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This is a tantalizing book. It is full of promise, of stimulating, thought-provoking, and sometimes profound ideas, but again and again I felt disappointed. There seem to be two main reasons for this: first of all the book lacks the solidity which the presence of clinical data could have given it and which one hoped to find in a book about suicide written by an analyst. Second, an excessively large portion of it is preoccupied with the virtues of non-medical as against medical analysts. Such lengthy intrusions jar.
It is its uneveness in quality and insight that has led me to believe that this book was written too soon; Hillman has not given his ideas time to settle. In the earlier chapters, for instance, he seems to argue that the suicide wish and the experience of death are identical; hence, as the experience of death is necessary in an analysis, the analyst should stand with the patient on the side of suicide. Yet, by the time he reaches Chapters 4 and 5—which I consider the best of the book—Hillman seems to be aware that ‘suicide is the attempt to move from one realm to another by force through death’ (p. ), and that ‘the person obsessed with suicide fantasies has not been able to experience death psychologically’ (p. ).
This confusion of suicide with death is really the major theoretical difficulty of this book. Hillman has important and relevant things to say about the interdependence of the capacity to live and the capacity to die and of the transforming effect on a person's whole development of this psychic experience of death in analysis. He makes, for instance, an interesting link between the dread of beginning an analysis and the fear of ‘dying to the world of the old order’ without which ‘there is no place for renewal’ (p. ). However, the value of his ideas is blurred precisely because he fails to recognize that suicide is not dying. Rather it is often an aborted dying; for suicide, in my experience, may actually be used as a defence against the experience