Self-Mutilation

Self-harm is worryingly common in young women, and is often used as a way of easing emotional suffering. Self-Harm: A Psychotherapeutic Approach explores the issues involved from the perspective of a psychoanalytical psychotherapist. Fiona Gardner examines these issues through extensive clinical material and an analysis of the social and cultural influences behind self-harm. This book will be of interest to all those working with those who are harming themselves, including psychotherapists, school counsellors, social workers and mental health clinicians.

'Life After Self-Harm' is written for individuals who have deliberately harmed themselves. Developed through a major research project, the contents of the manual have been informed and shaped by many users and expert professionals. The book is illustrated with multiple case-histories.

A darkly compelling story, this memoir examines one woman's secret overwhelming desire to physically hurt herself. Any casual observer of Victoria's life would not have seen that this confident, pretty, and articulate young woman was intensely struggling with the all-encompassing need to injure her body. This powerful account chronicles her stresses and insecurities, as well as the mental anguish that led to her wanting to physically turn on herself. Frequently an unspoken and unacknowledged disease, this psychological ailment affects an often hidden population; Victoria's story explores both the disease and the forces that drive it.

Hundreds of thousands of women self-mutilate, yet very little is known about the reasons for this widespread phenomenon or the experience of self-harming itself. Now, this powerful and accessible book gathers together the personal testimonies of a broad range of women who self-mutilate, explores the causes and effects of self-harming behavior and offers strategies for understanding, overcoming and healing from self-mutilation.

In the tradition of Irvin Yalom's Love's Executioner, Dr. Lynn Ponton's remarkable book takes readers inside the minds of 15 troubled adolescents to provide a compelling look at today's teenage experience. Included are Jill, a 13-year-old thrill-seeking runaway; Hannah, a privileged daughter of suburbia who suffers from anorexia; and Joe, a high school senior with a serious drinking problem. The case studies vary from the puzzling to the horrifying, but with her confident and engaging voice, Ponton brings out the unifying themes in all of them. She proposes that teenage "acting out" can be understood in terms of "risk-taking", and that by redirecting this natural impulse into healthy channels parents can minimize the dangers inherent in today's teen culture and help their children develop into mature individuals.

Challenging the traditional views of adolescence and offering a constructive new model for understanding teenage behavior, The Romance of Risk is an essential book for parents concerned about their children's well-being in this age of drug abuse, rampant violence, and AIDS.

Entering the tumultuous, dissociated world of the adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse presents an intimidating challenge for clinicians. But as the authors of this innovative book argue, therapists must be willing and able to work within the powerful and rapidly shifting relational paradigms of transference and countertransference commonly found in treatment of these patients. Such dual roles enacted in treatment include the unseeing, uninvolved parent and the unseen, neglected child; the sadistic abuser and the helpless, enraged victim; the idealized rescuer and the entitled child; and the seducer and the seduced. This is the first model for treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse that takes advantage of a relational approach and that integrates psychoanalytic thinking with the latest findings from the literature on psychological trauma and sexual abuse. Diverging from a more classical perspective, the authors view dissociation as the means by which a person adapts to and expresses traumatogenic material and by which such patients defend against traumatic memories, affects, and fantasy elaborations emerging into consciousness. The authors also detail how dissociation helps organize the patient's personality and presentation of self. Richly illustrated case examples bring to life the authors' treatment model and show how clinicians can work through the relational paradigms between patient and therapist and, ultimately, reach the core of the patient's deeply buried experiences of self and other.