%0 Journal Article
%T Holy Stigmata, Anorexia and Self-Mutilation: Parallels in Pain and Imagining
%A Robert F. Mullen
%J Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies
%D 2010
%I Seminar for the Interdisciplinary Research of Religions and Ideologies
%X This paper explores the comparative dynamics of self-mutilation among young, contemporary, female self-cutters, and the holy stigmatics of the Middle Ages. It addresses the types of personalities that engage in self-mutilation and how some manipulate their self-inflicted pain into a method for healing and empowerment. The similarities between teenage cutters and female stigmatics are striking in their mutual psychoanalytical need for self-alteration as a means of escaping their own disassociative identities; and offers evidence of how their mutual bricolage of pain, imagining, languaging, and subsequent self-mutilation often provide a transformation from bodies under siege to a resemblance of health and transformation.
%K agency
%K anorexic
%K depersonalization
%K imagining
%K sacred
%K self-cutting
%K self-mutilation
%K stigmata
%K symbolism
%K wounding
%U http://jsri.ro/ojs/index.php/jsri/article/view/250