Using their work with an adolescent girl who scarifies herself, the authors suggest that passages to the act involving the body be read as an attempt, differentiated by practice, to construct an object of desire. The scarifications carry out this operation by means of cutting, while piercing sustains it through drive excitation, which translates a differentiated relation between the subject and the Other.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Attaques du corps – 2004 T.22 n°2
David le Breton : the skin’s depth
The skin is, for better or worse, an instrument for constructing identity, playfully, through tattoos or piercing, or more painfully, through scarification. By painfully sacrificing a part of oneself, blood, the individual strives to save what is essential. By inflicting a controlled pain on himself, he fights against suffering that is infinitely worse. In order to save the forest, it is necessary to sacrifice one part of it. In the same way, if one is to get on with one’s life, one must sometimes hurt oneself as a way of combating distress.
Nathalie Zilkha : shame(s)
With reference to fundamental aspects of the adolescent process, the author explores the issue of the transformation of experiences of shame at this age, their disorganization and reorganization. She emphasizes the things that contribute to the often traumatic character of shame and its impact on the subject’s narcissism, especially passivation in the face of the genital and pre-genital drive emergences of puberty, and the modifying of identifications.
Ignacio Melo : passages to the body II
In the face-to-face encounter between a teenager and a psychoanalyst, the body is not only a part of speech but also a palpable and immediate element offered up to the other’s gaze, a fortiori when there are tattoos, piercing, or self-mutilation. In such circumstances, remaining a psychoanalyst-subject entails a response that cannot be dissociated from the construction of a theory about the Body.
Philippe Gutton : suffering … to believe in oneself
Self-mutilation would be a belief device which coats a great difficulty in believing in one’s own subjectal construction. A simple device, if it aims to play out sadomasochistic scenarios according to an hysterical model. A more complex one when it fulfills a transitory fetishistic mission. These behaviors have a dramatic effect on the narcissistic collapses of puberty.