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What follows are guidelines for rescue teams dedicated to suicide prevention for psychoanalytic institutes and societies. They provide a general orientation, and presuppose intensive individual and organizational training by the rescue teams. Some general notes of caution: suicide prevention is a complex, delicate effort that requires specific training, experience, knowledge, patience, and courage! It is a well-known fact that drowning persons may resist rescue efforts, thereby posing the danger of drowning the rescuer along with themselves. Similarly, expect desperate, blind resistances to your efforts, particularly when the suicidal temptation is urgent and overwhelming.
Any effort to change the present condition of a failing psychoanalytic society is likely to generate intense anxiety, frequently expressed as a desperate clinging to “standards.” “Standards,” in theory, should refer to criteria of competence; but here they are a simple set of criteria for training, primarily formulated by “bean counting” numbers of hours, and, at the bottom, a quiescent maintenance of the comfortable way things have been done (or seemed to have been done) in the past. The effort to teach survival skills, implying the learning of new ways to deal with a threatening reality, typically provokes worries about the victim’s “identity,” the existential doubt whether one still is what he/she does (“Am I still a psychoanalyst?”). The introduction of new knowledge and ways of dealing with reality tend to provoke desperate claims for the assumed purity of the past (Chapters 9 and 10).