Book Notices

SUICIDE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES. Edited by Norman L. Farberow. Baltimore, Md.: University Park Press, 1975, 286 pp., $19.50.

The pioneer suicidologist Farberow has collected seventeen papers, including his own contributions, and organized them to present ethnological studies of the occurrence of suicide in nations from every quarter of the earth. Not all the contributors were native to the country on which they report. As Farberow and other suicidologists have indicated, however, reporting systems leave much to be desired. This is especially a problem when an interdicting political climate, let alone antithetical social and personal factors, prevail.

Would a modern psychoanalyst want to argue with Faberow's thesis that "in order to fully understand the self-determination of any individual, it is necessary to know the cultural matrix within which it occurs" or, that "culture will define and direct the way in which suicide occurs, is reacted to, and is reported in the countries of the world"? Yet, to fully understand what appears to be the nub of the book—"to provide the basis for evaluating how many suicidal phenomena are universal and how many reflect distinct, socio-cultural processes"—is also to assess developmental disturbance and intrapsychic conflict.

The final chapter, and one of the most cogent and enlivening to read, "Characteristics of Suicides and Attitudes Toward Suicide in Japan" by M. Iga and K. Tatai, is addressed to the uniqueness of Japanese suicides, and traces the life history and psychobiographical material in interpreting the Nobel prize winner Yukio Mishima's suicide as a disturbance of self- and object representation. Other intrinsic determinants for suicide are given in the statement of J. P. Webb and W. Willard that, despite the adaptive task of adjusting to new cultures, suicide among the Navajo "seems to be more related to family difficulties" than from a breakdown of Navajo culture. It would have added to enlightenment had Webb and Wil