ABSTRACT
Understanding about the psychological function of containment and transformation informed the creation and development of the following metaphor: the “psychological envelope”. After Esther Bick and her notion of “psychic skin”, Didier Anzieu proposed the hypothesis of the “skin-ego”. The two notions resonate, but differ. One way of bringing them together consists in saying that the self is not initially a “bodily” self, or a “skin” self, but an undifferentiated “psychosomatic” self which differentiates little by little into a bodily self and an articulated psychic self, each one supporting the other. Didier Anzieu’s work inaugurates a consideration of what can be called the “envelope function”, in a subject as in a group, in a family or an institution. We speak of the individual, group, family and institutional psychic envelope, and we can consider psychopathologies, at these different levels, from the perspective of envelope pathologies.
