cover image Bad for Us: The Lure of Self-Harm

Bad for Us: The Lure of Self-Harm

John Portmann. Beacon Press (MA), $25 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-8070-1618-3

After When Bad Things Happen to Other People, his well-received 2000 study of schadenfreude, the scholar Portmann moves to another embarrassing arena of human frailty. He's scoured the international tabloids to find examples of classic celebrity hijinx, observing with wry good humor everyone from Kobe Bryant to Bill Clinton. Sometimes it seems like all celebrities trip up, as if it were in their contracts. But a person doesn't have to be famous, Portmann reminds us, to be drawn to the dark side of psychology. Why do people do things that are against their best interest? And how should they best control this impulse--through religion, law or Augustinian self-control? Most efforts at regulation, Portmann shows, whether imposed externally or internally, are doomed to failure, the ingenuity of sinners being greater than the will to stop sinning. But the great surprise in this volume is that Portmann encourages the cultivation of""raving,"" his neologism for deliberately over-the-top behavior.""What interests me,"" he writes,""is the pleasure of giving in to temptation, yielding to what we could control, to letting go of ourselves voluntarily."" Portmann, who teaches religious ethics at the Univ. of Virginia, has the wry wit to leaven the inevitably repetitive theme. There's a long chapter, related only tangentially to his other concerns, which could be expanded into a book of its own--potentially a more interesting one than this one. In it, under the rubric of""unnecessary self-control,"" Portmann explores the ambivalence of contemporary college boys in locker rooms and their inhibitions about stripping off when other men might see them. It's a cheeky interlude in an otherwise placid book of liberal speculation.