Self-Harm and Meaning Crisis

Self-harming behavior is a difficult subject to study. The main difficulty lies in the fuzziness and interpenetration of this concept with other nearby concepts. At the moment, in studies devoted to this area, a concept is just beginning to take shape that would allow us to move away from the discourse of medicalization (considering self-damaging behavior as a pathology) and come to the discourse of normalization (considering self-damaging behavior through the prism of the actor’s personality and the origin of individual meanings and meanings, important to him). In this work, it was suggested that self-harming behavior is associated with a personality crisis of loss of meaning, associated with the social context in which the person is placed. Almost all the hypotheses put forward in the work were fully or partially confirmed. Reasons for refuting hypotheses need further study. The findings can be used in the framework of psychological research and psychotherapy.