Self-Mutilation: A Love Letter

The impetus for this article, or what I would mark as its beginning in time, which is also a notion to keep in mind throughout the article, comes from a piece published in The New York Times Magazine entitled “The Thin Red Line” (Egan). The article circulated through the clinic where I work, and sparked much debate about what would be the clinical picture of someone who intentionally and painfully physically harm him or herself, why and how these activities would lead to the relief of anxiety, whether these were truly “female perversions,” as the author in the article contends, and what must be the biological components of these kinds of behaviors, since they couldn't have a solely psychological origin. The article itself is a finely crafted piece of writing, weaving together the clinical and treatment material with references to indigenous or tribal practices, the modern primitive movement, the mainstream notions of perversion, and the possible biological basis of the pleasure for those who engage in such practices, while holding to the assumption that this behavior is a contemporary form of adolescent self-loathing. It seemed to me that a Lacanian reading would provide a more comprehensive way of making sense of all of the material. What I would like to do in this presentation is to follow the trail of marks left behind that go to make up the thin red line that marks the difference between hysteria and perversion.

What results from the traumatic breaking of the skin? Simply, a scar is formed, leaving a trace of the rupture as a memento on the skin, a deformation of the surface of the body. As Freud has said, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself a projection of a surface [the editor's footnote continues:]…It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus” (Freud, Ego). In the mirror phase