Suicide is primitive and primordial.
In “Differential Diagnostic Types of Suicide,” Zilboorg contrasts Freud’s melancholia, or depressive psychosis, with “compulsion neurosis” and schizophrenia as an alternative etiology on suicide. For Zilboorg suicide through “depression, obsessional neurosis, hysteria, or schizophrenia” may point to an “archaic form of man’s response to his various inner conflicts …”
Thus, he turns to Malinowski’s study from the Trobian Islands, among others, to illustrate “primitive races and their reactions leading to suicide.”
Zilboorg writes: “it is difficult to rid oneself of the impression that many motivations for suicide which are found among patients are only regressive recrudescences of archaic traditions.” He continues:
There are a number of motivations discernible among primitive peoples as atavistic remnants of a still older past, and strikingly enough, the same, and, for that matter, all atavistic reactions appear to be still operating in the psychopatholigic conditions which come under clinical observation, particularly the compulsion neurosis and schizophrenia.
In “Some Difficulties in Assessing Depression and Suicide in Childhood,” Erna Furman examines suicidal wishes and actions in relation to child development. Furman believes that “depression” is often an over-simple diagnosis, concealing more than it reveals.
She focuses, instead, on the “hurting excitement”: a “primitive sadomasochistic excitement” combining experiences of humiliation, fear, loss, inadequacy, and guilt, with experiences of pleasure at the very same, including and especially genital sexual feelings. Thus, the dynamic of self-damage as hurting and gratification “may take the place of surrender or orgasm.”
A child’s failure to develop their protective bodily self-love is paralleled by a failure in the concomitant step of differentiation between self and object. When their raw and/or sexualized aggression is directed against themselves, it may therefore also represent aggression to the parental figures, vengeance upon them, or excited violent interaction with them.
The more shaky and inadequate the earliest loving bodily investment, the more prone a patient is to self-damaging and suicidal actions, with or without pathological admixture from later phases.
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Gregory Zilboorg, “Differential Diagnostic Types of Suicide,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 35, no. 2 (1936):270-291.
Erna Furman, “Some Difficulties in Assessing Depression and Suicide in Childhood,” in Essential Papers, 516-22.