ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how an early description given in 1895 of what he would call in 1896 “psychical apparatus” anticipates Skin-ego; it appears in the notion–which he did not return to and which remained unpublished in his lifetime–of “contact-barriers”. It traces the development of his argument through to one of his very last descriptions of the psychical apparatus, in his “Note upon ‘the mystic writing-pad’”. The chapter attempts to illustrate his transition to a topographical model, increasingly free of anatomical and neurological references, which is premised implicitly and perhaps fundamentally on the idea that the Ego leans anaclitically on the experiences and functions of the skin. In the Studies on Hysteria, co-authored with Josef Breuer, Freud is still using the contemporary terms “organism” and “nervous system.” In the “Project for a scientific psychology”, which Freud sent Fliess on 8 October 1895 and which remained unpublished until after his death, Freud develops a new idea, that of the “contact-barrier”.
