Fedunina N.Yu. Book review. Alessandra Lemma Under the skin. A psychoanalytic study of body modification, London, Routledge, 2010

Alessandra Lemma's book is dedicated to the body and bodily modifications in their entire spectrum, from the use of cosmetics to extreme transformations. The question of how to feel at home in your body reflects the basic fact that being-in-the-body simultaneously confronts us with our dependence on the other and with the loss of unity with the other. The focus of attention and understanding of the body are the peculiarities of the relationship between the “I” and the other (m/other), the child and the adult caring for him, which determine in many ways whether the body will be the place of the embodiment of the “I” or the object of manipulation, which is attacked and over which it is necessary to win. Based on the material of clinical cases, A. Lemma describes unconscious fantasies that may underlie certain modifications of the body that a person resorts to when he does not experience his body as hospitable, as his own. These are the fantasies of the almighty creation of oneself, the fantasy of restoring one's own body through getting rid of the pursuing other, literally localized in the experience of ugliness or damage to a certain part of the body, and the fantasy of the ideal couple, pushing for attempts to find an ideal body that would guarantee a loving look and fusion with an idealized object. Plastic surgery, tattoos, scarring on the body are attempts to overcome the inevitable limitations of reality, create a boundary for yourself, erase the traces of dependence on another, rewrite your own history. In addition to analyzing clinical cases, the book discusses the problems of the body and bodily modifications in anthropology, art and literature.

Key words: body, body modifications, plastic surgery, psychoanalysis

For citation: Fedunina, N.Yu. (2023). Book review. Alessandra Lemma Under the skin. A psychoanalytic study of body modification, London, Routledge, 2010. New Psychological Research, No. 1, 129–134. DOI: 10.51217/npsyresearch_2023_03_01_08