Between touches by Nicola Diamond.
Touch papers: Dialogues on Touch in the psychoanalytic
Space.
Chapter 7.
Ebrary 20th October 2012.
What is the significance of touch?
Why is it taboo?
Is touch a form of language?
Where is the border line between effection and erotic
caress? ( depends on the cultural attitudes that derive from philosophy and
tradition and the popularized engrained assumptions of common sense).
MY CONCLUSION FROM
THIS TEXT:
REMIDY: create HEIMLICH inside and outside the body, in my
artwork
DISARM the living bodily memory- senses/traces of NORMOPATHY
in my life.
I need to reflect and work on “Altering the procedural interpersonal sense - To reach
a desired state between me, the environment, social structure and personal
relationships and other people.
Look at :what I want to be at home with, comfortable with,
enjoy rather than fear…..
that it is ok to be different, not normal, strange, be
wanted, loved, looked after, and different rather than wrong.
DEFINITIONS:
ORIGINS of ‘touch’: Latin verb TANGERE
French verb toucher. English verb touch.
Means- to put the hand or finger upon. Or to affect with
feelings and emotions. It implies a relation with ‘other’.
NORMOPATHY: “you are wrong” not “ you and I are different”.
THE UNCANNY: (unheimlich) relates to the experience of of
strangeness, estrangement, not being feeling at home with something,
frightening. ( dolls in horror films that come alive, being depersonalised,
half machine half human, (my machine chair represents this), numbness, lack of
feeling, discomforting strange feeling.. a sense of not being quite oneself.
The experience of being like an object. A sense of loosing selfhood. Linked to
the ‘experience of Alterity’ meaning not being at home and a sense of
otherness.
HEIMLICH: opposite to uncanny, the familiar, homeliness,
friendly, comfortable, intimate.
NEUROPHYSIOLOGY: tactile receptors transmit stimuli
simultainiously with brain processes which prduce sense data and the experience
of touch.
CATHEXIS – to already experience it as an object as other
for the self.
CO-TERMINUS SONOROUS - including deep resonant sounds at the
end.
SOMATIC KNOWLEDGE – stored early experiences of touch, interpersonal
history, culture etc… ‘cognitively recalled’ or are activated into our
interactions with the external experience of the world. and deters how we
relate to others in the world, and is the same as: roots in the ‘skin ego’
and ‘tactile traces’. It can also be
related to ‘ pre-verbal interaction as a baby. P86
COGNATIVE RECALL: when somatic knowledge is remembered
through sensory and feeling. ( ie remembering how an ex lover would caress)
THE INVISIBLE HINGE – Merleau Ponty(1962)
‘The untouched touch’: is the hiatus, the break, the
absences of touch, separations, interruption, mini separations, missing part,
gap, withdrawals within touch, difference in pitch between touches that are
just as important and significant as
being touched, it is a part of life and how we experience interaction.
Kinetion: my word for: motion and energy created between two
people touching.
Kinethetic/kinethesia: (semiotext)
WRITING ON THE SKIN: is an attempt to link the body with
social inscription.
Could Touch be
considered a form or style of writing? An emotional scribe, the hand and body
as a communication tool, the writing tool and the surface?
STYLES OF TOUCH:
modes and styles of touch convey specific meanings. Co-terminus sonorous
(including deep resonant sounds at the end)
Continuous, contained, fragmented, unbound, literal,
implied, tone of voice, style of emotion, the physical pressure put onto the
skin.
Rythemic modes and styles and pattern, the gaps and spaces
between touch,
The withdrawal, the absence is just as important for
differentiation.
Touch can be discriminating, subtle, express deep feeling,
and multiple meanings. Touch is ambiguous. Intersubjective – something common
between many people, occurring between common minds.
KEY ROLES OF TOUCH:
Humans can’t thrive without touch. Neglect and deprivation
long term leads to impairment in social and affective capacity to relate.
Touch is essential for development of the cortex in the
brain, which develops long term thinking and relational development and how we
encounter others in the world.
It is essential for bonding and affective communication.
Biologically, bonding establishes relational ties, and develops specific modes
of interaction.
Touch is a form of bodily communication. Touch as a
form of writing?
It is a form of experience, of difference, otherness, and
relationship.
It is a form of thinking, a function of language.
Touch can break down and collapse boundaries, emotionally through meaning and
intention.
Touch is immediate and can disarm.
Touch is a reflexive sense: it involves a self-other
relation.
Touch is aligned with the body, speech, thought, language
and culture.
Touch is essential for sensory information to be transmitted
and crucial for the body to be in the world.
FUTURE OF TOUCH:
touch will develop in different ways, with varying potentials on style
and significance.
BENTHIAN: suggests, touch can be considered crucial for a
relation of body with world. The loss of this sensory stimuli can result in the
fragmentation of the self, of memory, social relationships. The sensation ego establishes in sustained
tactile traces. Touch is vital for
experience. One could simply
‘loose touch’. P83
LAPLANCHE AND PONTALIS (1973)
Primary narcissism:
Is the internalisation of a relationship.
Secondary narcissism is:
Already exists in the primary narcissism. One’s own body is
an object of concentration of emotional energy on the object or goal (cathexis)
– to already experience it as an object as other for the self. P84
MARLEAU PONTY (1962)
Phenomena of touch: touching/holding your own hand, touching
oneself and being touched by yourself. One becomes both subject and object for
oneself.
He believes to touch
and be touched by oneself never truly unites, as ones perception miscarries at
the last moment. P85
JACQUES DERRIDA (1976)
Auto affection: the experience of touching and being touched
by oneself, admits the exposure to be in the world (exteriority) as a third
party. P85
BICK FEDERN AND DIDIER ANZIEU
Agree that the primary role of touch forms the experience of
the skin and that the experience of being touched is conveyed in the style and
feeling it is registered in early skin experience, giving an emotional sense of
the experience.
MY URTICARIA:
Could be a ‘relational trajectory’ manifested as a bodily
state.
Relational Trajectory: something inside my thoughts disrupt
rights to inner calm, and manifests as a bodily state. I don’t feel truly safe
in the world, I’m always searching for home, comfort, to belong. I feel alien
in the world.
My body thinks its being invaded by a foreign body, but it
is myself, feeling alien inside myself and in the world. My body is defending
itself against myself, my thoughts of alienation. As if I am a threat to
myself, felt through my SOMATIC KNOWLEDGE and COGNATIVE RECALL and CO-TERMINUS
SONOROUS. My bodily processes are
interacting with brain structures to produce a radical ‘new anatomy’ or produce
vast sums of histamines that create huge wheels and itchy heat to protect me
from alien bodies to remedy the problem of how I was treated as a child, in the
way, not normal, strange, not really wanted, neglected, something wrong with
me.
A victim of Normopathic family ie, always being wrong.
Urticaria is a result of the brain-mind and body working
together.
MY CONCLUSION FROM THIS
TEXT:
REMIDY: create HEIMLICH inside and outside the body, in my
artwork
DISARM the living bodily memory- senses/traces of NORMOPATHY
in my life.
I need to reflect and work on “Altering the procedural
interpersonal sense - To reach a desired state between me, the environment,
social structure and personal relationships and other people.
Look at : what I want to be at home with, comfortable with,
enjoy rather than fear…..
That it is ok to be different, not normal, strange, be
wanted, loved, looked after, and different rather than wrong.
