You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To comment on IJP Open, you have automatically been assigned a Disqus profile. You can view and contribute to article discussions by clicking on the Discuss icon located in the left toolbar.
This paper weaves my own personal and clinical experience with psychoanalytic and gender theory to contribute an understanding of the prevalence and risk of suicide transmission within long-term bereaved families. Integrating personal and theoretical, I propose a theory of how suicide transforms into a “mysterious object” within some families, haunting subsequent generations. Specifically, the view of women as dangerous and subservient to men interpellates grief—silencing, abjecting, and shrouding women, where they have “failed” as caregivers and mothers. Gender ideology is tracked to demonstrate how this abjection carries an active absence, resulting in chronic liminality, radioactivity, and a dead third through family lines. The intersections of gender and suicide allow for “postvention” (Schneidman, 1969, 1972) recommendations, where the collective aspect of individual subjectivity has been overlooked in the intergenerational transmission of silenced and ungrievable trauma.