How can We Stop Our Children from Hurting Themselves? Stages of Change, Motivational Interviewing, And Exposure Therapy Applications for Non-Suicidal Self-Injury in Children and Adolescents (Report‪)‬

"Whoever studies the behavior of human beings cannot escape the conclusion that we must reckon with an enemy within the lines. It becomes increasingly evident that some of the destruction which curses the earth is self-destruction ..." (Menninger, 1938, p. 4). The psychoanalyst Karl Menninger made some rather grim observations in Man Against Himself as he was explicating Freud's concept of thanatos or 'death instinct.' Relative to the converse idea of eros, the 'life instinct,' Menninger drew morbid conclusions about the mechanisms that he believed comprised dialectic in human development. He saw an inescapable paradox: on the one hand, the individual's essential motivation for autonomy, pride, and companionship, and on the other, the compulsion to self-inflict physical injury in reaction to unresolved shame, doubt, guilt and alienation.