 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; Walkerdine, 2010; Pacteau, 1994; Tyler, 2001; Tate, 2005). 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 endeavour 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).4 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). 5 Fifteen years later, Anzieu’s condemnation
continued in an article entitled ‘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
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 4

and practice’ (Anzieu, 2000a, p. 181).6 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.7
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
Lafrance 5

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. 8 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)9

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
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 6

process of breaking through an outer shell to reach an inner core’ (Anzieu, 1989, p. 9). In
this remark, he is pointing to a longstanding 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 of the body in the pre-ego phase are played
out on and through the skin. Taking the functions of containment, protection, and
inscription as his three prime examples, he shows that the skin operates as a surrogate ego
for the infant, since it is the skin that performs the vital tasks the fully-fledged ego will
eventually perform. As one of Anzieu’s colleague’s, British psychoanalyst Esther Bick, puts
it: ‘In its most primitive form, the parts of the personality are felt to have no binding force
amongst themselves and must therefore be held together in a way that is experienced by
them passively, by the skin functioning as a boundary’ (Bick, 1968, p. 484). The infant’s skin
Lafrance 7

can, therefore, be seen as a sort of bodily blueprint for how the fully-fledged ego will
construct itself.
According to Anzieu, the skin ego is ‘a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes
use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing
psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body’ (Anzieu, 1989,
p. 61). Put differently, Anzieu defines the skin ego as a mental representation of the
experience of the body’s surface used by the infant’s emerging ego in order to construct
itself as a container capable of containing psychic contents. The skin ego is not, however,
straightforwardly given to the infant; it must be achieved. As one of Anzieu’s key influences,
British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, points out: ‘The ego is based on a body ego, but
it is only when all goes well that the person of the baby starts to be linked with the body
and the body-functions, with the skin as the limiting membrane’ (Winnicott, 1976b, p. 59).
To understand how ‘the person of the baby starts to be linked with the body and the body-
functions, with the skin as the limiting membrane’, we must look more closely at the
infant’s primitive experiences of the skin.
The newborn baby has but a rudimentary understanding of where its own body ends
and the body of the other begins. That said, the skin is significant in the life of the newborn
insofar as it is the site on and through which its first impressions of both itself and those
around it are brought into being. What is more, because the baby functions according to
the primary processes, it experiences its skin and the stimuli impinging on it through
phantasy.10 As Anzieu explains, the baby’s phantasies relate not only to its own skin, but to
the skin of its caregiver. That is, in these early stages of development, when the baby is for
the most part unaware of its own bodily boundaries, it perceives the caregiver’s skin as its
own; in other words, it experiences what Anzieu calls the phantasy of a ‘shared skin’
(Anzieu, 1989, pp. 41-6, 62-5). The baby, then, does not understand itself as a separate or
singular being at this point in its life. Instead, it experiences its own skin as
phantasmatically fused with that of its caregiver.
As the baby grows and becomes more mentally mature, it gradually develops a sense of
its own bodily space – a sense it gains, first and foremost, from its tactile exchanges with
its caregiver. These exchanges enable the infant to understand itself as a three-dimensional
container with insides and outsides. With this understanding comes a sense of
containment and, by extension, individuality. It is when the infant begins to make sense of
its body in individual and, indeed, individuated terms that the phantasy of the shared skin
gives way. Anzieu explains: ‘The next stage requires the suppression of this common skin
and the recognition that each has his or her own skin, and his or her own ego, a recognition
which does not come about without resistance and pain’ (1989, p. 63). The infant’s imagined
acquisition of an individual skin is, therefore, accompanied by the imagined rending of a
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 8

shared skin. For Anzieu, this imagined rending is experienced as a sort of phantasmatic
flaying since the infant has, up until this point, experienced the caregiver’s skin as its own.
The rending of the shared skin is a key moment for the infant. It is this moment – when
the infant realizes that it has its own skin and, by extension, its own insides and outsides –
that marks the infant’s transition from the realm of the shared skin to the realm of the skin
ego. More specifically, the acquisition of the skin ego marks the point at which the infant
develops the capacity to imagine itself as a three-dimensional being bound and contained
by the surface of its skin. In other words, the acquisition of the skin ego marks the point at
which the infant is able to transpose its somatic experiences of the skin onto the psychic
plane and figure them psychically. Anzieu explains:

The baby has a concrete representation of this envelope which is provided for it by
something of which it has frequent sensory experience (a sensory experience
intermingled with phantasies) – its skin. It is these cutaneous phantasies which
clothe its nascent Ego with a figurative representation, admittedly imaginary, but
which mobilizes […] what is most profound in us, our surface. (1989, p. 60)

