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When the Body is Target is organized into four parts. Part 1, “The Mysterious Borderland of Self-Harm,” introduces the reader to the concept of self-harm, its spectrum, paradoxes, and universality. Self-harm behaviors as Farber describes them fall on a spectrum and people often demonstrate a cluster of self-harm behaviors from self-mutilation, tattooing, body piercing, mutilating surgery, eating disorders (anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, and obesity), substance abuse, compulsive gambling, sadomasochism, to include those anti-aging devices one flocks to in an attempt to achieve the eternal fountain of youth. All can be seen as attempts at self-medicating. She writes about individuals who have experienced traumatic experiences of living and are unable to experience their emotions in their mind. According to Farber, a number of patients begin treatment experiencing pervasive aloneness and psychic deadness and many have been deadened from a long history of depression. All are searching for a path, a way to re-enter the world of the living. She sees self-harm resulting from over-determined, complex motivations, from “a particular kind of masochism, the embodiment of a determination to punish, castrate, or
annihilate the self” (p. 3), to the feeling of bodily pain, as a momentary jolt out of the deadness of depression and to experience the body as alive and vital. To defend against profound anxiety, these self-harm behaviors, which target peoples' bodies and their skin, serve as an unconscious solution, an unspoken communication to others and often it serves as a presymbolic communication to the self. Farber writes that self-harm is rooted in the desire to protect oneself from experiencing the original pain by substituting one form of pain for another.
Farber has gathered empirical evidence for a strong association between eating disordered behavior and self-mutilation, and she further states that it is not unusual to find within the same individual binge eating,