The skins we live in

Skin in consumer research

Within consumer research, we discern two approaches to skin: biological skin as a material canvas and relational conceptions that consider skin as a boundary of the self. The first approach considers the organic materiality of skin and its semiotic significance. Examples include studies of tattooed women (Patterson and Schroeder, 2010), tattoos of brand images (Bjerrisgaard et al., 2012), the use of skin whitening creams (Karan, 2008; Shevde, 2008), the imitation of skin in fetish culture (Schroeder and Borgerson, 2003) and the use of Botox (Giesler, 2012). In each case, marginal practices relating to skin are explored and skin is framed as a canvas or, as Bjerrisgaard et al. (2012: 5) put it, as a ‘site for self-reflexive identity articulation, a malleable object which can and should be worked on’. These authors point to a second approach, whereby animated skin not only acts as an object of identity expression but also as a means for reconceptualizing the subject–object dialectic. For instance, according to Patterson and Schroeder (2010: 255), ‘tattoos do refigure the body, shifting identity into liminal zones between subject (of the tattoo, of identity) and objects (of the gaze, of social stigma)’.

This relationship between subject and object as complicated by skin already appears in the work of Dichter (1960) (this should hardly surprise us because, as Tadajewski (2006) argues, much interpretive consumer research have their roots in insights previously developed by motivational researchers; see also Schwarzkopf, 2014). As Dichter puts it, consumers ‘cling to objects as tangible expressions of our anchorage’ (p. 89) and thus explores how textiles become interwoven, so to speak, with the subjectivity of their consumers and this supplements the person’s self-understanding. Moreover, Dichter considers the ultimate purpose of clothing to act as a barrier to contamination, providing an exterior layer that protects a vulnerable interior. At its most direct, this relates to wearing clothes but extends outwards to such examples as hanging white lace curtains over a window as a symbolic barrier that keeps the home atmosphere uncontaminated. Dichter’s examples reveal how the coordinates of our psychological sense of having an interiority shielded by an external layer (i.e. skin) is reproduced as we relate to other external objects. Accordingly, clothes, a room and a house may all be experienced as supplemental skins protecting a fragile interior.

In a similar vein of analysis, Belk (1988), in his seminal Possessions and the Extended Self, explores questions that relate interiority and exteriority. Belk addresses how externally existing possessions are experienced as part of the self, including both other people (i.e. ‘my father’) and objects within proximity. Belk provides empirical evidence that demonstrates the deep sense of interiority that people experience during disruptions – for example, the trauma of losing personal objects following a burglary or the sense of contamination when other people use our possessions a little too intimately. Belk observes how our possessions relate to human development as the infant distinguishes self from the environment, then from carers and latterly how possessions can allow for a formation of identity. Whilst Belk does not analyse skin, nonetheless a very porous boundary between subjects and objects is at stake and so we can conceive of subjectivity as something that exceeds bodily boundaries and incorporates a range of objects.

Interesting in this regard is the use of bleach for the purpose of becoming white. For example, Karan (2008) explores skin creams in India, which promise to alter skin as a means of achieving marriage, empowerment, generating job opportunities and boosting confidence. Indeed as Shevde (2008) further notes, Bollywood regularly depicts fair-skinned characters as successful, which in turn reflects centuries of thinking about skin colour in terms of reputation, marriage, dowry, prestige and oppression. Yet, changing skin colour is controversial because, as Karan (2008) notes, conventional Indian thought sees beauty as intensely personal and hence the idea of rendering skin is seen as a violation of the internal self.

