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 paper is about the analysis of a thirty-eight-year-old lady, who tried twice to commit suicide. The analysis deals mainly with the underlying causes of the second suicidal attempt.
The patient, a professional woman, had been extremely attached to a brother two years older who was idealized by the family for his talents and for his asexual life. He died, an aviator in the World War, his plane having fallen into a woods where he was buried. The suicidal attempt of the patient was a repetition of the brother's death. Like the brother in his airplane, she drove 'round and round in circles' before attempting suicide. She had dressed in clothes associated with her childhood identification with him in playing baseball, and she wanted to die as he did in the woods. The place of her suicidal attempt was the home of a man who was 'very brotherly' towards her.
The patient had had several homosexual love affairs during adult life. Chief among these was an overt homosexual relationship with an older woman whom she later hated. This woman is identified with both her mother and her older sister and reawakened an intense, lifelong resentment for them. She broke this ambivalent relationship, choosing a younger woman as her partisan against the older, thus repeating the seduction of her younger sister to an alliance against her mother. On the evening before the second suicidal attempt she had seen her beloved speaking with this older woman. After a night frenzied with hatred and jealousy, her homicidal fantasy became a suicide plan. The suicide was the expression of her desire to kill the mother surrogate who endangered her love with the sister surrogate. In her fantasies the beloved was consciously thought of as a dominant man and unconsciously as both father and brother, to whom she, the patient, would bear a child. The catastrophe was not merely caused by fear of losing the love partner; she also was unable to cope with the loss of a psychotically created happi