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.
Women make twice as many suicide attempts and suffer much more from depression than men. Utilizing an extensive clinical example from her work at a clinical center for suicidal patients, the author tries to understand the connections between femininity, passion, and suicidal inclinations, and develops some thoughts about a gender-specific deficit in women's capacity to form symbols that help transform the absence of the love object into its symbolic presence.
The author does not focus on early-traumatized patients, who develop an object hunger that is perpetually frustrated in traumatic reenactments; rather, she is interested in patients who are intelligent, attractive, passionate, successful, and socially integrated, and who experience at a certain point in their lives a relationship between passion and craziness that brings them close to committing suicide. Here it seems that suicide does not aim at the murder of an introject, but at the preservation, change, and safety of an object.
The patient discussed was a professional woman who, during a research trip, had engaged in a sexual liaison with a married man. The relationship was extraordinarily passionate, but ended abruptly when this man disappeared without explanation. When the patient first saw the analyst, she stated that she could not live without this man. After he had left her out of the blue, she had tried all the ways she could to get in contact with him; she could not sleep and was totally dependent on her cellular phone, waiting to hear from him by day and by night. In this state of helplessness, she had committed her first suicide attempt, hoping to force him to come back to her by doing so.
The analyst, who had first felt like comforting and taking care of the patient in her desolate state, soon felt dragged into the patient's obsessive talking, which she understood as the expression of a transference fantasy of in-separateness. While the patient felt she