Separate from practices of skin faring in India, Fanon’s (1967) theory of epidermalization argues that bodies are meaningful inasmuch as they are encoded with qualities of ‘colour’. As Gilroy (2000: 46) purports, epidermalization suggests a perceptual regime ‘in which the racialized body is bounded and protected by its enclosing skin. The observer’s gaze does not penetrate that membrane but rests upon it, and in doing so, receives the truths of racial difference from the other body’. Skin, therefore, acts as the master signifier of race and also, as Stephens (2014: 4) argues, black skin carries the markings, the ‘scratchings of discourse’ and the traces of violence of the symbolic order. In this sense, the cultural meaning of black skin infers a range of historic objects (the noose, the hood, the slave ship, etc.) and places (Africa, slave plantations, etc.). What such analysis emphasizes is that skin must be understood, not just in terms of its absolute materiality nor in terms of how it allows a person to manage (or fail to manage) their identity but also skin as the object of interpellating gazes that can be subjectifying, racializing and sexualising in ways that bear unconscious and historically formed relationalities.

All of these critical insights push us towards understanding skin as more than biological canvas to be decorated during consumer identity projects. We begin to see skin, to quote Stephens (2014: 1), as a ‘boundary between self and world that serves as both an entryway to the outside world and an enclosure of interior space’ … but also skin ‘reminds us of ourselves in a way that differs from how we think of ourselves in the abstract; the skin brings us back in touch with ourselves, literally as bodies’. Therefore we might, again with reference to Stephens, regard skin as a heuristic that represents the intersectional meeting point of a semiotically encoded body that is subject to symbolic and imaginary capture in discourse and imagery but also a bodily subject whose sensory and relational presentation of self occurs in material settings. In this regard, it is entirely appropriate to think of the relationality of skin. Harvey (2006) considers relationality as reflecting how there is no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them. Therefore, we can speak of skin insofar as it contains and represents within itself relationships to other objects. Or put differently, we ought to speak of skin as a temporal site of congealed and disparate influences of the past, present and future. To speak otherwise of ‘black skin’, for instance, would tell us very little at all.

Arguably the site in which these various issues are best explored are to be found within modern figurative sculptures, to which attention is now turned. Potts (2000) advocates an idea of sculptures as objects not for a disembodied gaze but rather as objects that actively engage with vividly involved viewers in ways that are spatial, kinaesthetic, intellectual and temporal. Considering such pieces as Carl Andre’s Magnesium Square, Potts explores how sculptures can interact with, intrude onto our space, produce instability and radically reshape our sense of ambience. An Andre sculpture, Potts writes, implies no privileged viewpoint and is an object that can easily ‘slip from view as one comes close to it’ (p. 314). Potts states, Andre’s sculptures ‘might be thought of as the empty bases of an absent sculpture that can only be fitted with the viewer’s own presence’ such that ‘the presence of the work evokes the need to be partly internal, bound up with a sense of oneself being there as well as the sculpture’ (p. 315). At stake, interestingly for consumer researchers (or at least we hope it will be), is a problematizing of what Potts (2000: 8) refers to as the ‘structuring imperative’ of the word ‘object’ because such sculptures psychically activate the viewer and make physical and spatial intrusions.

Inasmuch as the embodied experience of perception can be thought of as a physical activation caused by the object, the otherness is complex and paradoxical: the structure is static but experienced as dynamic. Yet, a sculpture is not a subject and Potts welcomes Andre’s naming of his sculptures as places; a framework emerges in which sculptures exist as something we can inhabit and there have ‘vividly embodied physical and perceptual responses’ (p. 5). In this regard, we remain both inside and outside the object, which in turn is both active and static, as though both subject and object desire to reach out and touch, the body is:

… not an inert solid mass weighed down on the ground, but an arena of interiority extending outwards into its immediate surroundings while also being sharply delimited and clearly located in one place. (Potts, 2000: 304)

Didier Anzieu

Didier Anzieu (1989) is well known in psychoanalysis and contemporary cultural studies as the prominent ‘skin theorist’ (e.g. Lafrance, 2009; North, 2013; Segal, 2009). His notion of the ‘skin-ego’, Anzieu’s most influential concept, builds upon Freudian theory but also breaks away to consider not only the psychical contents but also psychical containers, because for Anzieu, skin cannot exist without a relation to the ego. By focusing on the body’s surface, Anzieu attempts an elaborate topographical model that addresses ‘both the spatial organisation of the bodily ego and the psychical ego’ (Anzieu, 1989: 11). Skin emerges as the key analytical concept, not only because of its primacy as a body organ in the infant’s early developmental stages but also due to skin’s metaphorical prominence in a variety of different scientific and everyday discourses. Anzieu’s theory redresses Freudian psychoanalysis’s emphasis on psychic interiority.

