When the Body Is the Target
Subtitle: Self-Harm, Pain, and Traumatic Attachments
Publisher: Jason Aronson
Published: September 28, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 128
ISBN-13: 9780765702562
Subjects: Abnormal psychology; Psychotherapy; Specific disorders & therapies; Psychology; Pathological Psychology; Self-mutilation; Psychopathology - General; Mental Health; Mental Illness; Psychology & Psychiatry / Eating Disorders; Eating disorders; Anorexia nervosa; Bulimia; Self-injurious behavior
Description: "In this comprehensive and insightful work, Dr. Sharon Klayman Farber provides an invaluable resource for the mental health professional who is struggling to understand self-harm and its origins. Using attachment theory to explain how addictive connections to pain and suffering develop, she discusses various kinds and functions of self-harm behavior. From eating disorders to body modifications such as tattooing, Dr.

Farber explores the language of self-harm, and the translation of that language and its psychic functions in the therapeutic setting. She tells us, "When the body weeps tears of blood, we need to wonder what terrible sorrows cannot be spoken." Illustrated with clinical material, this book offers a practical approach to the diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of the increasing number of patients whose emotions are expressed through bodily harm.

The challenges of working with patients who tend to view the world of relationships in terms of predator and prey are clearly explicated and the stormy countertransference responses that threaten to destroy the treatment are given a full hearing. Finally, she shows how the attachment relationship formed in treatment can repair the traumatic attachment in mind, body, psyche, and soul, and can serve as the cornerstone of therapeutic change."--BOOK JACKET.