In brief, the skin ego is a phantasmatic figuration which, given its primitive nature, can be
seen as an inner pictogram of the body’s superficial sensations. Once the infant is capable
of conjuring up this phantasmatic figuration or inner pictogram, the shared skin has been
left behind and the skin ego has been achieved.11
To acquire a skin ego is to acquire both a physical and a mental skin of one’s own – an
acquisition that does not take place, however, without the traumatic loss of the shared skin.
In fact, if Freud links the most formative developmental traumas to a phantasmatic genital
castration, then Anzieu links them to a phantasmatic rending of the shared skin (Freud,
2001a, pp. 136-57; Freud, 2001d, pp. 125-244). By linking the infant’s most formative traumas
to primitive experiences of the body and, more specifically, the skin, Anzieu can be seen to
displace the centrality of the oedipal complex. Not only does this displacement open up
interesting and innovative ways of thinking about how primitive trauma might shape the
human being’s relationship to his or her skin across the lifespan, but it also allows for a
developmental model that avoids the sexed and gendered essentialisms associated with the
Freudian and, by extension, Lacanian approaches (see Irigaray, 1985a & 1985b).12 For these
two reasons alone, Anzieu’s psychogenetic model is relevant to contemporary cultural
theorists.
Anzieu’s model is, of course, relevant to cultural theorists for a number of other reasons.
First, it emphasizes the fact that the infant must learn how to make its skin its own. In this
way, his approach provides us with a systematic framework for understanding how human
beings are active and agential bodily beings from the very beginning of life. Second, Anzieu
Lafrance 9

highlights the fact that the infant’s relationship to the caregiver’s body is crucially
constitutive of its relationship to its own body. As a result, his work gives us a
developmental approach that stresses the radically relational nature of embodied
experience. Third, Anzieu underscores the fact that the infant’s engagements with both its
own body and the body of the other are thoroughly bound up with unconscious phantasy.
Consequently, his approach offers us a rigorous way of thinking about the body’s parts and
processes as at once concretely somatic and abstractly psychic. In my view, then, Anzieu’s
three-part emphasis on agency, relationality, and phantasy corresponds not only with
Grosz’s call for ‘some kind of understanding of embodied subjectivity [or] psychical
corporeality’ but also with Fausto-Sterling’s call for a ‘dual-systems’ approach that sees the
terms of mind/body, self/other, and nature/culture as both produced by and productive of
one another.

The Structures and Functions of the Skin Ego

Up to this point, my allusions to the functions of the skin ego have related to those of
containment, protection, and inscription. These were the three functions that Anzieu chose
to discuss in his first paper, published in 1974, on the phenomenon of the skin ego (Anzieu,
1994, pp. 195-203). When, in 1985, Anzieu published an entire book on this phenomenon,
he expanded his list significantly: the skin ego now had nine functions instead of three.
This expanded list of functions consisted not only of containment, protection, and
inscription, but of maintenance, individuation, intersensoriality, sexualization, recharging,
and self-destruction. Anzieu revised his list again in 1995 and included all of the functions
mentioned earlier with the exception of the one relating to ‘self-destruction’. Though he
continued to discuss it elsewhere, Anzieu eliminated this function as he deemed it to be a
product of the death drive or, as he puts it, ‘the work of negative’ (Anzieu, 1995, p. 129),13
rather than a bona fide function of the skin ego.
The principle of anaclisis is a key part of how Anzieu makes sense of the structures and
functions of the skin ego. No exact synonym for anaclisis exists in English and no exact
translation of the French term étayage exists in English either. Generally speaking, anaclisis
refers to the ‘propping’, ‘supporting’, or, to use a skin metaphor, the ‘grafting’ of psychic
functions onto somatic functions. Anzieu explains:

Every psychical function develops by supporting itself upon a bodily function whose
workings it transposes on to the mental plane. Jean Laplanche recommends that the
concept of anaclisis be reserved for the support the sexual drives find in the organic
functions of self-preservation, but I want to give it a broader interpretation. The
psychical apparatus develops through successive stages of breaking with its
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 10

biological bases, breaks which on the one hand make it possible to escape from
biological laws and, on the other, make it necessary to look for an anaclitic
relationship of every psychical to a bodily function. (Anzieu, 1989, p. 96)

Though he himself does not mention it, Anzieu’s emphasis on anaclisis is consistent with
what has come to be known as Freud’s ‘psycho-physical parallelism’. This parallelism
presupposes ‘a neurophysiological process for every psychic state, but rejects the notion
that every property of the mind can be reduced to the properties of the body’ (Panhuysen,
1998, p. 39). Once somatic functions have been transposed onto the psychic plane, they are
no longer somatically-specific but psychically-specific; and, once they are psychically-
specific, they are propelled more by psychosocial forces than by neurophysiological forces.
As both Freud and Anzieu make clear, once organic functions have been transposed onto
the psychic plane, they take on a life of their own.
The first function of the skin ego is that of ‘maintenance’. In the same way the skin
supports the skeletal and muscular systems, the skin ego supports the psychic systems. This
function of the skin ego is achieved through the infant’s introjection of what Winnicott
calls ‘holding’; that is, the way in which the caregiver physically supports the baby’s body
(Winnicott, 1976c, pp. 37-55). As Anzieu explains: ‘The Skin Ego is a part of the mother –
particularly her hands – which has been interiorized and which maintains the psyche in a
functional state, at least during waking life, just as the mother maintains the baby’s body
in a state of unity and solidity’ (1989, p. 98). For Anzieu, the baby’s experience of having
been physically maintained allows it to feel psychically maintained or, put differently, ‘held
together’ as it encounters and explores the world around it.
The second function of the skin ego is that of ‘containment’. According to Anzieu, this
function of the skin ego is set in motion by the infant’s introjection of what Winnicott calls
‘handling’; that is, by the way in which the caregiver physically manipulates the baby’s body
(Winnicott, 1976c, pp. 37-55). In fact, the caregiver’s handling of the baby as it is changed,
fed and washed allows it to do two inextricably interrelated things: first, represent its body
to itself as sac-like, as a bodily container with bodily contents; and second, represent its
ego to itself as sac-like, as a psychic container with psychic contents. The baby’s sense of
psychic and somatic containment is, therefore, vitally enabled by its everyday exchanges
with its caregiver.
The third function of the skin ego is that of ‘protection’. Just as the epidermis protects
the body against physical trauma, the skin ego protects the psyche against psychical
trauma. This function, according to Anzieu, is brought into being by the infant’s
introjection of the caregiver’s bodily surface. That is, when the infant is in its earliest
moments of life and its ego is too undeveloped to perform its own protective functions, the
caregiver’s bodily surface serves as the infant’s surrogate shield against excessive
Lafrance 11

