Why Do We Hurt Ourselves?: Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life
210
Why Do We Hurt Ourselves?: Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life
210Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253036391 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/14/2018 |
| Pages: | 210 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
The First Time
Under what circumstances does the first injury occur?
This question falls within the sociological study of deviant behaviors, which, broadly defined, studies behaviors that are socially stigmatized because they transgress the norms of a social group. As Patricia and Peter Adler point out, self-injurers enter the two categories of lonely deviance developed by Joel Best and David Luckenbill: they are loners, given that they proceed without needing relations with similar others, and they are individual deviants, in that they engage in deviant activities by themselves. Consequently, for the sociologist accustomed to initially looking at the impact of groups and institutions on individuals, this practice remains mysterious.
As Best and Luckenbill suggest, solitary deviants are thus socialized into their deviance by "society at large," rather than by supposedly deviant groups inaugurating a change in the individual's mindset toward norms. The first step to understanding this difference in the case of self-injury is to explore how the first instance of self-injury occurs, and this chapter will outline some analytical categories to account for it.
What Happened?
Many of the participants of this study expressed a haziness surrounding the first instance of self-injury. Judith, with whom I conducted several interviews, is exemplary of this:
Interviewer: Can you tell me when you started self-injuring?
Judith: Uh ... I was in ninth grade, in fact ... honestly, it's a bit of a blur, how I started ... It started ... Not much eh ... it was ... At first, I didn't even know what it was ... [silence]
Judith does not remember exactly what happened. Indeed, while most participants remember their first injury, many do not perceive a specific reason for the act. Even if a significant event occurs that provokes the urge to hurt oneself, the motivation, like the choice of this practice rather than another, is completely vague. There is no reason to assume that the attack of the body is, in itself, the motivation for this type of activity. On this point, I share David Grange's criticism against the teleological analyses of self-aggression: "behaviors such as bulimia/ anorexia, alcoholism, drug addiction, self-neglect ... have, in practice, a deleterious effect on the health of the person who does it. ... It is a fact, but nothing indicates that this is their vocation."
Understanding the first self-wound, and moreover the management of its enunciation in an interview situation, leads us to look into a posteriori — constructed explanations. Amandine was nineteen years old at the time of our discussion, in March 2008. This young Quebecois explains to me:
[Instant messaging]
Amandine: I started almost five years ago. I do not remember how the idea came to my mind, I grabbed a compass and engraved the word DEAD on my wrist ... without knowing what self-injury was.... I had great difficulties with my parents, I was in major suicidal depression, I went to PH [Psychiatric Hospital] for that and I went out ... I continued SI [Self-Injuring] after that....
Interviewer: Ok ... and you remember why you wanted to do it? Why the word "DEAD"?
Amandine: Why I wanted to do it, in the beginning, I think, was to make a concrete gesture toward my death ... and the word "dead" because it was my goal ... later I made five suicide attempts.
Interviewer: It was like a kind of training?
Amandine: No ... I don't remember exactly that time ... but I know that I quickly discovered the good it did ... I switched to cuts after, it was much more liberating than simple letters with the compass.
Unable to remember her precise motives, Amandine introduces an "I think" before "to make a concrete gesture toward my death." Here, we can perceive the influence of her studies in psychology on her narrative. This turn of phrase and the expression, "I was in major suicidal depression," recall how mental health professionals talk and their inclination to interpret actions through unconscious reasons. Moreover, Amandine's use of the expression, "I think, was to make a concrete gesture toward my death," means both that she has developed this interpretation retrospectively and that she feels as though unconscious motivations were at work.
The initial enigma persists: was the first injury a purely "spontaneous" act? The elusive origin of this act is even more troubling because the first time takes on a particular importance within the self-harming trajectory. From this initial act, individuals realize that this behavior provides them with relief, and a sense of dependence develops. Over time, self-injury becomes a motivation in itself. But how should we study the motivations of the first wound when the people concerned express difficulty discussing it?
The Study of Motives
Howard Becker writes about people entering deviant careers, stating that "people usually think of deviant acts as motivated. They believe that the person who commits a deviant act, even for the first time (and perhaps especially for the first time), does so purposely. His purpose may or may not be entirely conscious, but there is a motive force behind it." This de facto situation is not confined to illegal or illegitimate acts. Who knows the true motives of their daily practices, if such motives exist at all? Who is really aware, for example, of the reasons driving their initial participation in a leisure activity or, for that matter, their involvement in a given professional sector?
