Using Autotheory to Examine the Projective Field of Blame and Shame Following Suicide: Discussion of Alexis Tomarken’s “The Shroud of Suicide”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Alexis Tomarken examines her experience of suicide loss following the suicide of several generations of men in her family, and a clinical vignette of a young woman losing her brother to suicide, to construct a theory of how some women survivors of suicide loss may suffer from damaging and stereotyped projections containing blame and creating shame, anger, and other painful feelings. I characterize Tomarken’s methodology as a form of autotheory, a method emerging from feminist scholarship. In my response to Tomarken’s paper, I will describe autotheory and recognize its importance for understanding and theorizing the multilayered experience of suicide loss survivors. I then examine the projective field of shame, blame, and stigma as they reinforce silence, recognizing Tomarken’s voice emerging from this projective field to speak about the cultural expectations for a particular group of women thereby potentially creating a community of resistance to the shroud of silence surrounding suicide loss.