stimulation. Through its experience of a protective caregiving skin, then, the infant comes
to experience its own skin as a source of security.
The fourth function of the skin ego is that of ‘individuation’. In the same way that no
two skins are alike, no two skin egos are alike. This function, as Anzieu explains, ‘allows
one to identify [...] oneself as an individual having one’s own skin. In a similar fashion, the
Skin Ego performs a function of individuating the Self, thus giving the Self a sense of its
own uniqueness’ (1989, p. 103). For Anzieu, a strong sense of somatic borders and, by
extension, psychic borders allows the individual to distinguish between not only its self and
the self of the other, but between what Winnicott calls its ‘true’ and ‘false’ selves
(Winnicott, 1976a, pp. 140-52). A well-defined psychic skin is, therefore, necessary for
individuation and, ultimately, individuality.
The fifth function of the skin ego is that of ‘intersensoriality’. Where the skin serves as
the physical surface that accommodates and arranges the body’s sensations, the skin ego
serves as the psychic surface ‘which connects up sensations of various sorts and makes them
stand out as figures against the original background’ (Anzieu, 1989, p. 103). In other words,
the skin ego provides the infant with a feeling of ‘common sense’; that is, the feeling that
its sensory organs function in a coordinated, rather than a chaotic, manner. The
intersensorial function, then, allows the infant to feel that it can manage its sensory
perceptions instead of feeling alienated or overwhelmed by them.
The sixth function of the skin ego is that of ‘sexualization’. While the infant is handled
and held by its caregiver, the pleasures of the skin are awakened and the erogenous zones
are enlivened. As Freud points out, the pleasures of the skin enable the emergence of auto-
eroticism and, by extension, a more mature sexuality (Freud, 2001d, pp. 125-244). Put
differently, these primitive pleasures serve as the first and most fundamental support for
the development of the sexual drives. In this way, they lay the foundation for the infant’s
erogenous potential and, ultimately, its ability to have gratifying sexual relations in later
life.
The seventh function of the skin ego is that of ‘recharging’. Just as the constant
stimulation of the body by physical stimuli is managed by the skin, the constant stimulation
of the mind by mental stimuli is managed by the skin ego. In fact, in the same way the skin
is on the border of the body’s inside and outside, the skin ego is on the border of the mind’s
inside and outside. As a result, it is the skin ego that organizes and synthesizes the stimuli
directed at the mind. The skin ego, then, is that which enables the infant to feel that its
mind is neither ‘over-charged’ nor ‘under-charged’ by the stimuli that surround it.
The eighth and final function of the skin ego is that of ‘inscription’. In the same way the
skin records the external traces of the infant’s life experiences, the skin ego records the
internal traces of these experiences. As Anzieu writes: ‘The Skin Ego is the original
parchment which preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-out, written-over, first
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 12