Anzieu’s concept of the skin-ego represents a move away from ‘disembodying’ models of subjectivity that became prominent following poststructuralist psychoanalytical thinkers, most notably Jacques Lacan. In his article, ‘Against Lacan’, Anzieu (2000; cited in Lafrance, 2013: 19) criticizes Lacan for making philosophical rather than psychoanalytical postulates, characterized by ‘a triple deviation of thought, speech and practice’. Anzieu confronts Lacan’s clinical and analytical techniques and Lacan’s conceptualization of the unconscious as structured like language. For Anzieu, just as Freud’s era had previously repressed sex, Lacan’s disproportionate emphases on language now repressed the body. Anzieu’s concept of skin-ego is therefore an attempt to escape what he regarded as the ‘linguistic determinism’ of Lacan and the ‘biological determinism’ of Freud (Houzel, 2000). For Houzel, Anzieu’s skin-ego paved the way for ‘… giving the psyche back its corporeal weight, which structuralism has denied it, without, at the same time reducing it to the laws of biology’ (p. 21).

Skin-ego and psychic envelopes

Anzieu (1979: 23) defines the skin-ego as ‘a containing envelope, a protective barrier and a filter of exchanges, as a result of a proprioceptive and epidermal sensations and the internalisation of skin identifications’. Accordingly, skin-ego can be a metaphorical conceptualization of how psychic and physical space co-constitute each other and how we engage with the external world and have a sense of identity. The skin-ego develops through our initial experience of continuity with other bodies and the eventual realization that the bodies are distinct. Therefore, it is through our skin-ego that we develop selfhood and experience sensuality, protection and vulnerability. In developing a skin-ego, the child psychologically internalizes physical encounters with others, as Anzieu puts it:

The Skin-Ego is part of the mother – particularly her hands – which has been interiorised and which maintains the psyche in a functional state, at least during waking life, just as the mother maintains the baby’s body in a state of unity and solidity. (Anzieu, 1989: 89)

Anzieu locates the most formative developmental trauma in the moment where the baby leaves behind the illusion of a shared skin with his/her caregiver. In doing so, Anzieu foregrounds the primitive experiences of the body already found in the work of Freud, Klein, Winnicott and others but displaces the centrality of the Oedipal configuration in Freudian, and by extension, Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lafrance, 2013). This allowed him to develop a psychogenetic account that not only avoids sexed and gendered essentialisms (Lafrance, 2013) but also, as noted above, affords a topographical model of the psyche that is neither biologically nor linguistically determinist. With reference to Lacan’s mirror stage, for instance, Anzieu (1989) argues that self-identification is more ‘bodily’ and ‘intense’ than characterized by Lacan. For Anzieu, Lacan’s account of ego development is not only largely disembodied but also reliant on accentuating visual signals at the expense of other senses and kinaesthetic awareness. In contrast, the establishment of a skin-ego relies on sensory reflexivities of many different kinds, which includes visual stimulation but also considers touching, being touched by one’s own hand, ‘hearing oneself make sounds’, ‘smelling one’s own odour’ (p. 62) and it is skin as the site of the consensuality of these experiences that marks Anzieu’s conceptual distinction from Lacan.

For Anzieu (1989: 215), the skin of the body and the psyche can be understood like the skin of an onion, ‘a structure of layers interlocking one within another’. Thus, ‘what on one level is a container may become a content on another’ (Anzieu, 1989), and the stripping away of one’s psyche may reveal further containers rather than contents, confronting the notion of a one-way flow from the inner to the outer self. In this regard, objects like clothes play a more ambiguous role in their relation to skin. North (2013) illustrates how Anzieu moves from listing clothing as a modification of skin – relating it to skin-ego’s inscription function alongside tattooing and scarification – to clothing as a ‘second skin’ that compensates for a vulnerable skin-ego. Second skins, within Anzieu’s work, are generally sought whenever physical or mental boundaries require reinforcement.

