ABSTRACT
R. Descartes believed that only mathematical entities were objective facts, constituting something like eternal truths. Although Descartes’s emphasis on the individual’s capacity for rational thought helped to bring his era out of the darkness of magic and witchcraft, it also pushed theological anthropology toward the discourse of the “body and soul” and away from the more holistic view of the person. The skin is an artful surface, both an organ to be represented and a canvas on which representations and messages can be painted. Few have appreciated the complexity of the skin’s psycho-physiologic function better than Didier Anzieu. Since the skin ego’s “reality is of the order of phantasy”, it is, in effect, a bridge and an intermediary between mind, body, world, and other psyches. The destructive, non-neurotic elements from the deeply inaccessible unconscious painted themselves on the skin. These rashes, colored by distinctly different psyches, shared a common push to the exterior.
