YOUCHING THE HUMAN SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SKIN SECOND EDITION

Front matter

CRG

CRG TOUCHING

DATE DUE

Preface to the Second Edition xi

ONE The Mind of the Skin 1

TWO The Womb of Time 37

THREE Breastfeeding 59

FOUR Tender, Loving Care 76

FIVE Skin and Sex 158

SIX Growth and Development 186

SEVEN Culture and Contact 231

Envoi 317

Appendix: Touch and Age 320

Index 371

Preface To The First Edition

This book is about the skin as a tactile organ very much in volved, not alone physically but also behaviorally, in the growth and development of the organism. The central referent is man, and what happens or fails to happen to him as an infant by way of tactile experience, as affecting his subsequent behavioral de velopment, is my principal concern here. When I first started thinking about this subject in 1944 there was very little experi mental evidence available bearing upon these matters. Today a considerable amount of such evidence has been made available by a large variety of investigators, and my lonely paper of 1953, 'The Sensory Influences of the Skin" (Texas Reports on Biology and Medicine, vol. 2, 1953, pp. 291-301), is no longer alone. This book draws upon many sources of information, and notes citing these sources have been gathered in the Reference sec tion, where they are identified by the numbers of the pages and the line or lines on the pages where references or quotations occur. (This system seemed preferable to using note numbers which interrupt the text. When notes are amplifications, sugges tions, or comments, however, rather than simple source cita tions, they are keyed to asterisks and appear on the same pages as the passages to which they refer.)

The skin as an organ, the largest organ of the body, was very much neglected until quite recently. But it is not as an organ as such that I am here concerned with the skin; rather, in

X PREFACE

contrast to the psychosomatic or centrifugal approach, I am interested in what may be called the somatopsychic or centripe tal approach. In short, I am interested in the manner in which tactile experience or its lack affects the development of behav ior; hence, "the mind of the skin."

AM.

Princeton, N.J. 8 February 1971