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A more comprehensive treatise on the concept of suicide from both a phenomenological and hermeneutical perspective has probably not been written. The author, rightly acknowledged as the father of suicidology, draws on his unique combination of front-line experiences and extensive grasp of many diverse but relevant conceptual frameworks such as sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature to produce a very readable book that is at once intellectually highly stimulating and practically meaningful, i.e., applicable to the concrete issues the practitioner faces when in direct contact with a potentially suicidal person.
Although Shneidman's thinking is consistently solidly rooted in both sociological and psychodynamic perspectives, he tries and succeeds in creating new and fresh insights, distinctions, and formulations regarding suicidal thought, threat, intent, behavior, and death.
This is a book with no uninteresting or uninformative chapter, which is not to say there are no weaker or stronger parts. Perhaps the weakest pages for this reviewer occurred in the chapter “Sleep and Self-Destruction,” in which his points about the relevance of the two phenomena to each other seemed buried in descriptions and similarities. Also, his discussion of three books (one each on Cosmology, Personology, and Systems Theory) that stimulated his own thinking was paradoxically lacking in both depth and concise brevity.
However, the above literary imperfections were more than compensated for in style and content in the fascinating chapter on the “Suicidal Psycho-Logics of Moby-Dick,” the short but mighty “Conative Aspects of Suicide,” the psychologically sophisticated “Affective Aspects of Suicide” and “Cognitive Aspects of Suicide,” and the very important papers comparing and distinguishing between suicidal and parasuicidal acts.
The book builds toward and closes with, first, a very helpful and too-brief chapter on preventions of, and responses to, peoples' intentions and efforts to