outlines of an ‘original’ pre-verbal writing made up of traces upon the skin’ (Anzieu, 1989,
p. 105). The infant’s first impressions of the world around it are, therefore, imprinted on its
skin ego which, in turn, serves as what Freud compares to a ‘mystic writing pad’ (Freud,
2001b, pp. 227-32).
According to Anzieu (1994), the skin ego is only the first of two structures associated
with the fully-fledged ego. For the human being to develop healthily, the skin ego must be
superseded by what Anzieu calls the thinking ego for it is the latter, not the former, that
allows for the development of symbolic thought and elaboration, language and desire. Yet
the fact that the skin ego is superseded by the thinking ego does not make the skin ego any
less fundamental. On the contrary: the thinking ego is always already formed and informed
by the skin ego; or, put differently, the skin ego is the permanent support and ever-present
backdrop of the thinking ego.
By privileging the surfaces of the human being, both psychic and somatic, Anzieu shows
that the superficial is at least as important as the profound. Similarly, by bringing into relief
the anaclitic relationship between the psychic skin and the physical skin, Anzieu
demonstrates that human development is the product of a dynamic relationship between
that which is inside and that which is outside. That said, however, Anzieu’s approach to
the skin ego’s structures and functions does, at times, appear to have pathologizing
propensities. More specifically, contemporary cultural theorists may find that this
approach is problematic insofar as it tends to draw a straight line, as it were, between so-
called deficient care in early infancy and so-called deviant behavior in later life. For
instance, Anzieu argues that when the containment function of the skin ego fails to
properly develop due to what is, ostensibly, the caregiver’s neglect, the individual is likely
to feel as though he or she could ‘fall apart’ at any moment (Anzieu, 1989, p. 102). To avoid
this feeling, the individual may, according to Anzieu, act aggressively on his or her skin in
an attempt to reclaim and re-territorialize it and, by extension, force it to contain him or
her when the skin ego proves unable to do so. For Anzieu, cutting, piercing, tattooing, and,
above all, sado-masochistic sex are prime examples of these aggressive acts – acts which he
sees as defensive ‘second skins’ (Bick, 2002, pp. 60-71). While these second skins may be
helpful in the short term, they are, according to Anzieu, in need of analytic attention in the
long term.
Cultural theorists have shown that Anzieu’s ‘second skins’, along with a number of other
skin ego structures and functions, can be critically re-read and re-thought in ways that
avoid these pathologizing propensities. Jay Prosser (1994) has, for instance, used Anzieu’s
understanding of the containment function to theorise transsexuality; Imogen Tyler (2001)
has used it to theorize pregnant embodiment; and, most recently, Valerie Walkerdine
(2010) has used it to think about affect in community relations. Similarly, Steven Pile (2009,
pp. 134-54) has used Anzieu’s inscription function to theorize representations of memory
Lafrance 13

in film, while Francette Pacteau (1994) has used the intersensoriality function to think
about clothing and fashion. All of these authors show that if worked on and over, Anzieu’s
work has the potential to give cultural theorists a sustained and suggestive approach to
human subjectivity.

The Psychic Envelope

For Anzieu, the skin ego is modelled not only on the experience of the tactile sense organ,
but on the experience of the auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and visual sense organs. In fact,
all of these organs and the experiences associated with them give rise to what Anzieu calls
‘psychic envelopes’. Put succinctly, psychic envelopes are sensory experiences that have
been transposed from the somatic plane onto the psychic plane; once transposed, they are
structured like and function as the envelopes, or skins, of the psyche. In other words, the
skin of the psyche is not only a tactile skin, but an auditory skin, an olfactory skin, a
gustatory skin, and a visual skin. Or, to use a metaphor that Anzieu himself uses, the skin
of the psyche is in many ways like the skin of an onion (Anzieu, 1989, p. 215). That is, like
the skin of an onion, the skin of the psyche is structured by layers that interlock one with
the other. According to Anzieu, then, the senses of sound, smell, taste and sight interlock
with the sense of touch to form the skin of the psyche.14
While the skin ego is in many ways a freestanding concept, it gains increased
explanatory potential when it is used alongside that of the psychic envelope. In fact,
cultural theorists have tended to focus more on the former than they have on the latter and
it is for this reason that I consider the latter so closely here (see, for instance, Prosser, 1998;
and Tyler, 2001). Before doing so, however, it is worth reflecting on how the models of the
skin ego and the psychic envelope differ from one another. Houzel explains: ‘When we go
from the skin to the envelope, we jettison a part of the metaphorical meanings contained
in the first concept. ‘Envelope’ has a much more general meaning than ‘skin’ and is, in
particular, much more independent from its substrate’ (Houzel, 2000, p. 164). Drawing on
Houzel, I argue that two things happen when we go from the skin ego to the psychic
envelope. First, the literal skin becomes more of a figurative skin; it becomes, in other
words, a way of thinking about the experience of the senses – about how they feel – and
how this feeling grows out of or, indeed, latches onto the sensations springing from the
surface of the body. Second, the literal skin – and particularly the sense of touch with which
it is associated – is no longer privileged to the same extent. Instead, Anzieu’s tendency to
focus on the sense of touch as the most ‘fundamental’ is replaced by an interest in
understanding how the senses operate, each in their own way, as skin-like creatures (see
for instance Anzieu, 1989, p. 14). So where Anzieu’s work on the skin ego tends to be bound
up in a hierarchy of the senses – one in and through which touch almost always emerges as
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 14

the master sense – his work on the psychic envelope swaps this hierarchical thinking for
lateral thinking. More specifically, Anzieu’s work on the psychic envelope can be seen to
add both flexibility and fluidity to his oeuvre on the skin as it points to the range of ways
in which the senses are always ‘in dialogue’, as it were, with one another. This emphasis on
the interplay of the senses and, by extension, on their ability to overtake one another, stand
in for one another and trade places with one another makes Anzieu’s work on the psychic
envelope all the more relevant to contemporary theorists given that, as Segal points out,
increasing numbers of them are now opting to see the senses in plural, rather than singular,
terms. Segal writes:

