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 book, a translation of a symposium on suicide held by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910, was originally published, according to Alfred Adler who wrote the preface, in order to 'insure that psychological problems of interest to the community may be discussed before a wider circle of medical men, psychologists, and educators, from the standpoint of psychoanalytic method'. The discussion took place because there had been an increase of suicide among secondary school students, which had received wide publicity. The harshness of the schools at the time was pointed to as the primary cause.
In his Foreword to this translation, Dr. Friedman briefly reviews eighteenth and nineteenth century ideas about suicide. He points out that the most impressive psychoanalytic contribution to the symposium was made by Stekel who emphasized the role of intrapsychic conflict in reference to guilt, self-punishment, and the talion principle: 'no one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another'.
The value of the book to those interested in the history of psychoanalysis as well as to social historians is as a source of primary data about sociological and psychoanalytical thinking in 1910. Many interesting comments are made by the discussants that do not refer particularly to suicide. For example, in explaining the psychoanalytic method, Adler stated: 'The accuracy of the results can invariably be checked because the presumed pathogenic situation of childhood is always in accordance with the real situation which is gradually recalled in its entirety'. Freud, commenting on Professor Oppenheim's paper, emphasized the fact that the school 'must never forget that it has to deal with immature individuals who cannot be denied a right to linger at certain states of development and even at certain disagreeable ones', and must support these adolescents during the time when they must 'relax their ties with their parental home and their fa