Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Skin Patient

2025 Grand Rounds Series: Jorge Claudio Ulnik, MD, PhD

There is a relationship between what the psychoanalyst hears and what the dermatologist sees. What the psychoanalyst hears in the doctor’s consulting room allows him to infer that there are unconscious factors which have a part in the motive and the time of consultation, the self-destructive patterns of behavior that make the disease worse, the kind of complaint or suffering that will be privileged by the patient, the acceptance or rejection of a treatment, and in some cases even the location of the lesions.

The identity and the skin, the self-inflicted lesions, the mimetic moment and the tattoos, the hypothetical role of mirror neurons, the death on the skin, the symbiosis, the skin and the gaze, are some of the items in which this presentation is focused. Finally, technical considerations to help psychoanalysts and dermatologists working with skin patients will be described.