ABSTRACT
This book is designed to help clinicians, people who self-harm and their families to understand its causes, meaning and treatment. The notion of managing self-harm is central to this text. The idea of managing self-harm is inextricably tied into understanding it. The book does not offer a prescription for stopping self-harm, or speci®c behavioural guidelines but rather describes therapeutic approaches to working with self-harm, and outlines the complex, subtle and meaningful interaction between those who engage in self-harm and those who seek to understand it. What needs to be managed is not only the behaviour and distress of those who self-harm, but also what can be the overwhelming and potentially unhelpful responses of therapists and other workers, who may ®nd the intensity of their own feelings in relation to self-harm too much to bear. When these countertransference feelings can be thought about and contained, they become a tool to understanding what it is that self-harm communicates. At this point, meaningful engagement and therapeutic work can begin.