Contemporary theory sees the senses as a multiplicity – hence the use of terms like
‘sensorium [...,] sense ratio’ or ‘sensotypes’. To McLuhan sensing is a kaleidoscope,
to Serres a knot or an island, to Howes synaesthesia, the latter defined as a way of
‘short-circuiting the five sense model’. It is the meeting of senses and sensations that
most preoccupies current thinking: the ‘pluri-sensorial’, ‘combinatory’,
‘multidirectional [...] intersensoriality’. (Segal, 2009, p. 3)

Reading Anzieu’s work on the psychic envelope alongside his work on the skin ego is,
therefore, important for at least two reasons: first, because it attributes to the senses a more
fluid and, indeed, fluctuating range of structures and functions; and second, because it
emphasizes ‘multidirectional intersensoriality’ by showing the extent to which sounds,
smells, and tastes can – in some situations – serve as better skins than the skin itself.
The first psychic envelope Anzieu describes in The Skin Ego is the ‘sound envelope’. This
envelope is set in motion by the auditory sensations associated with respiration –
sensations that enable the infant to experience itself as a container that fills itself and
empties itself. Over time, the infant’s experience of itself as a container is reinforced by
other auditory sensations – particularly those associated with ingestion and digestion –
which combine to make its body into what Anzieu calls a ‘sonorous cavern’ (Anzieu, 1989,
p. 163). In order for the sound envelope to be strong and supportive, it must be constituted
by an array of both manageable and meaningful sounds – that is, sounds that are neither
excessive nor impersonal. If the sounds emitted by the caregiver are excessive, they are
more likely to invade than to envelop the infant’s psyche and, as such, are more likely to
tear and perforate it. Similarly, if the sounds emitted by the caregiver are impersonal, they
are less likely to be experienced as responsive and, as such, are less likely to serve as the
foundation of primitive reflexivity. Anzieu posits the sound envelope as the infant’s most
primitive experience of reflexivity; that is, when the infant makes noises and these noises
are then mimicked in some way by the caregiver, this two-way exchange lays the
Lafrance 15

foundation for the infant’s ability to, quite literally, reflect. In a provocative critique of both
Lacan and Winnicott, Anzieu writes:

Referring back to the mirror phase as conceived by Lacan, in which the Ego
constitutes itself as other on the model of a mirror image of the whole unified body,
D.W. Winnicott has described an earlier phase in which the mother’s face and the
reactions of those around her provide the first mirror for the child, who creates his
Self according to what she reflects back to him. Like Lacan, however, Winnicott
accentuates the visual signals. I should like to demonstrate the existence at even
earlier stage of a sound mirror or of an audio-phonic skin, and the role this plays in
the acquisition by the psychical apparatus of the capacity to produce meaning, and
then to symbolize. (pp. 157-8)

The internal auditory sensations emanating from the infant coupled with the external
auditory sensations emanating from the caregiver create what Anzieu refers to as a ‘sound
bath’. Insofar as it is more primitive than its tactile counterpart, the sound bath functions
in the first instance as a sort of substitute skin ego. This function is revealed in and through
a number of Anzieu’s case-studies, particularly the one relating to a middle-aged burn
victim named Armand. 15 Though his life was no longer in danger, Armand was in a
particularly painful phase of physical regeneration and, as a result, required a constant flow
of liquid painkillers to keep his agony at bay. Before Anzieu’s assistant began speaking with
Armand, he had been complaining about the excruciating pain his burns were causing him.
Because Armand was not in the habit of complaining without good reason, the nurse agreed
to administer him an additional injection of painkillers, but not before she tended to an
emergency in another ward. In the mean time, Anzieu’s assistant struck up a long and
involved conversation with Armand – one that pertained to his past life and a number of
personal problems that were preoccupying him. When the nurse returned an hour and a
half later with the painkillers, Armand refused them, claiming no longer to be in serious
pain.
According to Anzieu, Armand’s skin ego had lost its anaclitic support on the skin
because the skin was seriously burned and, as a result, could not serve as a continuous and
containing tactile envelope. Through his conversation with Anzieu’s assistant, however,
this anaclitic support was replaced by the enveloping function of sound. As Anzieu shows
throughout his work, words – be they spoken or written – can often have a containing effect
on those in distress. And the reason for this relates precisely to the role that words and
their sounds play in early infancy, where, as I have already mentioned, they serve as
substitute skin egos. As Anzieu’s work with a number of patients makes clear, the ‘skin of
sound’ or ‘skin of words’ can function as a substitute psychic envelope when a stronger and
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 16

more supportive one is, for whatever reason, unavailable. This understanding of sound as
a crucial and, indeed, constitutive psychic envelope could prove useful to a wide-range of
contemporary theorists – particularly those interested in thinking critically about
phenomena like the cultural politics of music or the social implications of noise.
Generally, according to Anzieu, the skin ego is based on psychic envelopes that are
primarily tactile and auditory in nature. Yet, as his work with a patient named Gethsemane
makes clear, the skin ego can also be based on psychic envelopes that are linked to the
olfactory sense. Gethsemane underwent analysis for approximately five years. During the
first three years of this analysis, Anzieu spent most of his time interpreting the linguistic
material of his patient’s sessions – all of which indicated an extreme aggression at and
vindictiveness towards those around him. While Anzieu’s interpretative work was in many
ways helpful to Gethsemane, Anzieu felt nonetheless that the core of his patient’s neuroses
eluded him. Indeed, it was only after Anzieu began interpreting the bodily material, as
opposed to the linguistic material, of his patient’s sessions that he was able to gain a clearer
picture of his patient’s psychic and somatic lives. Anzieu explains:

