Introduction to the concept of the psychic envelope

As Svein Tjelta mentioned, the collaboration between the Group Analytic Society International and the French Journal of Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy is a welcome international exchange for people interested in analytic groups. The new endeavour reminds me of the collaboration started in 1985 with EATGA (European Association of Transcultural Group Analysis) that joined professionals from different psychoanalytic and group analytic affiliations, such as Malcolm Pines, Elizabeth Foulkes, Dennis Brown, Jean Claude Rouchy, René Kaës, Kurt Husemann and Ursula Keller-Husemann, with the aim to discuss theory and practice in groups. In 2021, we are starting this new collaboration by discussing an important concept in French theory, the psychic envelope, conceived by the psychoanalyst and psychanalyste de groupe, Didier Anzieu. This first contribution is introduced by prestigious colleague, Prof. Edith Lecourt.

Didier Anzieu was influenced by French authors such as Lagache and Lacan, but also by English theoreticians, such as Esther Bick, Bion and Elliott Jaques.  His book The Skin-Ego (Le Moi-peau, 1989) is one of the most beautiful psychoanalytic books I’ve ever read in describing the early development of the infant and the constitution of the body-ego. For Anzieu (1989), the body-ego is always a matter of skin ego defined as “a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, based on its experience of the surface of the body” (p. 61).  The skin-ego is achieved through the early interactions of the dyad mother-baby. Although the new born has a rudimentary understanding of where its own body ends and the body of the other begins, in the early stages he/she experiences a fantasy of a shared skin (p. 41). As the baby grows, he/she develops a sense of his/her own bodily space, which enables the infant to understand himself/herself as a three-dimensional container with insides and outsides. With this understanding, a sense of containment and, by extension, individuality slowly arises

The skin ego is modelled not only by the experience of the tactile sense organ, but on the experience of the auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and visual sense organs. These organs and experiences associated with them give rise to what Anzieu named as psychic envelopes. Psychic envelopes are sensory experiences that have been transposed from the somatic to the psychic dimension; once transposed, they are structured like and function as the envelopes, or skins of the psyche (Lafrance, 2009). The psychic envelopes are similar to the skin of an onion, structured by interlocked layers that form the skin of the psyche (Anzieu, 1989, p.251).

Differently from group analysis (Hopper, 2003), French theory largely makes use of body metaphors to describe group formations. Anzieu (1984) criticized these metaphors because for him they were used as pseudo-organizers of group processes being related to the group’s nostalgic wish of a symbiotic union with the mother, with the primitive wish to fuse/return to the mother womb/body. It is not necessary to say that in groups, especially in larger ones, these primitive fantasies of sharing the same body or the same skin or even losing our own body/individuality are reactivated, re-enacting fantasies of homogeneity (Turquet, 1975) and merger in massification states (Hopper, 2003). It was not by chance that in 1975, in parallel with Kreeger, Foulkes, Turquet, de Maré and Skynner, when they were publishing The Large Group: Dynamics and Therapy (1975), Anzieu in France was exploring primitive processes in large groups in training (Anzieu, 1984).

However, we argue: how can the idea of a psychic envelope be related to group processes? For Anzieu (1984) groups are constituted by an imaginary reality constituted by envelopes, such as a psychic-skin (Ego-skin, Bick), skin-ego (Anzieu, 1989). Psychic envelopes are responsible for the creation of dimensions of interiority and externality, enabling the creation of an area which as an envelope contain, giving limits and boundaries to the individual and the group. The psychic envelopes flap open and close, allowing the exchange between the inside and the outside, between the interior and the exterior, the individual and the world. Its inner face contains projections of primary anxieties, fantasies as well as the topic subsystems (ego, id, superego) of the group members. The external side of the group envelope acts as a barrier against threats from the outside world and other groups, working as a filter for the group.

The concept of psychic envelopes is an important ally when thinking about boundaries and barriers in a group. Brown & Zinkin (2000, p. 249) while discussing Anzieu’s concept, state that the psychic envelope permits us to understand and compare the group as “an ego-like, to a two-sided mirror, sensitive to unconscious individual fantasies internally and to collective representation externally”. In this sense, the three-dimensionality provided by the psychic envelope – which on its permeable movement allows the group to close inwards creating a barrier/boundary for the group but at the same time modulates the contact with the external world – is directly connected to what Brown and Zinkin aimed to explore in their book The Psyche and the Social World (2000). Today, Anzieu’s psychic envelope can contribute to group analytic work in terms of tripartite matrices (Hopper & Weinberg, 2017) enabling us to associate the movement of the psyche envelopes flaps with the interdependencies and the multidimensionality of personal, dynamic and foundation matrices. But, let’s follow Edith Lecourt’s contribution. Voilá!

References

Anzieu, D. (1984). The Group and the Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Anzieu, D. (1989). The Skin Ego. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Brown, D. & Zinkin, L. (2000). The Psyche and the Social World. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Lafrance, M (2009). http://centreforsensorystudies.org/occasional-papers/chapter-one-from-the-skin-ego-to-the-psychic-envelope-an-introduction-to-the-work-of-didier-anzieu/

Carla Penna, PhD
Psychoanalyst and group analyst in private practice. She is former president of the Group Analytic Psychotherapy Society of the State of Rio de Janeiro and former Professor of Medical Psychology at the University State of Rio de Janeiro. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of GASi.
drcarlapenna@gmail.com