Turning against self is an ego defense whereby a person deflects hostile aggression from another person and directs it onto self. This defense is extremely common among people who have been abandoned through severe abuse. Because a child so desperately needs his parents for survival, he will turn his aggressive rage about his abuse into abuse of himself. The extreme form of this is suicide. In such cases (the French call it self-murder), the person so identifies with the offender that he is killing the offender by killing himself.
