From Scarification to Tattooing: An Intimate Writing
In traditional societies, the body serves as identification. Anthropology has shown that the body marked by scarifications and/or tattoos carries the system of signs of a social group which allows an individual to identify another at first sight. Psychoanalysis provides access to the discourse that the young person cannot express verbally but that he/she writes on his/her skin through scarifications and tattoos. The story of several teenage girls, through their psychotherapeutic journey, shows how they went from the scarifications they inflicted on themselves in secret, out of their pain of living, to a tattoo chosen and assumed and for all to see. The tattoo, an ornamental element of body marking, served in helping them to sublimate their destructive impulses.