Fighting with oneself to maintain the interaction order: A sociological approach to self-injury daily process

This article proposes an interactionist approach to self-injury behavior in youth. Mostly based on in-depth interviews with seventy people who self-harm or who have self-harmed at some point in their lives, it describes the process of daily self-injuring. It shows that this practice consists less in the self-harm in itself than in a liminal emotional state, composed of several successive steps, and that self-injury makes sense because concerned individuals subjectively see it as the most practical of known activities for releasing emotional troubles, then maintaining the interaction order surrounding them.