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.
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 unevenness 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.…
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. 68). 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 of death, an experience that relies on a capacity to accept, to become passive, to submit, to wait, and to forgo fantasies of control and omnipotence.…
Another theme thrown up in reading this book is the problem of the meaning of words to individuals. For instance, Hillman describes ‘self-destruction’ as a term ‘purged of emotion’ and contrasts it with a word like ‘suicide’. My own reactions are the reverse of his, because I find ‘self-destruction’ a much more emotive term than ‘suicide’; the latter has for me an almost classificatory connotation. Thus also t