ABSTRACT
Didier Anzieu starts with two basic assumptions. The first is that psychic life has sensitive qualities as a basis because “every psychic function develops on the basis of a physical function the operation of which surpasses the mental area”. The second is that “the tactile sense is the foundation, on condition that it is forbidden at the necessary time”. For Anzieu, skin diseases maintain a very close relationship with the narcissistic failures and the structuring insufficiencies of the Ego. The prohibition to touch could be, in tactile terms, what castration, repression or the function of the law is in oedipal terms. Anzieu attempts to explain the cases of perverse masochism and the self-destructive behaviours of patients who inflict skin wounds upon themselves. Commenting on the case of a patient with a strong smell of perspiration, Anzieu describes what he calls the olfactory envelope, in which the function of excitation screen is confused with the function of emotional signalling of secretions.
