PS64 The social skin – the social self. Tattooing as a paradigmatic technique for constituting identity and its implications for psychodermatology

Abstract

In the medical literature, tattoos are mainly discussed under three aspects: (i) with respect to their potentially harmful dermatological side effects and technologies to remove them; (ii) as indicators of their bearers’ deviancy from mainstream culture and (iii) as expressions of their bearers’ motivations, phantasies, experiences or feelings, and thus as a heuristic instrument for accessing their ‘inner lives’. These approaches to tattooing are based on the view that tattooing is a personal issue, the meaning of which is constituted by individuals’ ways of treating their bodies alongside aspects of their subjective identities. I analysed three types of tattoos: memorial tattoos, prisoners’ tattoos and the numbers tattooed on the forearms of inmates in Nazi concentration camps. My analysis suggests that tattooing does not primarily express identity, but constitutes individual identity as social identity. Tattooing presents a body technique literally inscribing a person’s social identity on the person and thus constituting the person as a person at first place. Tattoos mirror a community’s norms, values and codes of conduct just as they reflect their members’ self-conception as members of the community, abiding to the community’s norms inscribed on them and being aware of the impossibility of eradicating the community’s imprint on their lives. As the skin presents the interface between an individual organism and its social environment, it is the primordial site of constituting and representing a person’s identity in the interplay between the individual and its social environment. I suggest that, for psychodermatology, this implies regarding psychodermatological conditions as being entangled with and inseparable from a patient’s social relationships, rather than as conditions lying ‘within’ the patient’s individual lives.