The author explores the genesis of a particular form of longstanding suicidality, finding its roots at the beginning of life. Following Winnicott's theory of “essential aloneness” as a pre-object relational state associated with a primal state of peaceful quiescence, it is proposed that some suicidal subjects may lack this developmental capacity in part or in full. They can find no sanctuary from psychic pain. It is primitive agony without respite for which “unaliveness” is deemed a triumph over suffering. One finds a regressive wish to recover essential aloneness and not necessarily a wish to permanently end one's life. The short but well-chronicled life and death by suicide of poet Sylvia Plath, as well as a clinical case example, are both discussed in support of this hypothesis.