“Dying to Live”

People were bodies, I thought; the only valuable people have beautiful bodies; since my body isn’t beautiful, I’m worthless.

Tom – coming across these words by gay author, White (1988) – recounts to me the ensuing inconsolable state he experienced. “Reading this,” Tom tells me, “was validating all the horrible things that I thought about the world and the gay world and myself. That, you know, I’m not in good physical shape, and I’m worthless.”

In revisiting my recorded sessions with Tom – who participated in my psychoanalytically informed study of adult gay men’s suicidal despair – I found myself associating to Winnicott’s prayer, “May I be alive when I die” (2016, p. 351). Tom, I thought, is already dead when alive (in the biological sense). “I woke up and had a very weird feeling that I was already dead,” he tells me in the following session. “I didn’t feel like I wanted to kill myself. It was like I was living in a world and people could meet me and I could talk to people, but they didn’t realize that I was already dead.” Three weeks later, Tom voluntarily admitted himself to a psychiatric ER, fearing that he was in some kind of danger – manifesting as vague fears that he would kill himself.

According to Winnicott (1974), the mother’s effective holding of the unintegrated infant as it bears primitive agonies allows for the gradual development of non-psychotic defenses, gathering those “unthinkable state of affairs” (p. 103) into the infant’s own omnipotence. Effective maternal holding nurtures numerous adaptations that Winnicott believed are necessary to go on being and feel aliveness. It also allows for actual breakdowns in life that can help one regain a sense of the real – with fears of breakdown signifying a relentless search for experiencing a holding that never happened. Winnicott stated that many people “spend their lives wondering whether to find a solution by suicide, that is, sending the body to death which has already happened to the psyche” (p. 106). Fur