At certain moments, Gethsemane gave off a strong odor, the more unpleasant for
being mingled with the scent of toilet water in which he drenched his hair, no doubt,
I surmised, to offset the effects of heavy perspiration. I attributed this particular
feature of my patient either to his biological make-up or to his social milieu. This
was my first counter-transferential resistance, the assumption that the material
most insistently present in the sessions has nothing to do with psychoanalysis
because it was neither put into words nor had any apparent status as
communication. (1989, p. 179)

Determined to make sense of Gethsemane’s perspiration, Anzieu formulated a new

interpretation and expressed it to his patient in the following terms: ‘You speak to me more
about your emotions than your sensations. It seems you are trying to overcome me not only
with your aggressive feelings but also with certain sensory impressions’ (1989, p. 180).
Shortly thereafter, Anzieu discovered that Gethsemane had had a difficult birth, and that
when he was born his skin was torn and covered in blood. As far as Gethsemane knew, his
godmother had saved his life, for she was the one who – by holding him almost constantly
against her arms and chest – gave him the skin-to-skin contact that he required in order to
survive and, ultimately, to thrive. This godmother, however, occupied a fraught place in
Gethsemane’s past for a number of reasons, not the least of which was her own
overwhelming odor. Anzieu explains:
Lafrance 17

His godmother had a reputation for being dirty. A countrywoman by origin, she
rarely washed herself, except for her face and hands. She used to let her dirty
underwear pile up in the bathroom for several weeks before washing it, and my
patient would go in there secretly to breathe in its strong smell, an act which gave
him the narcissistically reassuring feeling of being preserved from all harm, even
from death. (1989, p. 180)

This fact, combined with a number of others, led Anzieu to interpret that Gethsemane’s
psychic and somatic functioning was structured around ‘the underlying phantasy […] of a
fusional contact with the godmother’s foul-smelling and protective skin’ (p. 180). Put
differently, Gethsemane had not fully acceded to the realm of the skin ego but had, instead,
remained in the realm of the shared skin. So while Gethsemane’s skin ego was not
completely absent, it was full of holes, for it continued to be phantasmatically fused with
the sweaty and, indeed, leaky skin of his godmother.
As Anzieu worked through Gethsemane’s phantasies of a shared, sweaty and leaky skin
with his godmother, it became clear that the smell of perspiration had become so
anaclitically tied to feelings of wholeness and protectedness that this smell had itself
become a sort of olfactory envelope. As a result, whenever Gethsemane needed to feel
whole and protected – particularly when confronted with his own aggressive feelings – he
started to sweat. In Anzieu’s view, this suggested that Gethsemane’s ego was so tightly
fastened to his skin that he operated as though his skin ego had not yet been combined
with or restructured by a thinking ego. To solve this problem, Gethsemane’s ego needed to
go from being nothing but a skin ego – and a leaky skin ego at that – to being a skin ego
overlaid by a thinking ego. In other words, Gethsemane needed to confront his anger,
rather than splitting it off and sweating it out through the pores of the skin. For Anzieu,
this confrontation could only occur once the patient had learned to begin processing his
aggression through his mind, not his body.
Anzieu’s approach to the sense of smell is relevant to contemporary theorists for a
number of reasons. As his work with Gethsemane makes clear, the notion of the olfactory
envelope allows for a critical approach to issues of body odor and what they mean
psychically, somatically, and socially. What is more, Anzieu’s olfactory envelope is
amenable to a variety of additional applications, such as the cultural complexities of aroma
– be it agreeable or abject – and mass-marketed fragrance. But Anzieu’s notion of the
psychic envelope does not begin with sound and end with smell; instead, it involves a host
of other sensory events and experiences, such as those relating to taste. In fact, while the
gustatory envelope may not be as fundamental as the auditory envelope, or as perceptible
as the olfactory envelope, it is nevertheless an important part of what enables the infant to
decide what it likes (and therefore accepts) and what it does not like (and therefore rejects).
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 18

