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Touch is essential to the differentiation of inside and outside the bodily surface as well as self versus non-self . The body surface is the skin, and touch is related to affects and emotions. Touch is embodied in the emotional life in narcissism and object relations. The emotional aspects of touch are experienced in massage, warmth, cold, compression, or distention. The skin also registers dysphoric stimuli, such as excessive heat, cold, compression, abrasion, cutting, itching. Dysphoric touch may have self-preservative functions, such as avoiding burns. Touching or stroking the erogenous zones are linked with erotic fantasy and excitement, masturbation and copulation. Every aspect of a subject’s life has a potential to consciously and unconsciously touch all others, and the earliest maternal caresses are indelible in the formation of the psychic structure, character and personality . While the postmodern influence of the 1980s and 1990s, in the United States, following Foucault, rejected Freud’s biologically based ideas, for many reasons, including the concrete biological essentialism and phallocentrism of psychoanalysis of pre-1970s, Feminism and contemporary gender studies are again reviving interest in a body ego. Among examples of this trend are writers challenging phallic monism in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis Female supplements 1976 and 1996; an advent of a new journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality in 2000; and a growing number of publications on the dynamic meaning of the body (Raphael-Leff, 2001, 2014; Balsam 2012, 2013, 2015; Lemma 2014; Diamond 2013). Rosemary Balsam ’s “Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis” (2012) explores in depth why has the female body been marginalized in psychoanalysis, with a focus on female problems and pains, and how can psychoanalysts re-think female body in terms of pleasure, power, competition and aggression . She re-traces the mental development back to the female biological body (across female gender variants and sexual preferences, including the ‘vanished pregnant body’), and she demonstrates that the images of the body, weaved into everyday lives, lead to the clues that inform gendered patterning. This approach frees the postmodern gender studies from perpetuating the divide between the physical and the mental. In a different way, proponents of the Relational school (Harris, 2000) re-focused psychoanalytic attention on body/mind dilemma with the notions of ‘gender as a soft assembly’ and that of ‘embodiment’. Contemporary neuroscience (Emde 1991, Solms 2003, Damasio, 2010) has given a boost to re-examining Freudian meta-theoretical postulates, re-centering the body again in relation to the ego . Body image is another concept related to body ego and the mental representation of the body. The term is used descriptively clinically, especially in the body dysmorphia associated with eating disturbances in adolescence, denoting the subjectivity of somatic changes and growth experience, and as it relates to the subjectivities of gender, pregnancy, fitness, illness, frailty, aging or other physical conditions.
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