Between Skins

Between Skins challenges individualistic accounts of the
body in psychoanalysis. Drawing on philosophy, contemporary
neurobiology and developmental research, Nicola Diamond explores
the ways in which bodily processes and skin experience are
inseparable from the field of language and environmental
context.

• The first book to address epistemological implications for a
  new understanding of the body and embodiment - offers a new
  perspective on the division between mind, body and world

• Brings together a philosophical phenomenological account of
  body experience with key concepts from psychoanalysis,
  developmental research and neuroscience

• Responds to a growing interest in the body and psychoanalysis,
  and considers some limitations in neuro-biological accounts of
  brain-body processes for psychoanalytical understanding

Auteur

Dr Nicola Diamond is a Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial
Studies, University of East London, and teaches at the Tavistock
Clinic. She is also a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with the
British Association of Psychotherapists (British Psychoanalytic
Council registered) in private practice, and runs a clinic at The
Helen Bamber Foundation; before this she worked as a
Psychotherapist at the Women's Therapy Centre in London. She is the
co-author of Attachment and Intersubjectivity (with Mario
Marrone, 2003) and has published widely in the field.

Résumé
Between Skins challenges individualistic accounts of the body in psychoanalysis. Drawing on philosophy, contemporary neurobiology and developmental research, Nicola Diamond explores the ways in which bodily processes and skin experience are inseparable from the field of language and environmental context.

• The first book to address epistemological implications for a new understanding of the body and embodiment - offers a new perspective on the division between mind, body and world
• Brings together a philosophical phenomenological account of body experience with key concepts from psychoanalysis, developmental research and neuroscience
• Responds to a growing interest in the body and psychoanalysis, and considers some limitations in neuro-biological accounts of brain-body processes for psychoanalytical understanding

Contenu
Introduction 1 Part I The Framework: Neuroscience and Interdisciplinary Connections 11

1 Introducing Interdisciplinary Connections 13

2 Nurture/Nature 29

3 Bodily Expression and Language Relations 38

4 Setting the Scene: The Problem of the Binary Divide 51

Part II The Vital Order: Moving Away from Interiority and Biology as Bedrock 59

5 The Vital Order and the Biological Functions: Going Back to the Fundamental Problem 61

6 The Problem of Dualism and the Division between the Vital and the Psychic Order 74

7 The Vital Revisited: Deconstructing the Vital Order from Within 77

8 Rebuilding the Vital Field 90

9 Body Memory and Know-How 101

10 Attachment and Sexuality: Regulation versus Deregulation 109

Part III Exteriority: The Body Surface 119

11 The Skin: An Introduction 121

12 Didier Anzieu and The Skin Ego 137

13 Permeable Skin 147

14 The Emergence of Skin as a Support Matrix 154

15 Skin Narratives 162

16 Skin Relation 173

17 Skin Writing and Touch as Analogous to Language 179

18 Psychosomatics and Conversion: The Question of the Symbol 189

Conclusion: Have We Reached a Destination? 208

References and Further Reading 217

Index 226