Didier Anzieu

Building on the writings of such psychoanalysts as Melanie Klein and Heinz Kohut, Anzieu also sought with great skill to analyze, not so much works of art, but the creative process itself; and he published numerous works on literary creation (Pascal, Beckett) and artistic creation (Bacon)'.

[6] Emerging from ideas of holding in such writers as Marion Milner and Donald Winnicott, and then 'migrating into Continental psychoanalysis, the idea of the skin-container takes on a life of its own...shap[ing] Didier Anzieu's influential concept of the psychic envelope in The Skin-Ego (Le Moi-peau)'.

[7] 'Didier Anzieu (1985) theorized on the skin-ego, the first narcissistic envelope on which the feeling of well-being is based',[8] suggesting for example that 'narcissistic personalities...possess an unusually thick skin ego; in contrast, masochistic and borderline personalities show remarkably thin skin ego'.

This is the name Didier Anzieu gives to the visual dream-film, the fine, ephemeral membrane which he thinks of as replacing the tactile envelope of the ego's vulnerable skin'.

[12] 'For a critique of Anzieu's "interpretatively versatile" pan-pellicularism and his therapeutically oriented model of the skin-container, see Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London...2004)'.