Suicide is war waged within.
Augustine writes of the Donatists: “[T]hey delight in murder so much that they inflict it on themselves when they cannot inflict it on others!”[1]
In the fifth century allegory, titled the Psychomachia — The War of the Soul, or, The Battle of the Virtues, and Vices — the figure of Ira, as anger, seeks to destroy Patientia. Blow after blow, spear and sword, all are in vain. Patience is unharmed and with each attack Ira is further enraged. Faced with the futility of murdering Patientia, Ira plunges the sword into his own body. Patience pronounces and mourns that anger is the enemy of itself. Anger is spirit as the destroyer become self-destruction.[2]
In “Mourning and Melancholy,” Freud’s declares in a brief aside that suicide is homicide turned inward: the drive to kill another redirected upon oneself. Suicide is murderousness realized as self-murder.
The mechanics and dynamics entail a complex sequence: love-hate of another, and a murderous ambivalence about the very same; the object of love-hate then internalized, identified as oneself (introjection); murder turned inward against the object within against oneself; and, the murdering. Suicide as murder, murder as suicide.
In “Mourning and Melancholy,” Freud views suicide as the extension of melancholy, where the ego treats itself as an external object to be destroyed; which helps to explain the perplexing question: How the command of self-preservation, the irresistible drive for life and more life, can be overthrown.[3]
Robert Litman laments that Freud never fully developed his thinking on suicide. Thus, the aside in “Mourning and Melancholy,” becomes central to psychoanalysis on this crucial question. Litman establishes, however, that Freud did express his thinking in many instances.
For instance, Litman believes that for Freud, suicide and war were a “unitary problem.”[4] That suicide, as a war against oneself, and war itself, are correlative to the very same mechanics and dynamics: the drive for life as the killing of the enemy; the killing of oneself as the enemy within.
In “Why War?,” Freud marks the complex interplay of self-love and death in outward expressions of violence as the war between peoples and nations. In “The Disillusion of War,” and in a letter to Einstein, Freud reflects on the power and promise of “civilization” and the illusion it fashions and promulgates: that civilized man has supplanted and surpassed the natural and biological drive to war. Freud observes, however, that the drive of war — self-love mixed with death — remains an inevitable spark as well as its own accelerator. It remains within “civilization” and holds itself up as mirror to the very same.
The element of suicide runs through many of Freud’s early and famous studies: Dora, the Rat Man, and Schreber, among them. Freud begins to theorize a connection between the fuels of love and self-destruction such that the love object overwhelms the ego. Love as self-preservation is abundance as of the promise sex and of procreation, and an overflow of fulfillment. And love is dangerous as cathexis, investing these same energies into hatred, ambivalence, sorrow, guilt, revenge, and self-love mixed with ego renunciation: a war against another and against oneself.
Freud theorizes that murder and suicide correlate to specific conditions such as narcissism — which allows object identification —, and strong tendencies toward sadism and masochism, manifesting themselves in erotic and death fantasies.
Thus, suicide is not for everyone, so to speak. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), however, Freud establishes that the drive and the danger of self-destruction reside within each individual. The drive to suicide is not the mark of exceptionalism, as madness or nobility. It is a drive of the people one by one.
In “Psychoanalytic Aspects of Suicide,” (1933) Karl Menninger formulates a troika driving and driven against the sleigh: the wish to kill, murderous destruction; the wish to be killed, as self-punishment — a symbolic act of parricide, passive erotic submission, drowning phantasies, messianic crucifixion, violent fellatio; and the wish to die, to return to the womb, to be obliterated.[x]
In Man Against Himself, Menninger formulates these powerful drives at work and their subtle and often hidden manifestations. [6]
Living a life of self-destruction as usefulness in specific endeavors of self-preservation — ascetics as life deprivation, martyrs toward eternal life, and radical surgical procedures, among them.
Living a life of self-destruction as slow dying, through alcoholism or drug use, among others. The accident-prone, in which “fate” and “circumstance” elide unconscious intention and drive. The self-destructive in which physical disease is the manifestation: a sickness unto death.
Self-destructiveness is not merely to be found in exceptions of sado-masochism or extreme narcissism; it is to found in everyday life in myriad ways and along a range of intensities: working, resting, socializing, simply moving through the hours of the day.
In “Attempted Suicide and Self-Mutilation in Adolescence,” Maurice Friedman et al., bring psychoanalysis to bear on late childhood and young adulthood. Friedman indicate that phenomena of conscious and intentional self-harm may mark the transition from childhood to adolescence, indicating a change in mental functioning.
Friedman emphasizes that his study does not begin with a “typical” adolescent. Patients include boys and girls, the active and social and the isolated and withdrawn, those from liberal and conservative families and upbringings, but all are adolescents psychotic and/or neurotic. The study begins by establishing common characteristics: the manifestation of psychopathology only after puberty, a conscious wish to kill or self-mutilate, and a demonstration of praxis, especially as self-burning or –cutting. None had attempted suicide.
Friedman locates the source of these characteristics in the failure “to achieve psychic maturity,” as “the detachment of the libidinal tie from the original object”; namely, mother. Freud’s theory of melancholy then helps Friedman to explain the unfolding narrative: the loved-and-hated-object introjected; the displacement of oneself; the attack on the internalized parent; and, the ruthless attack on the parent-proper, as the destroying of her most loved object, her child.[7]
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[1] Augustine, Letter 185.
[2] Prudentius, Psychomachia.
[3] Freud, “Mourning and Meloncholy.”
[4] Robert Litman, “Sigmund Freud on Suicide,” in Essays in Self-Destruction.
[5] Karl Menninger, “Psychoanalytic Aspects of Suicide,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 14 (1933): 376–90.
[6] Karl Menninger, Man Against Himself (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966).
[7] Friedman et al., “Attempted Suicide and Self-mutilation In Adolescence,” International Journal of Psychoanalytics 53, no. 2 (1972): 179-83.