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To find an answer to this problem, the author questioned one hundred people who had attempted suicide about their motives. As one would expect, the answers make responsible all kinds of human miseries without furnishing any clue to a specific psychological cause for suicide. The author admits that the reasons given may or may not lead to suicide and that there must be some unknown factor which decides the issue. This factor or factors, she states, must lie in the character. Her few hints at such factors are: (1) a poor faculty for friendship and for adaptation to community living and (2) a general weakness of the sex drive. These are held to be the psychophysical correlatives to 'a certain weakness of the personality' which makes the individual unfit to cope with external and inner difficulties.
The author's conclusions leave off at the very point where psychoanalytic investigation should begin. But she purposely excludes all 'depth-psychological' investigations, confining herself to phenomenology. With the assumption 'of both psychoanalytic schools of thought that suicide is always a revenge on the environment', the author argues that a person so unhappy that he commits suicide is in himself a reproach against the environment. But it would be wrong to dispose of the problem by labeling it revenge. A person whose value was questioned by the environment might