That is why I have emphasized the coupling of embodiment and technics: the technologies that saturate our contemporary world, in this respect no different from the earliest flint chipping tools used by protohumans, are so many exteriorizations of our fundamental sensory écart. What Bick's and (particularly) Anzieu's work on the skin helps us to see, however, is that this epiphylogenesis of the human, its evolution through means other than life, is made possible by the primordial écart and, more specifically, by the fundamental anaclitic indifferentiation of the écart, its occupation of the cusp between the biological and the psychic prior to their actual differentiation.
A concept describing the way that psychic functions "lean on" biological functions (Freud's word is Anlehnung, literally “leaning on"), anaclisis" is central to Freud's conception of psychoanalysis insofar as it depicts the psyche in continuity with the body and with the biological functioning of the organism. If anaclisis is, for Anzieu, arguably the most fundamental principle of the Freudian revolution, this commitment has the effect of making psychic phenomena intrinsically technical or, perhaps more exactly, of rendering the passage to the psychical nothing less than the sensible-transcendental condition for technical exteriorization as a "transcendence" of genetic law.
In contrast to Jean Laplanche, who reserves anaclisis for explaining how organic functions of self-preservation provide a support for sexual drives, Anzieu generalizes its application to the entirety of psychic life: "The psychical apparatus develops through successive stages of breaking with its 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" (96). As the most diffuse and primitive organic (sensory, or better protosensory) locus—the locus for the “attachment drive" (following John Bowlby's ethology-inspired broadening of early infant experience beyond the oral phase of the sexual drive)—the skin encompasses the entirety of biological and psychical function, initially (as we have seen) in an undifferentiated state (a state of virtual differentiation). It thereby forms the basis for a conception of the ego, the skin ego, that is far more primitive than Lacan's mirror stage, Winnicott's analysis of the mother's face, and Klein's introjection, and is primitive, categorically, because it designates the (in)differentiation of the psychical and the biological.
BODIES IN CODE
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