ABSTRACT
Psychic life and experience organises itself around the body ego, which is a sensitive spatial unity with openings and exit-points. The self is therefore thought of in terms of the psychic borders of the body and not apart from them, a fact which is made particularly clear in the term coined by D. Anzieu—the skin ego. The first formulation of a psychic border, which S. Freud described using the term 'contact barrier', is recalled in this chapter. Then some more recent representations are presented, and a suggestion introduced. Out of the combination of monadic, dyadic and triangular functions present at any given moment comes the permeability of the boundary in the transference and counter-transference of the psychoanalytical process. The psychoanalytical process can be characterised as transformational work at the contact barrier of the patient and of the analyst, as well as in the intermediate space, which makes it possible to alphabetise events and so make them comprehensible.
