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The suicide threat is a phenomenon that occurs across a range of diagnostic categories, and it can serve many purposes. It is a form of communication that may be a means of getting attention, help, or revenge, an avenue for forgiveness and reconciliation, or a manner of submission (; Litman, 1961). It is an activity that discharges tension and releases emotion (Glover, 1955). It is also a resistance with the potential to destroy the psychoanalytic relationship, the analyst and the patient.
Freud (1901) noted that “the trend to self-destruction is present to a certain degree in very many more human beings than those in whom it is carried out.”
Freud (1909) understood suicide as “self-punishment for wishes for someone else's death.” By 1917, he was giving increased emphasis to the part played by aggression toward others:
It is this sadism alone that solved the riddle of the tendency which makes melancholia so interesting and so dangerous…. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object cathexis, it can treat itself as an object—if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego's original reaction to objects in the external world. (1917)
Freud (1920) in his dual-drive theory, viewed suicide as a man-infestation