Anzieu, therefore, regarded the skin-ego as eventually superseded by the thinking ego, but with the caveat that the latter’s functions are still grounded in sensory qualities (Anzieu, 1989). As North (2013: 80) explains, this grounding is not a one-way affair:

the sensory goes on being the ground of the psychical, which in turn grounds and shapes the experiences of the sense. The attempt to construct thinking as of a different order to corporeal experience is undermined by the concurrent claim that bodily experience constitutes psychical reality.

Examples of Anzieu’s theories in practice are to be found in his case studies, which demonstrate how the formation of a weak skin-ego results in psychological disruption. Consider Anzieu’s work with ‘Juanito’:

Juanito, who suffered from a congenital deformity, had had to undergo an operation in the USA shortly after his birth. His mother had interrupted her family and professional activities to accompany him, but for several weeks she was only able to see him through a glass panel, and could neither touch him nor speak to him. The operation was successful; his convalescence had gone well. After returning to his native country, the acquisition of speech had occurred normally, if not indeed somewhat precociously. But the little boy did, as one might expect, suffer some considerable psychical after-effects, which led to his being presented for pscyho-therapeutic treatment at the age of five or six. The decisive turning-point in the treatment is a session in which Juanito tears from the wall a huge, blank strip of the washable adhesive paper that has been put there expressly to allow children to paint freely on the walls. He cuts this strip into little pieces. He then undresses completely and asks his therapist to stick the pieces all over his body, except for his eyes, emphasising the necessity of both using all of the pieces and of covering the whole of the body without leaving any gaps – except to see through. During the following sessions, he repeats this game of having his therapist wrap up his entire body, then he performs the same operation on a celluloid doll of a swimmer. (Anzieu, 1989: 65, see also Lafrance, 2009 for further analysis).

Theoretical applications

Discussion

The mode of analysis conducted in this article demonstrates a potential relevancy across various strands of consumer research. As a direct contribution to consumer research skin studies and music consumption, it offers a very distinct interpretive lens possible of generating fresh insight. Moreover, spread across different consumer research areas like embodiment and experientialism, the implications are arguably more exciting. Indeed, the article directly returns to the experientialist and hedonist literature that emerged from consumer research in the 1980s and arguably constituted the subject’s most exciting period in terms of novel contributions and intervention (e.g. see Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982). This research not just returns to such analysis but invigorates it by emphasizing the role of the body in consumption, noting new interpretive lens for the purpose of studying consumer behaviour.

The article also contributes to ongoing studies of psychoanalysis within consumer research and marketing and therefore might be regarded as timely (e.g. see the content of the recent Psychoanalysis and Marketing special issue of Marketing Theory and John Desmond’s excellent book Pyschoanalytic Accounts of Consuming Desire, 2012). It offers a distinctive approach to analysing subject–object relations and the psychodynamics of objectification and commodification, beyond Lacanian (Reyes et al., 2015), Freudian (Cluley and Dunne, 2012) and Kleinian (Chatzidakis, 2015) perspectives. Yet, although directly inspired by Anzieu’s theories, it can be problematic to refer to the present study as psychoanalytic. For example, by focussing on the recurrence of words such as ‘flood’, ‘contained’ and so on, a very literal and face value interpretation is asserted that does not engage with questions concerning the unconscious or ego formation, as might befit psychoanalytic methodology. However, our argument is that we prefer a demarcation between psychoanalysis and consumer research. As Frosh (2010) argues, psychoanalysis is a practice rooted in the clinic, it has conventionally taken a form of treatment for a patient, who would typically arrive with psychological stress and encounter an analyst who, using specific methods, would seek to alleviate that distress. Without wishing to be too dogmatic, such psychoanalysis is clearly beyond our purview as marketing academics. But as Frosh also states, psychoanalysis has already migrated beyond the clinic and has become a significant tool for understanding the social world. It is here that we call for temperance. Anzieu’s case studies, as evidenced above, clearly relate to people in severe distress and the psychoanalytic interpretation presented followed extensive and highly intense and intimate meetings between analyst and analysand. We, by contrast, are doing no such thing, nor do we wish to, because between the stated aim of the psychoanalyst of understanding the unconscious for the purpose of alleviating personal distress and the aim of marketing scholar who seeks to advance our understanding of consumer behaviour in a context of the business school lies a massive ethical and political gap. A fine line should exist, we submit, between psychoanalysis as a distinct set of clinical practices and marketing scholarship. For this reason, we would rather see this work described as inspired by psychoanalysis, rather than as psychoanalytic in content. If it is the case that we are amidst an enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis by marketing scholars, we encourage further consideration of what questions are raised in terms of psychiatric ethics, creativity of interpretation, researcher integrity and the old problem of ‘armchair analysis’.