We generally assume that when someone develops a deviant practice, they have justification for it, while simultaneously we share an ignorance toward the motivations of our own socially accepted activities. In this regard, the participants' narratives are likely to be much more elaborate than one given by an individual asked about a behavior deemed socially legitimate, such as playing ping-pong on a Sunday afternoon. Here, a justification by taste ("I like it") may appear to be sufficient. But because they are engaged in unusual behaviors, the people I met had already reflected on a way to justify their practice, prior to the interviews. They are somehow socially summoned to hold a reflexive posture toward their behavior.
Moreover, I believe that the more socially illegitimate a behavior is, the more that it is suspected to rely on deep, unconscious, and inaccessible motivations. In our case, this implies that the quest for a motivation regarding the first injury constitutes also, and perhaps above all, an expectation toward the self-injurers. Howard Becker has encouraged us to reverse these questions, suggesting that "instead of the deviant motives leading to the deviant behavior, it is the other way around; the deviant behavior in time produces the deviant motivation." In his seminal study of marijuana smokers, Becker showed how "vague impulses and desires ... are transformed into definite patterns of action through the social interpretation of a physical experience which is in itself ambiguous."
We will see that self-injurers also gradually learn to find a precise sensation in the wound, although this learning often happens alone. But there is another difference. Through the social imaginary surrounding its consumption, the marijuana smoker has an idea of the effect that the drug should produce. Except for a few participants who explained that they had begun self-injuring after observing the relief that people around them seemed to gain from it, the motivating effects of self-injury are often unknown before the first wound.
The issue of motivation, even in Becker's writing, is in fact too narrowly considered. In his study of marijuana smokers, he focuses on the longing to smoke marijuana or to socialize in a group of smokers. These motives are all directly related to drugs, whereas one can imagine someone starting to smoke for other reasons, such as escaping a social, familial, or emotional situation, or desiring to improve one's popularity among school peers, including nonsmokers. We should not assume that only the content of a deviant behavior plays as a potential motivation for this behavior.
To avoid this difficulty, it is sufficient to consider that the first time is a biographical moment. In this context, the first injury becomes the intersection, at a given time, of an intention, a circumstance, and a biographical passage. The "intention" refers to the conscious motive expressed by the participant about this first self-injury (motivation, as we have said, is often insufficiently developed in the interviews). By "circumstance," I mean the material framework of the wound, namely the place, the time of day, and the interactions preceding the act. Finally, the "biographical passage" describes the participants' situation at this point in their lives, their preoccupations, their family and school situation, the events that they find significant, and so on.
An Intention, a Circumstance, a Biographical Passage Let us take the example of Beatrix, a fourteen-year-old high school student in the tenth grade. She also expresses the haziness surrounding the reasons underlying her first injury. Nonetheless, she remembers its circumstances:
[Instant messaging]
Interviewer: So, can you tell me when you started to self-injure?
How did it happen?
Beatrix: On a Thursday. Half the class had gone skiing, and it was a day of strike action, so I had not gone to school. A banal day. I had nothing to do.
Without acknowledging any motive, Beatrix finds herself in a situation of loneliness — which, as we shall see, often favors the recourse to self-injury — and in a biographical moment, characterized by the recent death of her father coupled with difficulties with friends. Solitude leads her to revisit her past. In other words, the circumstance in which she finds herself (solitude) momentarily reinforces the impact of her biographical passage (the death of her father).
For Lisa, a nineteen-year-old high school student in vocational training, the configuration looks similar:
[Instant messaging]
Lisa: I do not remember exactly when it was. In the year when I turned fourteen, I walked out of my home, and I started at that time. I settled outside and I saw a piece of glass. After I don't remember what pushed me to take it, but it started like that, then I kept doing it.
Interviewer: Why did you leave your house?
Lisa: After a fight with my mother, now it seems stupid for me to have left for that, but at the time ... I have very conflicting relations with my mother.
Like Beatrix, Lisa does not identify any particular intention in her act, but she is able to clearly identify its circumstance as well as the biographical moment. Lisa says that she had been assaulted when she was eleven, and had only told her parents three years afterward. She did not wish to specify the type of assault. After this announcement, her parents seemed distraught and sought to "know everything," which, according to Lisa, resulted in many family tensions.
The intention of the first self-injury is clearer in the cases where the participants injure themselves in preparation for suicide, as a manner of training, or at least as a means to symbolically approach a more-or-less desired death. This is what Louise, a twenty-two-year-old literature student, narrates:
[Instant messaging]
Interviewer: The first time, you remember?
