First inscriptions

The word 'I' is a late elaboration; long before learning it, the child has already mapped their existence in a universe of sensations that define their boundaries. This sensory map is the true proto-language of being.

First Inscriptions

Before we acquire language to name ourselves, before reason elaborates complex narratives about our identity, the body has already begun to trace the primordial contours of being. This sensory cartography precedes any abstraction, any verbal construction of the self. We are first a tactile experience, a sensation of boundaries, a set of perceptions that delineate where I end and the other begins.

The infant who cannot yet say "I" already experiences their separate existence through sensations: the hunger that tenses their entrails, the well-being that follows satisfaction, the pain that circumscribes a specific zone of their corporality. These sensory experiences constitute the raw material of consciousness. The skin, the material frontier between being and world, becomes the first canvas where identity is drawn through the registration of countless contacts, caresses, pressures, and temperatures.

This primeval bodily inscription persists as a permanent substrate even when we develop more sophisticated representations of ourselves. Deep analysis reveals how, beneath layers of intellectual elaboration, this foundational somatic memory always underlies. Patients with identity disorders frequently manifest alterations in their body schema, evidencing that when the original bodily representation is distorted, the entire subsequent architecture of the self falters.

Psychotherapy

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