Punitive asceticism

The third of the three forms of asceticism and the only one that operates as predation. Debt asceticism produces joy through release from debt and guilt by reducing anima bloat. Tantalus asceticism slightly lessens the cravings of an endoself by removing unattainable objects from view. Punitive asceticism is different in kind, since the person is extracting anima from their own stores through punishment and shaming, which makes them both predator and prey in one operation. The comparison in the definition is exact rather than rhetorical. They experience euphoria from the release of anima just as predators do when anima is released from their prey, so the mechanism is identical and only the direction has turned inward. Auto-anima is the general term for anima produced by feeding on oneself through asceticism, drugs or other attacks on one's own animus, which places this practice alongside substance use rather than alongside discipline. The three forms are indistinguishable from outside, since fasting, deprivation and plain living can be balancing a debt, managing a craving or extracting from oneself, and only the source of the will and what is being reduced tells them apart. Marsh's caution about who is praised for asceticism applies here too, since it is no great accomplishment in someone who experiences primary anima with revulsion, and the endoself's version is not aimed at debt reduction or reanimation at all.

Clinical psychology studies non-suicidal self-injury and reports affect regulation as the most commonly given reason, with endogenous opioid release among the proposed mechanisms, which parallels Marsh's account of euphoria from released anima. Religious mortification of the flesh has a long comparative literature and is generally analysed as devotional or purificatory rather than as self-directed extraction. Freud's moral masochism and the concept of a punishing superego cover related ground. Marsh's contribution is the three-way split, since it separates practices that look identical by what they do to a person's energy balance and identifies only one of them as harmful.