Skin-Ego

he theory of the skin-ego speculates that our conscious thought arises from the skin as much as from the brain. We can chart the development of this embodied-ego from the beginning of life: in the early gastrula phase of invertebrates, the embryo, through a process of “invagination” turns itself into a sack; the outside of this sack, the ectoderm, will become both the skin and the cerebral cortex, the outer limits of the brain where all higher-function thought takes place. A visual image would depict consciousness then as one surface, skin and cortex, that together produce the entity otherwise known as the ego. This ego is a mental image of the body bounded by the limits of tactile feeling. Skin, as the primary sense organ, able to feel and be felt, is the foundation of the self. Mother and infant through the “sensorial bath” create a “symmetrical skin” from which a piece is folded to become the infant’s ego. This self will forever be a social self; it only has meaning in relation to other embodied selves in what could be called the “the cutaneous universe.”