Citation

Giddens A. Arch. Eur. Sociol. 1966; 7(2): 276-295.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1966, Cambridge University Press)

DOI

10.1017/S0003975600001442

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

OBJECTIVE investigation into suicide as a social and psychological phenomenon dates back to the opening of the nineteenth century (1). Few other areas of human behaviour, in fact, can have attracted the same measure of continuous interest on the part of students in several disciplines. H. Rost's Bibliographie des Selbstmords, published in 1927, lists well over 3,000 items (2). Today the total must be something over 5,000 (3). The reader surveying this voluminous literature, however, is impressed by several notable lacunae: 1) most of this literature is descriptive rather than explanatory; the great bulk of it consists of surveys of the distribution of suicide, or of clinical descriptions of individual cases (4); 2) there is a marked degree of disciplinary "compartmentalisation". It has been evident for many years that both sociology and psychology have complementary contributions to make to the explanation of suicide (5); but theory and research into suicide in these two disciplines has tended to proceed separately with little more than a token acknowledgement of the potential relevance of one to the other (6). The object of this paper is to establish a schematic typology upon which a bridge between sociological and psychological theory might be built.

Language: en