Indeed, Anzieu defines the skin ego as a transitional stage between the psychical and the biological—the psychic and embodied inhabitation of the caesura of their fundamental (dis)juncture. It 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. This corresponds to the moment at which the psychical Ego differentiates itself from the bodily Ego at the operative level while remaining confused with it at the figurative level. (40)
As Victor Tausk's analysis of the “influencing machine" attests, the skin ego comprises a stage in which the operational function of anaclisis is ahead of its properly psychic function—a stage in which the body operates through a fundamental differentiation that it does not yet experience as such. It thus marks the fundamental sense in which, as Freud put it, the ego is "first and foremost a bodily ego," "not merely a surface entity, but “the projection of a surface," the projection of "bodily sensations .. springing from the surface of the body" (Freud, 16).
The skin, in sum, is the most primordial locus and expression of the indifferentiation of the biological and the psychical marked and overcome by the function of anaclisis. That is why it supports the protoorigin of specularity, of self-relation/heterorelation, as the fundamental sensible écart. This écart is essentially technical because it is the sensible-transcendental condition for all exteriorization. As it is expanded and deepened by Anzieu, the Freudian theory of anaclisis shows that the passage to exteriorization is only possible because of a passage within embodied being, the passage opened by anaclisis and the primordial indifference it marks as well as overcomes, indeed marks in the very process of overcoming.
By helping us discover the essential technicity of the skin ego as the primordial support of anaclisis, Anzieu's analysis refunctionalizes Bick's conception of the “second muscular skin," uncovering its nonpathological generality and, more importantly, making it speak to our contemporary technogenesis and the challenges it poses to our efforts to understand our agency in the world today.xxi From Bick's more narrow clinical perspective, the second muscular skin, or "second-skin formation," occurs when there is a "disturbance in the primal skin function"; in this formation, "dependence on the object is replaced by a pseudo-independence, by the inappropriate use of certain mental functions, or perhaps innate talents, for the purpose of creating a substitute for this skin container function" (56).
BODIES IN CODE
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