Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0393027414, Hardcover)

The author of the seminal and groundbreaking Treating and Overcoming Anorexia Nervosa now explains the phenomenon of self-mutilation. Known as the illness of the 1990s, it is estimated that close to two million Americans and possibly more suffer from the psychological disorder of self-mutilation. The most prominent public admission was that of Princess Diana. Like anorexia and bulimia, self-mutilation is predominantly a women's disorder since women tend to direct their anger inward. Steven Levenkron identifies the self-mutilator as someone who is fearful of people and abandonment, whose attachments are hostile or tenuous at best, who lacks interpersonal trust, and who often can't stay focused in a relationship of any depth. In the same way that anorexia and bulimia manifested in behaviors that seemed incomprehensible to the public, the bizarre behaviors of the self-mutilator are unraveled for the reader, step by step, in this valuable book. Cutting tells the reader where to turn for help and offers important skills the self-mutilator must learn in order to deal with the affliction.