The Skin-Ego: A New Translation by Naomi Segal

In this classic work, the author presents and develops his theory of the importance of ‘the Skin-ego’. Just as the skin is wrapped around the body, so the author sees the ‘Skin-ego’ as a psychical wrapping containing, defining and consolidating the subject. From this perspective, the structure and functions of the skin can provide psychoanalysts and general readers with a fertile and practical metaphor. The author’s concept of the Skin-ego is the answer to questions he regards as crucial to contemporary psychoanalysis: questions of topography which were left incomplete by Freud; the analysis of fantasies of the container as of the contained; issues of touch between mothers and babies; extending the concept of prohibitions within an Oedipal framework to those derived from a prohibition on touching; and questions pertaining to the representation of the body and to its psychoanalytic setting. This new translation of Le Moi-peau is based on the second and last (1995) edition.