ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with skin: touch the sense of contact, the concreteness of things, the feel of things and childhood touch. Sensory experience is tactile experience, contact with others and objects, the feeling of our feet touching the ground. Reality is experienced through touch "first hand." Children simply adapt to the usual ways that their parents manifest their love through touching or neglecting bodily contact. In touching the skin, we touch the subject, both literally and figuratively. The deprivation of love, the absence of skin stimulation in childhood, leads individuals to develop skin irritations that are relieved with scratching. The skin is a living memory of childhood deprivations. These continue to resonate long afterward, even if their effects are sometimes attenuated by different remedies or relationships with others that reopen or help heal the wounds. Chronic or circumstantial anxieties can cause skin reactions: blemishes, in both the real and figurative senses, an outbreak of eczema, psoriasis, hives, or rashes.
