"Unlock the complexities of suicidal behavior through the lens of psychoanalysis. Explore how Freud's concept of the death drive and Melanie Klein's theories on envy and melancholy shed light on the unconscious mechanisms driving self-destruction. Discover the symbolic and imaginary functions of suicide, and understand how depression can fuel suicidal tendencies. Dive into the latest insights from psychoanalytic research and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate relationships between mourning, melancholy, and the suicidal psyche."
Extract
[...] Murderous impulse and suicide in psychoanalysis: suicide as an enactment of the death drive? Suicide as an expression of the death drive : If we refer to Freud's work published in 1920 titled 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', we can grasp the affirmation of two drive motions, the life drive and the death drive. (Freud S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Essays in Psychoanalysis, translated from German by J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Paris, Payot p. 41-115.) This last one 'demolishes and disassembles' (ibid. [...]
[...] The psychotherapist then strongly recommends a psychoanalytic approach. This experience of the Freudian psychoanalytic cure shows that 'the one who chooses the Freudian couch finds himself on the tightrope of a possible fall into nothingness.' (Ibid.) The patient's psychoanalysis begins with suffering and all its manifestations. She wants to free herself at all costs from this affliction and considers suicide to be her last resort. Freud's role here is to calm the patient of her pathologies. The relief of the person's troubles is already included in the treatment of psychic difficulties. [...]
[...] He thinks that suicide would lead him to calm this anxiety that has become his suffering. « Success, with the fulfillment of a dream that becomes reality, can mean the disappearance of the lack, if the imaginary debt, that of filling the mother, is not distinguished from the symbolic debt. The force of the confusion of debts depends on the place of the paternal function which authorizes or not the existence of the subject, as this subject can be loved as it is and not as the one who must fill, like the missing phallus, a narcissistic failure of its parents. [...]
[...] The internalization of these conceptual representations metamorphosed from the parents will establish internal tormentors in the psychic apparatus of children, risking to fail the parental images. On the opposite, good dispositions in the child will refer to a good parental image: good breasts and a good penis. In reality, the splitting of the object functions as follows: it serves as a protection of the good objects from the antagonistic and sinister oppressions of the bad objects. Thus, this schizo-paranoid position is characterized by this splitting and this hallucinatory and interpretative anxiety. It designates the 'psychotic nucleus of every individual'. [...]
[...] Magneti then evokes the conditional consideration of Lacan and advances that 'the choice of death' relates to a final declaration of the subject on the one hand and a time of 'passage to action'. The majority of practitioners do not want this act of suicide to be realized and Lacan encourages all his patients to choose life over death. We can also observe that at the height of a success a suicidal subject paradoxically resolves to give himself death when he has achieved his glory. In reality, he is afraid of this glory that he has nevertheless obtained and is unable to integrate it. [...]