Louise: Yes, very well.
I wanted to die
I wanted to open my veins, but it was very superficial.
But I noticed that hurting myself relieved me, so I did it again.
Despite these exceptions, the motive of the first wound generally remains mysterious, whereas the circumstance and the biographical passage are more easily recounted. The gap between a difficult-to-describe intention and an easily identified context helps us understand the mechanism at work in the first time. From this, we can indeed understand that when facing a "trouble," a malaise, some uncertainty exists regarding the possible behaviors to adopt. The participants often give the impression of having reacted as best they could, of having done something just to do something. The first injury may thus be described as a form of "spontaneous" expression, but not according to the common usage of this adjective. It is an act whose initial intention is neither formulated nor rationalized by the one who performs it, and thus it is consequently experienced as spontaneous.
Are There Predispositions?
The idea to self-injure in the face of a problem does not immediately occur to everyone. For this possibility to emerge spontaneously there must first be a familiarity with self-aggression so that the self-inflicted wound appears as a possible form of spontaneous expression. Many participants described their first-time self-injuring as part of behaviors or desires that had animated them for a while. Are we to attribute this to biographical reconstruction or reality? We cannot know. Nevertheless, it is the first possibility — biographical reconstruction — that is necessary to perceive oneself as someone who may self-injure.
Camille, a twenty-three-year-old literature student, explains that self-injury refers to the behaviors that have shaped her relationship with emotions since childhood:
[Face to face]
Camille: I don't really know when I started, I really began self-injuring like that ... that is, the cutter in the arm, I think I was about fifteen or sixteen. But I had ... I mean it was dormant, it was going to happen. Let's say I don't believe that someone who is totally normal can see someone else self-injuring and tell himself, "Well, what if I do that myself?" and start self-injuring. Let's not be dumb. I mean ... I remember very well that around ten or twelve, I spent winter nights, when it was cold, with only a T-shirt and underwear at the edge of the window ... because I couldn't sleep if I wasn't cold enough. Yes, behaviors like that ... behaviors like when there is something that gets on your nerves, you hit the walls, you kick it, it hurts but for you it lets off steam, stuff like that. Then, you set the limit of what self-injury is or what it is not.
Interviewer: Before you self-injured, where did these behaviors come from?
Camille: No idea. My character, I imagine. Uh, for me it was the reaction to have, I never thought of it especially. For example, nobody has ever prevented me from talking about my problems or whatever. I just never did.
For the most part, participants describe the gradual emergence of a feeling of strangeness, of abnormality. Patricia and Peter Adler report the same type of feeling among some of their informants. Camille says it well: "I don't believe that someone who is totally normal can see someone else self-injuring and tell himself, 'well, what if I do that myself?'" The question is not whether an individual is normal or not, but whether that individual is able to perceive themselves, beforehand, as a person abnormal enough to enable this kind of deviance. In this regard, the biographical illusion becomes performative.
In his research on marijuana smokers, Howard Becker provides an uncompromising critique of theories that attempt to explain the entry into deviant careers in terms of individual predispositions. He attacks the psychological, even neurological, models against which he seeks to substitute his own. Becker's model, on the contrary, consists in showing the emergence of deviant motives due to the socialization within a deviant group. To do so, he implicitly assumes that a predisposition leading to smoking marijuana would be a predisposition to only smoke marijuana.
However, from a sociological perspective, the predisposition to enter a deviant career could be understood as the self-persuasion that a predisposition toward deviant behavior exists. In other words, a predisposition to smoke marijuana or self-injure need not result from a motivation toward engaging in these specific actions, but rather toward acting in a deviant manner in general. Many participants thus expressed having for a long time (or even always) felt "apart," or "a little bit different."
Another type of social predisposition stems from a reduction in the degree of illegitimacy regarding certain deviances through socialization. Élodie, a twenty-three-year-old student working toward an associate's degree in commerce, illustrates this. She says that she no longer knows exactly when her self-injury started, but explains that getting hurt has been a "mode of expression" (she puts it in quotation marks on MSN Messenger) since childhood. She tied her practice to the education provided by her parents. Élodie explains that her parents did not hesitate to resort to physical punishment. Integrating a principle of aggression from her childhood may lead, logically, to a performative predisposition toward self-aggressive behaviors, insofar as it can be assumed that this type of socialization makes it easier to envisage any form of (self) aggression.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why Do We Hurt Ourselves?"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Alma Editeur, Paris.
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