As a result, the gustatory envelope can be seen to enable – at least in part – the infant’s
ability to make sense of its inside and outside worlds, and by extension, to form judgements
about what is good and bad or right and wrong in those worlds. According to Anzieu, then,
the infant’s engagements with the qualities of taste lay the foundation for its engagements
with the qualities of the objects that surround it.
The vital importance of the taste envelope is borne out by Anzieu’s work with Rodolphe,
a young man who came to analysis suffering from compulsive vomiting and cigarette
smoking. After some preliminary session work, Anzieu discovered that throughout
Rodolphe’s childhood, sweet-tasting things had been presented to him as bad, while bitter-
tasting things had been presented to him as good and forced on him to the point where his
body rejected them through the act of vomiting. In Anzieu’s view, this situation resulted in
an early and repeated invalidation of Rodolphe’s sense of taste. This confusion of the
qualities of taste – or, to put it in Anzieu’s terms, this confusion of the taste envelope –
eventually became the anaclitic basis for other forms of confusion, particularly as they
relate to thought and communication. When asked about these other forms of confusion,
Rodolphe described them in fog-like terms: his dreams often took place in a fog; when he
was confused by the questions put to him by others he generated a fog of irrelevant and
interminable answers; and finally, he smoked compulsively, which created a barrier-like
fog between him and those around him.
When asked to elaborate on his smoking habits, Rodolphe connected them to his eating
habits. More specifically, Rodolphe explained how when he smokes, he fills his lungs with
smoke and keeps it in without being able to breathe. Similarly, when he eats, he is often
unable to keep food down and has a tendency to expel it as he breathes out. What is more,
as a child Rodolphe used to swallow air while eating, and often still does. Anzieu interprets
Rodolphe’s fraught relationship to the acts of smoking and eating in two ways. On the one
hand, Anzieu links this relationship to Rodolphe’s behavior in the analytic session: ‘He so
fills up the volume of the sessions’, explains Anzieu, ‘that I can neither have any thoughts,
nor ‘get a word in edgeways’, though he is so hungry for my words. He fills himself up with
air and disgorges food’ (p. 189). On the other hand, Anzieu links this relationship to what
he sees as Rodolphe’s confusion of the respiratory and the digestive tracts. That is, in
Anzieu’s view, Rodolphe experiences his body as a two-dimensional surface – rather than
as a three-dimensional container – with a single tube passing through it that can
accommodate air or food but not both. Rodolphe’s smoking can thus be seen as an
unconscious attempt to fill himself up with air in order to give himself depth and substance,
since eating has never been able to do so.
Rodolphe’s confusion of the qualities of taste had other consequences for the way he
lived his life. For instance, he claimed to enjoy the burning feeling of smoke in his lungs.
While Rodolphe acknowledged that this feeling could signal the threat of lung disease, he
Lafrance 19

revelled in it nonetheless for, as Anzieu puts it, ‘it (made) him feel warm inside’ (p. 190).
For Anzieu, Rodolphe’s compulsive pleasure in harming himself by means of his own orality
is symptomatic of the fact that his taste envelope had been inverted. Because of this
inversion, Rodolphe developed a ‘taste’ for what was bad for him and a ‘distaste’ for what
was good for him. Because the gustatory distinctions of good and bad, like and dislike, were
unclear to Rodolphe, so too were a range of other distinctions tied to the gustatory sense
organ, such as those of eating and breathing, and fullness and emptiness.
As Rodolphe’s case makes clear, the notion of the gustatory envelope presents cultural
theorists with a variety of interesting tools for thinking critically about the age-old axiom
that we are what we eat. That is, over the course of his discussion of Rodolphe’s case, Anzieu
shows that the cultural politics of food and eating, or cigarettes and smoking, cannot be
considered without keeping a close eye on how they relate to the workings of psychic and
somatic life. Indeed, if contemporary cultural theorists appear to be increasingly interested
in, as Ahmed and Stacey put it, ‘a model of embodiment that facilitates an understanding
of the processes through which bodies are lived and imagined in more visceral and
substantial ways’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2009, p. 9), then it is precisely the ‘visceral’ and the
‘substantive’ that comes so clearly into focus when we consider Anzieu’s work on the
psychic envelope. Unlike many structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of subjectivity,
Anzieu’s work encourages us to reflect on how the nitty-gritty things about the life of the
body quite crucially make us who and what we are. Anzieu’s work can thus be seen to allow
us to ‘sustain the body as a literal category’ in ways that the work of many influential
structuralists and poststructuralists does not (Prosser, 1998, p. 27). That said, however,
there are problems with Anzieu’s notion of the psychic envelope, not the least of which is,
as I mentioned earlier, its tendency to narrowly link his patients’ strained relationships to
their bodies to what he sees as negligent caregiving in early infancy. Not only is this a
reductive way of looking at human development – which is, as Anzieu’s own framework
makes clear, complex, and overdetermined – but like many psychoanalytic frameworks, it
comes dangerously close to the kind of ‘caregiver-blaming’ that many have long
condemned (see Fonagy, 2001). These, in combination with the fact that Anzieu has little
to say about how the phenomena of sex, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity might be
brought to bear on his work, are definite limitations. These limitations can, however, be
overcome. With some careful rereading and rethinking, Anzieu’s notion of the psychic
envelope can, as I have already suggested, be most useful to theorists working on a wide
range of cultural phenomena.
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 20

