Differentiation

I'm posting this partly to see where blogger puts it - it's an edit of a saved post from a little while ago.

Across the three years that I've been back at university as a student I've had more than one tutor in a brief fit of self-disclosure announce that 'we study that which we know well'.

Which doesn't leave me with very much wiggle space when it comes to posts like this one, on the human propensity to dissociate and self-destruct, an act undertaken somewhat, in the name of self-protection. This post is a summary of some of the main points that I'll need to address in my essay about self-destruction, taken from a paper written by Sharon Klayman Farber entitled 'Autistic and Dissociative Features in Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation'.

Succumbing to the illusion that bodily pain can obliterate psychic pain, some vulnerable individuals may enact self-harm as a means to derive feelings of power and omnipotence. Trauma which alters serotonergic activity may precipitate a propensity to harm the self, and a biologically based primal urge with a homeostasis of it's own has been proposed in some research, because self-mutilation and bulimia acts both have been found in numerous  other animal species.

Who needs to go that far to find either, really?

For people, Klayman Farber proposes that dissociation may be a useful lens through which we can view self-harm. A decentered self is proposed, where dissociative processes function to inhibit the integration of the mind with the psyche-soma. Outcomes of dissociated states are reflected in the symptoms of ASD, narcissistic pathology, eating disorder patients and individuals who are vulnerable to self-mutilation.


Ref:

Klayman Farber, S. (2008). Autistic and Dissociative Features in Eating Disorders and Self Mutilation. Modern Psychoanalysis, 33, 1, 23 - 49.