CRG 3 1148 OO666 2969 CRG TOUCHING DATE DUE FEB06 19ST Oemco, Inc. 38-293 TOUCHING The Human Significance of the Skin SECOND EDITION ASHLEY MONTAGU 1817 HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS NEW YORK HAGERSTOWN SAN FRANCISCO LONDON TOUCHING: THE HUMAN SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SKIN (Second Edition). Copyright 1971, 1978 by Ashley Montagu. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto. Designed by Eve Kirch Callahan Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Montagu, Ashley, date Touching. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Touch. 2. Skin. 3. Nonverbal communication. 4. Personality. 5. Child psychology. I. Title. BF275.M66 1977 152.1 '82 77-3762 ISBN 0-06-012979-4 79 80 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 To the memory of James Louis Montrose V ".<. KANSAS O>"f '.'---'-.; M'C LIBRARY CONTENTS Preface to the First Edition ix 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 References 323 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 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The first edition of this book has gratifyingly found a large audience. The present edition incorporates much new informa tion concerning the vital importance of touch from birth to old age. One regret that every writer must have is that there does not exist a word which specifically refers to both sexes. In this edition I first attempted to remedy the situation by employing "it" as a substitute for the customary masculine pronouns. The result was an unacceptable impersonality which, combined with the awkward repetitiveness of "he or she" and "his or hers," rendered the change repellent. I, therefore, have adhered to customary usage. It is, of course, to be understood that in all instances both sexes are implied. This book is about human beings, not objects, and no baby is an "it" to its mother, nor should it be to anyone else. Most of all, I have to thank Louise Schaeffer of the Biology Library, and Terry Caton and Terry Wiggins of the Psychology Library, all of Princeton University. I have also to thank Louise Yorke of the Library of the Medical Center, Princeton. To my friend Dr. Philip Gordon I am indebted for his careful reading of proof. To Elisabeth Jakab, my editor, many thanks for her sympa thetic interest and concern for the continued welfare of this book. AM. Princeton, N.J. 20 September 1977 TOUCHING ONE THE MIND OF THE SKIN The greatest sense in our body is our touch sense. It is probably the chief sense in the processes of sleep ing and waking; it gives us our knowledge of depth or thickness and form; we feel, we love and hate, are touchy and are touched, through the touch corpus cles of our skin. J. Lionel Taylor, The Stages of Human Life, 1921, p. 157. The skin, like a cloak, covers us all over, the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient of protectors. The whole body is covered by skin. Even the transparent cornea of the eye is overlain by a layer of modified skin. The skin also turns inwards to line orifices such as the mouth, nostrils, and anal canal. In the evolution of the senses the sense of touch was undoubtedly the first to come into being. Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others, a fact that seems to be recognized in the age-old evaluation of touch as "the mother of the senses/' Touch is the earliest sensory system to become functional in all species thus far studied, human, animal, and bird. Perhaps next to the brain, the skin is the most important of all our organ systems. The sense most closely associated with the skin, the sense of touch, 2 TOUCHING: THE HUMAN SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SKIN is the earliest to develop in the human embryo. When the embryo is less than an inch long from crown to rump, and less than six weeks old, light stroking of the upper lip or wings of the nose will cause bending of the neck and trunk away from the source of stimulation. At this stage in its development the embryo has neither eyes nor ears. Yet its skin is already highly developed, although in a manner not at all comparable to the development it is still to undergo. In the womb, bathed by its mother's amniotic fluid and enveloped by the soft walls of the womb, "rocked in the cradle of the deep," the conceptus* leads an aquatic existence. In this environment its skin must have the capacity to resist the absorption of too much water, the soaking effects of its liquid medium, to respond appropriately to physi cal, chemical, and neural changes, and to changes in tempera ture. The skin in common with the nervous system arises from the outermost of the three embryonic cell layers, the ectoderm. The ectoderm constitutes the general surface covering of the embry onic body. The ectoderm also gives rise to the hair, teeth, and the sense organs of smell, taste, hearing, vision and touch everything involved with what goes on outside the organism. The central nervous system, which has as a principal function the keeping organism informed of what is going on outside it, develops as the inturned portion of the general surface of the embryonic body. The rest of the surface covering, after the differentiation of the brain, spinal cord, and all the other parts of the central nervous system, becomes the skin and its deriva tives hair, nails, and teeth. The nervous system is, then, a buried part of the skin, or alternatively the skin may be re garded as an exposed portion of the nervous system. It would, therefore, improve our understanding of these matters if we were to think and speak of the skin as the external nervous system, an organ system which from its earliest differentiation * the Conceptus, organism from conception to delivery. Embryo, the orga nism from to the conception end of the 8th week. Fetus, from the beginning of the 9th week to delivery. The Mind of the Skin 3 remains in intimate association with the internal or central nervous system. As Frederic Wood Jones, the English anato mist, put it, "He is the wise physician and philosopher who realises that in regarding the external appearance of his fellow- men he is studying the external nervous system and not merely the skin and its appendages." As the most ancient and largest sense organ of the body, the skin enables the organism to learn about its environment. It is the medium, in all its differentiated parts, by which the external world is perceived. The face and the hand as "sense organs" not only convey to the brain a knowledge of the environment, but convey to the environment certain information about the "internal nervous system." Throughout life the skin is in a continuous state of renewal by the activity of the cells in its deep layers. In different parts of the body the skin varies in texture, color, scent, temperature, innervation, and in other features.