Working Clinically With the Skin’s Surface: Tattoos, Scars, and Gendered Embodiment

Saturated with cultural, relational, and intrapsychic meanings, the phenomenon of body modification has been both undertheorized and pathologized in psychoanalytic writing. This lack of nuanced, creative thinking only exacerbates the difficulties that many analysts face in mentalizing the experiences of their body-modified patients, most particularly those who identify as trans or gender nonconforming. Extending Didier Anzieu’s skin-ego theory in response to the emergent field of somatechnics, as well as the work of media studies scholar and psychoanalyst Patricia Clough, I propose that our corporeal and psychic skins (even when “sufficiently developed”) are more porous and inextricably bound with technicity than has been previously thought. In particular, I offer a redescription of Anzieu’s “insufficiently developed” skin-ego as a “radical openness.” Theorized as a potentiality rather than a lack, I propose that this radical openness may leave one with an exceptional receptivity to phenomena such as unconscious communication, creativity, and other-than-human technologies such as body modification. Drawing from my clinical work with queer and trans patients, the three vignettes in this paper highlight the interrelatedness of body modification and gendered embodiment (as well as other identities) using this extension and redescription of Anzieu’s skin-ego theory.