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Title: Suicide as murder: Recalling Wolfgang Loch’s work 'Mord – Selbstmord oder die Bildung des Selbstbewußtseins' (1967) ('Murder – Suicide or the Formation of Self-Consciousness')
In his work Mord - Selbstmord oder die Bildung des Selbstbewußtseins (Murder - Suicide or the Formation of Self-Consciousness), Wolfgang Loch analysed from a primarily philosophical perspective the psychological logic of a suicidal patient who was only by chance unable to carry out his suicide plan. The patient’s central problem was his dependence on an over-powering object (his mother), from which it seemed that murder or suicide were the only possible ways to free himself. It is in this context that I present the analytical psychotherapy of a patient whose inability to come to terms with her own life finally manifested itself in a persistent suicidal tendency from which there seemed to be no way out - any apparent progress in the therapy was nullified by a subsequent negative therapeutic reaction. After my own long and difficult inner process, at which point the idea of ending the treatment became concrete and I was able to talk about it, there emerged a kind of interval space between analysis and non-analysis. At some point after the decision to end treatment was made, she told me about an impulse she had had to murder a woman, which she then rejected in a state of complete shock. Afterwards, her torturous suicidal thoughts and impulses dissolved. My paper is an attempt to understand this experience in terms of the mental space opened up by Loch. Finally, I outline the end of the treatment and her separation from me in terms of her coming into the world.
The full text is available in German.