ABSTRACT
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. This chapter describes two patients, namely Joseph and Jeanette, for whom touch was a complex, conflict-laden issue, and shows a part of that history came to write itself onto their skins, despite vastly different life histories. The profession of psychoanalysis is the better for it, as are patients with somatic illnesses, like Joseph and Jeanette, whose stories have had happy endings. Aspects of Joseph’s and Jeanette’s agonal life narratives, otherwise split off and unavailable, had to find their way to that imaginary screen and then to the real of the surface of the body. The destructive, non-neurotic elements from the deeply inaccessible unconscious painted themselves on the skin. These rashes, coloured by distinctly different psyches, shared a common push to the exterior.
