Citation

Zilboorg G. Am. J. Orthopsychiatry 1937; 7(1): 15-31.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1937, American Orthopsychiatric Association, Publisher Wiley Blackwell)

DOI

10.1111/j.1939-0025.1937.tb05556.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article discusses some consideration on suicide, with particular reference to that of the young people. For the sake of clarifying the discussion which follows it may be advisable to recapitulate briefly some of the basic findings on suicide expressed during the course of the past few years. At the time psychiatry was replacing theology in the field of human psychology, suicide began to be looked upon as the result of a psychopathic state or of an acute psychosis. A careful perusal of clinical material should give a fatal jolt to what we call "common sense," as well as to the constitutionalistic tradition, for neither the one nor the other sheds any true light on the mystery of suicide. It is this mystifying characteristic of the phenomenon that has led several research workers to utilize, a bit too freely, the concept of the death instinct and to construct a series of theoretical assumptions which are supposed to explain the phenomenon of suicide. The descriptive aspect of psychoanalytic contributions to the problem of suicide proved to be of real value in the understanding of some of the deeper contents of suicide, without, however, explaining its specific dynamics or economics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

Keywords

Death and Dying; Economics; Psychosis; Suicide