ABSTRACT
Although there are few explicit references to the expression body-ego in Freud’s writings, the underlining idea is recurrent in his complete works. For Freud, the body-ego was the organizing basis of the structure of the body. In The Ego and the Id (1923) he defined the body-ego as a psychic projection of the soma’s surface. In this chapter, I will present a revision of this concept in his metapsychological writings to stress the importance that primary experiences play in the organization of a proto-symbolic way of being a body. I will also elaborate a deeper understanding of body-ego and address more specifically how this organization enables the body to appear as a body archive that represents images.
