The skin that (dis)covers me

Abstract

It is proposed to approach the psychosomatic phenomenon from a possibility of entangling the body in the Borromean knot, as something that substitutes the knot. Fragments of an analysis are presented, where the patient in question presents depigmentation in the skin due to an outbreak of vitiligo, which appeared again accompanied by a crisis of anguish. It starts from the idea that the “speaking body”, that is, the “body of the speaking being”, is made possible thanks to the knotting of the three registers: Real, Symbolic and Imaginary. The discussion follows around the irruption of the body in the analytic experience, highlighting the time in which, in the course of the analysis, a signifier returned in the body causing an injury to erupt at a specific point, being taken by the analyst as what returns from the Real. According to the clinical fragments presented, the traumatic event placed in the body, not translated into words, manifests itself not as a symptom inscribed in the symbolic, but as a display, as a real that erupts, through the inscription of the letter on the body.