An Analytical Psychology View of Self-injury

Abstract

The act of injuring the skin is present in several cultural manifestations. Despite that, one of the segments of self-injury is accompanied by psychological suffering and has been separated from the manifestations classified as cultural, having been placed nowadays in the mental disorder category. The approach of analytical psychology, associated with clinical experience with people who injure their skin, offered means to re-establish the bridge between culture images and mental suffering, aiming us to shed new light on the problem from a psychodynamic point of view. To that end, the theoretical and methodological foundations are based on amplification, which was conceived by Carl Gustav Jung as a hermeneutic process. To understand the self-injury phenomenon, we highlighted specific dynamics of psychic energy, including regression, impoundment, pendulation (mode of understanding proposed by us) and images of the lost paradise complex, as well as the disruptive hero, negative and positive inflation. At last, the alchemical mortificatio image served as a parallel to the self-injury understanding from its own teleology.