Sigmund Freud on Suicide1

In this essay I will review the clinical experiences and theoretical steps which led Freud to his various conclusions about suicide. My purpose is to abstract from the totality of Freud's writings his pertinent observations and to evaluate the contributions they make to the understanding of suicide and of suicide prevention in our own time, a full generation after Freud's death.

It would be a mistake to assume that Freud's encounters with suicide were only theoretical or philosophical. To the contrary, Freud had considerable clinical experience with suicidal patients. There are, for example, references to suicidal symptomatology in all of the case histories that Freud published, except that of Little Hans, a five-year-old child.

Suicidal behavior was an important aspect of the symptoms of Josef Breuer's patient, Fraulein Anna O. Breuer discovered the cathartic method of treatment, an approach that Freud later developed into psychoanalysis. Anna O. became suicidal after the death of her father. On the doctor's recommendation, and against her will, she was transferred to a country house in the neighborhood of Vienna (in June, 1881) because of the danger of suicide. “The move was followed by three days and nights completely without sleep or nourishment and by numerous attempts at suicide by smashing windows and by other methods.” After this she grew quieter and even took chloral at night for sedation. (5)

Very early in his career as a psychoanalyst, Freud was aware of the importance of guilt for hostile impulses against parents in causing symptoms, especially after the parents' death. In May, 1897, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote: “Hostile impulses against parents (a wish that they should die) are also an integral part of neuroses. … They are repressed at periods in which pity for one's parents is active—at times of their illness or death. One of the manifestations of grief is then to reproach oneself for their death … or to punish oneself by putting oneself in