ABSTRACT
Part of understanding the self-inflicted injury history involves understanding how the meaning of self-harm as a symptom of mental illness changes over time. Self-harm is characterized, to continue to quote Cohen on other such manifestations, by "stylized and stereotypical" representation by the mass media, and a tendency for those "in power" to man the "moral barricades" and pronounce moral judgments. The psychoanalytic contexts are important because by the 1950s self-harm was beginning to become a symptom, not of masochism or psychosis, but of borderline personality disorder, the hot, new psychiatric category inspired by post-war psychiatry and its integration of psychoanalytic views of self-harm. The clinical literature of the time seems to echo the view of religious monomania and self-harm, unless one is speaking of sexual self-mutilation. Armando R. Favazza argues in the late twentieth century that self-mutilation is a universal cultural manifestation.
