|
Abstract
|
The person who kills himself has often been viewed as an unaggressive person. He is the sort who doesn't attack others either physically or verbally, but instead inhibits his aggression and turns it inward upon himself in some self-destructive way.
This idea was first suggested by Freud. Although he never considered the psychodynamics of suicide in detail, Freud had considerable experience with suicidal patients and he, himself, threatened to kill himself if he ever were to lose his fiancé. (Luckily he never did lose her.) So the idea of suicide was not alien to Freud.
Robert Litman collected Freud's scattered comments on suicide and noted that Freud had outlined two stages in the development of suicidal behavior. First of all, emotional investment is withdrawn from a lost object of love and relocated in the ego where the loved one is recreated as a permanent feature of the self, as a kind of ideal self. This is called identification of the ego with the abandoned object and Litman called the process ego-splitting. Secondly, the ego can kill itself if it can direct aggression that it feels toward some object in the external world toward itself. So, after identifying with the lost love-object, the ego can direct its aggressive impulses felt for that object toward the part of the ego that has identified with the object and, thence, kill itself.
Psychologists and sociologists have emphasized only the part of this formulation dealing with aggression turned inwards upon the self, and they have neglected the essential role of ego-splitting after loss of a love-object. Suicide has been seen as an act of inward-directed aggression to be contrasted with acts of outward-directed aggression such as homicide. For example, the sociologists Andrew Henry and James Short argued that homicide and suicide were opposed behaviors. They suggested that people who killed others and those who killed themselves had very different kinds of childhood experiences of punishment. Experience of love-oriented techniques of punishment should favor the development of a strong super-ego for, when a child is punished by his mother threatening to withdraw her love, he must learn to inhibit his aggressive impulses for if he attacks her he may lose her love. Thus, the child who experiences love-oriented techniques of punishment is likely to develop tendencies to inhibit aggression as an adult whereas the child punished physically is unlikely to do so.
One conspicuous thing about these ideas is that there is very little empirical support for them. The ideas make sense but often what makes sense is not correct. Let me look at some recent research on this issue.
Language: en |