Manifestations of Abnormal Mourning: Homicide and Suicide Following the Death of Another

In an earlier essay (1972) I focused on the mourning process to describe the relations of culture and ritual to internal psychic processes. In this research, I found that cultures have evolved ways and means of dealing with death that usually relate to some concept of immortality. This belief in an afterlife stands as an almost universal feature of man's religious views throughout time (Pollock, 1972). Previously (1961), I had written about the evolution of the mourning process as a means of internally adapting to the change resulting from loss. More recently, my work has been concerned with various aspects of anniversary phenomena (1970, 1971a, 1971b, 1971c), including anniversary suicide (1975a) and the relation of immortality to utopia (1975b). My conclusions favor the idea that anniversary reactions are manifestations of abnormal or uncompleted mourning processes.

Much has been written about suicide, and many theories, explanations, and approaches have been proposed. It is clear that suicide, a final act having multiple determinants and multiple precipitants, can occur in