Adolescence and body: What do scarification pratices reveal.
adolescence, body, scarification, self-inflicted.
In recent years, there has been an increase in scarification practices among adolescents. The DSM5 considers non-suicidal self-injury an independent diagnostic dimension and includes it in the category of disorders that need further research and review of their diagnostic criteria. The World Health Organization (WHO) includes self-injury in the context of self-inflicted violence, making series with suicide attempts, suicide, self-harm, self-punishment. This paper aims to discuss scarification in adolescence, based on clinical cases. Adolescence and its crossings demand a series of elaborations from the subject (ALBERTI, 2004) and particularly during this moment of life the identity verdicts of the Other are particularly acute (SOLER, 2014). If we consider adolescence as the time when each person's social identity is suspended, can scarification in adolescence indicate the shocks suffered in this first identification with the image of oneself in the mirror, by the shape of the body? To what extent does scarification as a contemporary phenomenon question this alienating identity? To elaborate such questions, we take as theoretical reference the contributions of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and also Other psichoanalyst authors.