Conclusion

Both non-dualist and non-determinist, the work of Didier Anzieu can be seen to say at least
three key things about human subjectivity. First, it says that subjectivity is at once
completely psychic and utterly somatic and, as a result, that mind and body must be viewed
as both produced by and productive of one another. Indeed, insides and outsides are seen
to be mutually constitutive in Anzieu’s work, which means that not only are body and mind
viewed as radically relational, but so too are self and other and nature and culture. Second,
Anzieu’s work demonstrates that there are limits to human subjectivity. Unlike those who
emphasize fluidity, instability, and malleability in their approaches to subjectivity, Anzieu
emphasizes containment, continuity, and integration – showing that, without a secure
experience of his or her own skin, the subject quite simply cannot survive and thrive. And
finally, Anzieu maintains that, in order to think subjectivity in far-reaching and inclusive
terms, we must be alive to questions of pain and suffering as they are played out in the lives
of real people. Unlike his ‘great rival’ Jacques Lacan, whose work rarely makes mention of
his patients, Anzieu produces what we might call ‘grounded theory’; that is, theory that
grows out of his clinical work with those in distress (Rabaté, 2001, pp. 133-4). By endowing
subjectivity with embodied specificities without reducing it to them, Anzieu’s work brings
to contemporary cultural theorists a firm focus on the human being’s fleshly frailties.

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Notes

1
I would like to thank the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Fondation Ricard, and the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the research that led to the publication of
this paper. I would also like to thank Daphne Briggs and the editors of the collection for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts.
2
While, in English, there is only one book dedicated to the work of Didier Anzieu (see Segal, 2009), there are
over a dozen dedicated to the work of Jacques Lacan (see, for example, Grosz, 1990; Lee, 1990; Mitchell and
Rose, 1985; Rabaté, 2001; Zizek, 2003).
3
Here Grosz is drawing on Lacan, who understands the ego’s structure as similar to that of the moebius strip.
As we will see, however, Grosz does not appropriate Lacan’s use of the moebius strip without adjusting it as
she does so. Indeed, for her, the moebius strip model is useful for thinking not so much about the ego but
about the mutually constitutive relationship between inside and outside. This is an important point in a
chapter devoted to the work of Didier Anzieu, given that Anzieu rejects the Lacanian view that the ego is
always already structured like a moebius strip (Anzieu, 1989, p. 124). That said, like Grosz, Anzieu emphasises
the importance of understanding the relationship between inside and outside as a kind of ‘feedback loop’ (p.
57). For this reason, I argue that Grosz’s appropriation of the moebius strip model is useful in the context of
an introduction to Anzieu.
4
This translation is my own.
5
This translation is my own.
6
This translation is my own.
7
A few words of warning before we proceed. To start, it is difficult to avoid sounding inflammatory when
presenting an introduction to Anzieu’s critique of Lacan. This is due to the fact that Anzieu’s critique is, by
its very nature, inflammatory. As even a cursory glance at his interviews makes clear, there is little in the way
of subtlety where Anzieu’s characterizations of Lacan are concerned; they are bold, relentless, and, at times,
rather mean-spirited. That said, it would – in my view – be inappropriate to subdue or pass over these
characterizations; after all, the chapter is intended to be an introduction to Anzieu’s work, and a key part of
this work is his thunderclapping critique of Lacan. For all of these reasons, I present Anzieu’s views of
Lacanian psychoanalysis in much the same way he himself does. But this approach is not without its
problems. In fact, one of the problems with this approach is that it does not account for the range of ways in
From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope 24

which Lacan and the Lacanians might respond to such a critique. But again, because this is an introduction,
it would go beyond the scope of the chapter to discuss where Anzieu’s argument is sound and where it is not.
Instead, I merely present the argument – in what are, admittedly, simplified terms – and encourage others to
engage more heartily with it in the future.
8
That the body was, at least for a time, abandoned for the sign in France is confirmed by the fact that entries
for ‘body’, ‘body ego’, and ‘body image’ are not to be found in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis’s
otherwise exhaustive The Language of Psychoanalysis (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988b). For more on this
matter, see ‘The Body’ in Anzieu and Tarrab (1990).
9
This translation is my own.
10
According to one of Anzieu’s most important influences, British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, phantasy is
the mode of mental functioning characteristic of the primary processes while thought is the mode of mental
functioning characteristic of the secondary processes (see Isaacs, 1952).
11
Anzieu does not explicitly refer to the skin ego as a pictogram, but he does say that Piera Castoriadis
Angelergues’s work (see Angelergues, 1975) on the pictogrammatic nature of primitive psychic functioning is
one of his guiding influences. When I refer to the skin ego as a pictogram, then, I do so for illustrative purposes
only.
12
It is important to point out that Anzieu’s approach is not ‘anti-oedipal’. It is, however, ‘non-oedipal’ insofar
as it relates to that which comes before the oedipal complex. In my view, this non-oedipal approach allows
us to think psychoanalytically about embodied subjectivity in general, and embodied trauma in particular, in
ways that avoid privileging male bodies and pathologizing female bodies.
13
This translation is my own.
14
Anzieu leaves the visual sense organ to one side. In my view, he does so largely because considerations of
the visual sense have – up until quite recently – tended to eclipse considerations of the other senses and their
role in psychic development. Anzieu, like Irigaray (see Irigaray, 1985a & 1985b), ties this tendency to the
dominance of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and their occularcentric orientations. Having said this,
however, some followers of Anzieu have used his notions of the skin ego and the psychic envelope to make
sense of the primitive structures and functions of visuality (Lavallée, 1993, pp. 87-126).
15
All names are pseudonyms chosen by Anzieu.