Pseudosuicide as a symbolic act.

Abstract

While serious gestures' are generally interpreted as representing cries for help (Farberow & Shneidman, 1961) or as a means of striking out at family or friends (e.g., Adler, 1967), there are some such gestures which do not seem to fit either category, nor is it evident that such gestures are simply irrational acts growing out of psychotic processes. In five such cases encountered by author, following features were prominent: ( 1 ) For a period of weeks preceding suicide persons were ruminative. depressed, and withdrawn. ( 2 ) In each case person had a close friend he could have turned to in distress, while two were actively involved in therapeutic relationships at time. ( 3 ) Prior to suicide persons became extremely tense and jittery. ( 4 ) In each case method of chosen was drugs, with S taking a dangerously high but non-lethal dose. ( 5 ) In every case S expressed surprise on surviving. ( 6 ) Finally, in each case there was a short period of enormous grief (2 -3 days), then confusion, then profound elation (about a week), marked by hyperactivity. Following this period, tensions were reduced, persons claimed to be flooded with insight, and there were marked positive changes in direction of need-fulfilling, adaptive behavior. In each case, so post-attempt interviews suggested, motivation for pseudosuicide' attempt seemed more like Brown's (1969) notion of as a positive act: an act of profound rationality, of personal integrity and fulfillment. These were not suicides in psychoanalytic sense of destroying certain aspects of one's experiencing or functioning as an analogue to, or as a substitute for, actual suicide. Yet these gestures did seem to manifest symbolic characteristics in a Jungian sense: as a means of acting out archetypal themes of death and transfiguration, metamorphosis, or death and resurrection. It was as if these persons somehow needed to bury their hurt and pain, to suffer symbolic pangs of death, and to be born anew. This aspect of suicidal activity seems to underscore general impression that suicidal persons comprise a quite heterogeneous group (e.g., Hitchcock & Wolford, 1970) and to support Alvarez' (1972) conclusion, in his sensitive commentary on suicide, that the processes which lead a man to take his own life are at least as complex as chose by which he continues to live.