Elements of Self-Destruction

Elements of Self-Destruction explores how individuals unconsciously enact self-harming patterns through a phenomenological psychoanalytic lens. This revised edition deepens and expands the theoretical framework, offering a more integrative and culturally responsive examination. Drawing on the author’s extensive clinical practice, the book explores psychic fragmentation, repetition compulsion, moral injury, and dissociation - not only as intrapsychic symptoms but as socially reinforced phenomena. Brent Potter uses clinical theory, philosophical analysis and a new psychobiographical study to hold a mirror to unconscious processes of self-erasure, framed through the lens of existential inquiry, psychoanalysis, and contemporary cultural dynamics. Elements of Self-Destruction will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training, clinicians seeking trauma-informed resources for understanding self-harming and dissociative presentations, and academics and students of depth and existential psychology, philosophy, trauma studies, political psychology, and cultural studies.