The sociological implications of taking self-injury as a practice: an author meets critic interview

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.