Individual and group psyche against the wall: psychic skin and the politics of borders

This article examines the global proliferation of contemporary border walls as a psycho-political phenomenon. Despite limited practical efficacy in regulating migration or security, walls continue to multiply across the world. The article argues that their persistence cannot be fully understood within geopolitical or policy frameworks alone, but must also be approached through the unconscious dynamics of individual and collective psychic life. Drawing on Jung’s concepts of participation mystique and regression, and on psychoanalytic theories of the psychic skin and group envelope (Bick, Anzieu), the paper develops a framework linking early sensory boundary formation with the dynamics of large-group identity. It proposes that in periods of social and political instability the wall can function as a substitute group psychic skin: a material surface that reactivates archaic experiences of containment, belonging, and separation. Through this process, political discourse mobilises sensory and imaginal forms of identification that tighten collective boundaries while intensifying mechanisms of splitting and exclusion. By theorising the reciprocal relation between individual psychic envelopes and large-group identity, the article reconceptualises contemporary wall-building as a reconfiguration of the psychic architecture of collective life.