Conclusion

Anzieu presents us with both a literal and a relational understanding of a skin-ego as a ‘way of thinking about the experience of the senses – about how they feel – and how this feeling grows out of, or indeed, latches onto the sensations springing from the surfaces of the body’ (Lafrance, 2013: 31). Drawing on this work, we have attempted to illustrate how material and immaterial objects surrounding the body, in this case noise, may approach relatable ontological status with biological skin borders as they become internalized into the ego experience.

Moving beyond skin’s typical framing as biological canvas for signification – a framing that we would argue parallels a broader preoccupation in consumer research with mechanisms of signification and symbolic communication – we engage with a range of consumer skins and envelopes that serve alternative functions. We turn to aural envelopes and some of the ways in which they reinforce the individuation of the skin-ego, compensate for vulnerability through holding and provide containment. Altogether, we hope the examples provide theoretical tools and metaphors that pave the way towards a view of the embodied self and its inanimate surroundings as relational and mutually constitutive.

Beyond allowing for additional insight, we suggest that skin-ego might also provide us with a deeper sense of critical awareness of how consumer behaviour can be understood as relating to a desire for reinforcement. For example, recall the previously mentioned case study of Anzieu’s treatment of Marsysas in which the analysand was interpreted to be in need of being carried and warmed by another. Accordingly, we submit that Bull’s iPod users and DeNora’s respondents’ experience of music can be understood as stemming from a desire to be held and warmed by another. It stands to reason that the more capitalism and consumer culture isolate people into individuated living and ‘bowling alone’ (Putnam, 2000) and ‘inoperative communities’ (Nancy, 1991), the more people turn to noise baths to create sensations of intimate engagement. More generally, we see how everyday consumption may address experiences of sensuality, protection and vulnerability. Whilst much consumer research demonstrates the conviviality to be enjoyed via shared experiences in tribes and other forms of community (Cova et al., 2007), the soundscape reveals a tendency towards people disappearing into antisocial melancholic bubbles.

With such thoughts in mind, it is interesting to recall another of Anzieu’s patients, Armand, for whom conversation provided anaclitic support during a period of intense pain. Might ubiquitous retail background music provide a similar function in easing a sense of loneliness in a crowd? Indeed, more generally, to what extent do consumer objects fulfil needs in a society that functions in anaesthetized, atomized conditions? Such questions provide a sobering counterpoint to the strident, hyper-agentic ‘cosmopolitan burning mountain man of action hero’ subject who reappears across studies of consumer culture theory. Instead, Anzieu’s treatment of his patients reminds us that underneath everyday consumption can often be a fundamental need for reinforcement. Accordingly, a poignancy and melancholia can be read into Potts’ analysis of Carl Andre’s sculptures of art audiences whose bodies extend outwards yet only encounter sculptures that, despite their perceived dynamism and ability to generate vivid experiences, remain just objects. Therefore, the objects that come to constitute our extended self or skin-ego can betray, at a psychoanalytic level, deep levels of forlorn desire and melancholic yearning that run through our consumer culture.