Brossard, B.Why Do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self‐Harm in Social Life. Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2018. 190 pp $80 (cloth) $25 (pbk) $24.99 (ebk) ISBN 978‐0‐253‐03639‐1

When does the possibility of self-injuring as a deviant practice emerge as ‘reasonable’ for a given person in a particular place and time? To investigate this question, sociologist Baptiste Brossard interviewed 68 francophone people who engaged in self-harm in Europe and, complementarily, in Canada, between 2006 and 2010. He met self-injurers online, and occasionally offline, through his membership in related internet forums, and in person at two mental health institutions in Paris to which he was affiliated as a trainee. Although Brossard produces a non-pathologising and non-stigmatising sociological account of self-injury as an alternative to the psychiatric discourse that sees it as basically ‘irrational’, his resulting monograph, originally published in 2014 and now translated into English, differs from other similar attempts by not aiming to reveal the meanings implicated in self-harm. Rather, defining self-harm as the practice of ‘injuring oneself, intentionally and repeatedly, without deliberate suicidal, aesthetic, or sexual intent, and without social recognition’ (page x), Brossard seeks to identify the ‘social conditions’ under which self-injury occurs, and the implications of self-harm, for example, to the shaping of one's identity. After all, what does someone engage in self-injury for? Brossard's book is structured around the two answers to this question: first, self-harm is a practice through which self-injurers maintain the social order and, second, through which self-injurers position themselves and others socially. In the first part, Brossard introduces three temporalities related to self-injury to frame the self-injurers’ experiences. First, he considers the ‘trajectory of the participants’ so as to situate self-injury as a ‘biographical period’ in participants’ life cycles. Interestingly, while Brossard uses the self-injurers’ narratives to meticulously describe how one starts with, develops a feeling of dependence on, begins to talk about and finally quits self-harm, it is self-harm itself that seems to take on a life of its own. The tensions around whether self-injurers use self-harm as one available resource among others, or whether self-injurers are taken over by self-harm itself and the social conditions that propitiate it, permeates the book. Inspired by Howard Becker, Brossard argues that, after starting without clearly knowing why, self-injurers tend to develop their own explanations for their self-harm. The second temporality concerns self-injuring in daily life, as described in chapter five. This chapter vividly reproduces the vicissitudes, internal and external conflicts, risks, affordance and compensatory issues related to self-injuring as a ritualised process. The third temporality, the wounding act, builds the background on which Brossard then addresses how self-injurers focus on their own bodies as the target of individual purification rites that they seem to miss in collective form in their respective social worlds. Seeking for common features between the participants’ stories and their multiple trajectories, Brossard emphasises the functional effects of self-injury as a tool that self-injurers use to cope with distressing situations so as to manage their emotions, keep up the appearance of normality without disturbing others and, in the last instance, remain functioning. In the second part, Brossard suggests that self-injurers tend to opt for self-harm instead of choosing other ‘equivalences’ (i.e. socially accepted self-aggressive practices that have a similar effect) mainly due to three ‘comparative advantages’: potential discretion; the sensation and attractiveness of transgression and the possibility of deliberate self-aggression. By reporting what motivates self-injurers and how self-injurers ‘stage discretion’, Brossard shows, for instance, that the good grades often achieved by self-injurers at school do not reflect their well-being; at the same time, self-injurers reproduce a domestic norm of not expressing suffering in public. Moreover, the malaise felt by self-injurers associated with their predisposition to transgress seems related both to feeling different from others and to the multiple abuses that many self-injurers have experienced. Here, instead of seeing self-injurers lonely as victims and objects of possible disorders, Brossard comprehensively emphasises, without praising, that self-injuring might be perceived as helpful by those looking for their own place within the world (and, maybe, a place within one's own skin), and to manage issues and expectations that some self-injurers see as alienating ones imposed by oppressive others who are central actors in their immediate social world. One of the strongest aspects of Brossard's book, beyond his ability to methodologically combine contemporary long-term digital research with more classic research possibilities, such as observation at clinics and semi-structured interviews, is the equilibrium achieved between his analysis and his exposure of the empirical research material that he uses not only to illustrate his arguments but also to indicate the complexity of self-injury. In many moments, the self-injurers’ narratives transcend Brossard's many good points, challenging the limits of his definition of self-harm and exposing potential theoretical contradictions. A concern of mine is that Brossard portrays psychology and psychiatry as a homogeneous field. Ironically, viewing self-injury as a way to cope with highly stressful life experiences, situations and longstanding malaise seems part of an older stream within psychology and psychiatry that, at least since David Laing, considers patients as fully capable of acting rationally in the face of an irrational environment within which they are compelled to exist, such as by creating and performing a ‘false self’ or engaging in addiction as ‘self-medication’. One way or another, Brossard's account offers a fruitful analysis and invites the reader to elaborate their own arguments about the matter. His book is highly insightful and recommendable to a broad and heterogeneous public, including not only public health professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, sociologists and anthropologists, but also people interested in emotions, deviance, gender and ritual studies, not to mention self-injurers themselves, their family members and school teachers.

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