Main description:

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

Contents:

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