ABSTRACT
Deploying the skin-ego metaphor in all possible directions, Didier Anzieu showed the fecundity of the taboo on touching and its fundamental value in psychic life as well as in the intervention of psychoanalysis. The discovery of the Oedipus complex and the introduction by S. Freud of the analytic situation were indeed concomitant to his renunciation of touching patients. He linked the “taboo against touching” with the mechanism of isolation, so that it operated on the psychic level to avoid the return of a repressed impulse in consciousness; isolation is opposed to associative contact, to the “touching of thoughts” between themselves. From the psychogenic and metapsychological perspective of Anzieu, the taboo on touching makes it possible to go beyond the skin-ego, derived from the illusion of a common skin with the mother, in favour of a psychic ego founded on the activity of thought.
