The sociological implications of taking self-injury as a practice: an author meets critic interview
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The sociological implications of taking self‑injury as a practice: an author meets critic interview Baptiste Brossard1 · Peter Steggals2
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract Baptiste Brossard’s 2018 monograph, Why Do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life, reports on his 2006–2011 PhD research into non-suicidal self-injury in France and Canada. Brosssard advances two main arguments: first, that self-injury is a practice of self-control used to preserve the interaction order, and second, that self-injury is a technique of social positioning used to manage a sense of pressure or distress that may be internalized and psychologized, but which is essentially social in origin. In this interview, Peter Steggals talks to Brossard about these themes, taking as their departure point the idea of framing self-injury as a form of practice, rather than an expression of illness. Through this discussion, Brossard uses an interactionist sociology of deviance and Bourdieu’s theory of practice to formulate a sociological version of the affect regulation or ‘pressure-cooker’ theory of self-injury. People who self-injure find themselves in certain social configurations, often family configurations, that encourage them to manage their emotions discretely. The idea of expressing their true feelings is associated with a threat to the interaction order, and the anxiety provoked by the possibility of such a face-losing event is what motivates them to vent off their feelings through private practices like self-injury. Keywords Self-harm · Self-injury · Sociology · Mental health · Sociological theory · Medical sociology
* Baptiste Brossard [email protected] 1
The Australian National University, School of Sociology, Canberra, Australia
2
Newcastle University, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle, UK
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B. Brossard, P. Steggals
Introduction Baptiste Brossard is a French sociologist specializing in mental health, behavioural addictions, the relation between sociology and psychology, and the production of utopian novels. As a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, he has worked at the University of Montreal (where he developed a social interactionist approach to Alzheimer’s disease) and, since 2016, he has been a lecturer in sociology at the Australian National University. His 2018 monograph, Why Do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life, is, along with the Adlers’ 2011 The Tender Cut, one of the few English-language books on the sociology of self-injury to report on research outside of the UK. In fact, Brossard’s book is an updated, English-language version of a work previously published in French in 2014, reporting on his 2006–2011 PhD research with French-speaking communities in France, Switzerland and Canada. For this research, Brossard interviewed 70 people who or had self-injured. Brossard met these participants in online forums dedicated to self-injury, and in mental health institutions serving adolescents. Why do We Hurt Oursel
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