‘Maybe You Don't Actually Exist’: Containing Shame and Self‐harm in a School Counselling Service

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the school counsellor occupies a liminal position in the school environment, on the boundary between the private and the public, and that this position intrinsically reflects the paradoxical nature of shame, at once hidden and viewed. I review arguments that locate the development of primitive shame in early containment failure, with shame being defended against by rage against others or the self. I argue that the school counsellor's position commonly oscillates through the three positions of the child-home-school triangle, but that this is felt particularly acutely when the dynamics projected through this triangle are those of shame and shaming. For adolescents, the paradoxical nature of shame also finds a counterpart in self-harm, a simultaneously hidden and viewed act which I see as a mapping of shame on the body. In exploring the operation of shame in self-harming students, I also argue that chance encounters between counsellor and student in the external school world render projections about intimacy, intrusion and shame particularly powerful.

How Do Young People Understand Their Own Self-Harm? A Meta-synthesis of Adolescents’ Subjective Experience of Self-Harm

“…Psychodynamic theories have brought several concepts and theories of, not only about the function of selfharm, but also about ways to understand a symptom in relation to underlying motives and self-structure. From this perspective, relational challenges, which often characterize these treatment processes, may even represent important information about unprocessed emotional and existential experiences (Catty, 2012;Frankel, 2001;Gabbard, 2005;Nathan, 2004). A systematic exploration of the adolescents' personal experience of self-harm may enhance our knowledge on individual and contextual conditions for self-harm from their own perspective.…”