Narrative Skin Repair: Bearing Witness to Representations of Self-Harm

At a recent conference on feminism and popular culture, I attended a presentation on Marina de Van’s (2002) film Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin).¹ From the outset, the presenter cautioned us that the film contained graphic imagery of self-harm including the protagonist tearing at, sucking on, and eating her own, self-inflicted flesh wounds. She then proceeded to show a few clips from scenes she described as “relatively inexplicit” compared to the rest. Upon the first, three members of the already small audience sprang out of their seats and hurriedly left the room. Exactly what did these three not want to see, think about, or perhaps feel such that they were compelled to leave this way? Put differently, what did the invitation to bear witness to representations of self-harm evoke that was so unbearable? What, on the other hand, motivated the rest of us to stay? Moreover, did the feminist context matter here? And does this instance say anything about the status of self-harm, or representations of self-harm, in relation to popular culture?

More specifically, I recall this instance as a point of entry into a two-fold discussion concerning, first, why representations of self-harm might be difficult or even unbearable to witness and, second, what the implications of this are for the potential to cultivate empathic understandings of self-harm and of those who practise self-harm. In her recent work on the politics of terror and loss in media and literature, E. Ann Kaplan (2005) argues that it is important to pay attention to representations of trauma as well as people’s responses to these representations given that the majority of our encounters with trauma are, in fact, experienced vicariously through mediatized accounts rather than direct witnessing (87). Kaplan refers in her work mainly to large-scale traumatic events such as war, the Holocaust, and terrorist attacks, but her observations are also useful for thinking about encounters with self-harm since, outside of mediatized representations, self-harm is generally hidden from public view. As such, these representations not only offer rare glimpses into a rather private suffering, they operate pedagogically; that is, they operate to inform the spectator’s understanding of self-harm in the absence of other kinds of encounters. Importantly, however, cultivating empathic understandings of self-harm from such occasions depends upon moving past dominant readings of self-harm that view it as a destructive behaviour with solely negative consequences to recognize instead that, for those who practise it, self-harm serves as a means of survival in the wake of psychical trauma. It is upon this recognition, I argue, that representations or mediatized accounts of self-harm can be appreciated not only for making self-harm visible but for their reparative potential. By “reparative” I do not mean that the traumatic experiences underlying self-harm are somehow undone or reversed by mediated representation or by the occasion of empathic witnessing alone but, rather, that the conditions necessary for making sense of these experiences and for articulating previously unthinkable pain might be found.

I turn to the psychoanalysis of skin for insight into what is psychically accomplished through self-harm enacted on and through the surface of the body. It is here that self-harm is understood not simply as destructive or counterproductive but as a means of protection against further emotional rupture following a devastating event, or even as a means of caring for oneself in the face of ongoing emotional turmoil. Moreover, in its attention to counter-transference—that is, in its attention to the analyst’s affective responses to his or her analysands—psychoanalysis is helpful for thinking about the relationality of self-harm, including the significance of readings and responses by others. Extrapolating from counter-transference in the psychoanalytic context to spectatorship in the context of media encounters, this paper mines both possibilities and resistances to empathic witnessing by asking how it is, exactly, that representations of self-harm get under the skin of onlookers with such force. And finally, to animate some of these...