A Bright Red Scream: Self-mutilation and the Language of Pain – Marilee Strong

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Written by journalist Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain is a detailed look into self-injury. Looking at the subject holistically, the author starts the book with several vignettes describing different people who cut. The author then begins to look at self-injury from different perspectives: psychology, childhood sexual abuse, psychobiology of trauma, eating disorders/body alienation/self-mutilation, socio-cultural aspects, and treatment/healing.

This book contains a comprehensive, non-judgmental journalistic portrayal of self-injury; interwound with personal stories to illustrate subject matter. One warning though, this book can be triggering for some due to the graphic descriptions and personal stories…

 

When the Body is the Target: Self-harm, Pain & Traumatic Attachments – Sharon Farber

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Many psychotherapists shy away from working with patients whose pathology is the most paradoxical of all: those raging, desperate individuals who, instead of seeking to ameliorate their pain, seemingly amplify it. These patients repeatedly engage in extreme self-harm such as compulsive cutting, scratching, scarring, piercing, tattooing, erotic vomiting and starvation. Sharon Farber is one of the increasingly rare psychoanalytically trained clinicians who have chosen to treat this challenging cohort and investigate the dark meaning of their pathology.

This book is an encyclopaedic review of the literature and a report from experience of often-successful treatment as well as a summary of her data-based research.

Farber attempts to connect the dots from the origin of the masochistic impulse to its manifestation in bodily self-harm, arguing that this “freakish” behaviour seems to be a repetition of violence that individuals had suffered (or witnessed passively), that is now performed by the victims themselves on themselves and has become an irresistible habit. These patients, she persuasively asserts, are speaking via their body, that their self-harm may actually serve to regulate their intolerable emotions and allow them to survive. It is a continuation and exaggeration of impulses that are available to us all.

By making sense out of seemingly senseless behaviours, by rendering these patients’ actions human and understandable, Farber promotes empathy, a necessary component of treatment. In contrast to many psychoanalytic practitioners, she argues (and demonstrates!) how psychoanalytic psychotherapy (informed by attachment theory), may be clinically useful, even in the face of stormy transference/counter-transference feelings.

As a self-harmer and a recovered purging type anorexic myself I found this book extremely interesting, the authors reasoning and method make sense, and really do make you feel less of a “freak” for your behaviour, while at the same time making you think about the route of it. I always do feel that without knowing the true source of your troubles and understanding them recovery is nigh on impossible, and this book helps with this greatly. At parts it can be hard to understand, and in others seem almost insulting, but overall it is a very interesting and enlightening book.

 

An Unquiet Mind – Kay Redfield Jamison

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In this book the author tells the story of her life: her focus is on her struggle with bi-polar disorder, but she puts it in a larger context. The author is an accomplished writer, and reading this book leads the reader through a range of powerful emotions. For me, the most interesting themes in the book were to do with creativity, medication, and the place of people with manic depression in society. Jamison has written elsewhere of the link between mania and creativity, but it is here that she writes most personally and most convincingly about it. As with almost all people who take lithium, she often wishes that she didn’t have to take it. There have been times in her life when she did not take it consistently, and she found that doing so let to crisis. Yet at the same time, the feeling of well-being and her productivity are at their height when she is slightly manic. So she takes her medication with some regret. She emphasizes too how important it is for treatment to be a combination of medication and psychotherapy. Finally, she also confronts the stigma that accompanies severe mental illness. This issue was particularly painful when she met some people who automatically assumed that the fact that there is some genetic component to manic depression and told her than due to this she should never have children. Jamison writes movingly of her response to such stigma.

At points the book dose become a little slow, and maybe even dull… but if you press through these sections you will be rewarded