Suicide is a threat. It hopes to take hostages.

Of the Donatists, Augustine reports: “If they cannot devastate us by slaughtering us, then they believe that they can terrify us by dying themselves. Their goal is either their own joy at our deaths, or else our sorrow at their deaths.”[1]

In “Attempted Suicide in Adolescence,” Jack Novick studies “the critical psychopathology … derived from the incapacity to achieve adolescent separation from their mothers,” and the descent into suicide due to the “resultant morbid attempt to master the developmental problem.”

In their commentary on the essay, Maltsberger and Goldblatt see this connection as pertaining “to many adults in their twenties and thirties who suffer from chronic suicidal character pathology, of which a singular aspect is the tendency to make the therapist responsible for whether the patient lives or dies.”[2]

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[1] Augustine, Letter 204.
[2] Novick, “Attempted Suicide in Adolescence,” in Essential Papers.