Self-Mutilation, Masochism, and Rigid Character

In this paper the subject of self-mutilation is approached through an understanding of character, which is defined here as an organization of predisposing, yet consciously unarticulated attitudes and modes of functioning that shape and provide form to conscious subjective experience (Reich, 1945; Shapiro, 1965, 1989). By “attitudes” I am describing the mind as biased and poised in the state of readiness to organize, interpret, and respond to experience in a distinctive manner. This distinctiveness is what makes a person recognizable across different contexts and can be observed in the continuity of a person's way of speaking, thinking, experiencing affect, interacting, and remembering (Piers, 1998). From this perspective, symptoms are seen as conspicuous expressions of the more pervasive, ongoing, restrictive, and self-regulating dynamics of character.

It is from this point of view that I argue that a variant of rigid character, masochism, provides a meaningful psychological context for understanding self-mutilation in many patients. The quality of the rigid, masochistic patient's mode of functioning has been described as continuously deliberate and purposeful (Shapiro, 1981), A corollary to the exaggerated importance these patients place on deliberateness and willful self-direction is that they are acutely sensitive to and react against being influenced by their own passively experienced subjective states (particularly desire and dependency longings) and by others. In his work on