"Wisdom says that one should beware of perfect people. In order to remain perfect such a person is prone to use his neighbour as a scapegoat. A perfect and narcissistic man happens to tread in a puddle of water. This mistake is a sin which he experiences as insulting to his perfect and controlled ego, and his 'unit status' has been questioned. The stain must now be transferred onto his wife, who is made to suffer from his bad mood. Comparatively, the flagellant's longing to be free of sin evolved into scapegoat psychology and victimization of innocent people.
Pathological self-laceration, as a misguided initiation rite, obtains among youths. What's even more disturbing is the mobbing and bullying at schools. Instead of lacerating themselves, youths can find a substitute victim. Young people often lack the strength to endure the ambiguity of their own nature when confronted with a diversity of painful and confused experiences. They want to be in control and to be "cool". Hence they resort to the destructive form of ego emancipation....
What does it mean when Western teenagers are practicing self-mutilation? Young men and women are cutting themselves, using razor blades or knives to wound their limbs and bodies. Eliade notes that 'patterns of initiation still survive, although markedly desacralized, in the modern world' (Eliade, p.188).
By damaging themselves, it seems, they aim to destroy the natural wholeness of childhood, and relieve themselves of the anxiety that goes together with a consciousness not yet amputated off its mother, namely the unconscious. As in the Tezcatlipoca sacrifice, an uncontrolled passion must be curbed. In order to conform to the monotony of social and societal life, it is necessary to cast off the ambivalency of primary wholeness. The impression of a young woman's wholeness is wrecked when she puts an ugly tattoo on her beautiful skin. It's like knocking out a tooth."
http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/bloodsac.htm
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The reasons why people do anything that appears to be irrational (I define these for the moment as anything obviously not centred upon the need for comfort or survival) depends greatly, but not entirely upon the social meaning of the action. Therefore there can never be a one true meaning. For instance, self-harming as I understand it is a way to externalise psychic pain. Why does the pain need to be recognised? Only because the pain inherent within our culture is taboo; sex is bad but violence is ‘normal’-- a glib quote such as 'sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you' is supposed to strengthen the victim. Instead it disallows the expression of outrage and hurt arising from being the target of insults. The dissonance of feeling hurt without a wound is too much for some people to take.
Making the hurt an external wound is a kind of truth.
Tattoos are very difficult to 'read'. I don’t see them as related to a desire to hurt oneself, though the pain and the wound can be used in a similar way to ‘self-harming’. Mine are a 'protection'. In the case of my key tattoo (my others are, a lunar coil celebrating my years of menstruation, and spirals-- life/death cycle) they can be a virtual 'objects'...
Cutting away the ‘maternal’, destroying ‘perfection‘, really isn’t it for most people, not in my experience anyway. The tattoos show that we have lived and are scarred already, they can also be ‘clan’ tokens, because most people feel as if they are in some kind of clan and seek others of the same ‘mind‘.
As to ‘cutting away’ the maternal, the unconscious….?
Many people feel that there was never perfection, only ignorance!
Living increases knowledge and wisdom but it also darkens us and leads us to death. In the light of this, perhaps the impulse to pretend that youth and vitality endure and to avoid the tattoo, or the wrinkles, or the sagging flesh is more pathological than the honesty of blood letting?
x
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