Between Skins

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.

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