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In 1937, “Imago” published a paper of mine on the subject of suicide, in which I indicated that the principal determining factors were the loss of an important libidinal object and aggressive wishes towards an object, both secondarily turned against the ego. Other determinants I mentioned were the recovery of the lost libidinal object and the carrying out of aggressive wishes.
Over the years I became convinced aggressive wishes turned against the ego were less important. Further psychoanalytical experience confirmed for me Freud's theory in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” that “masochism is older than sadism” and not the reverse.
For this reason I completely agree with Dr. Litman that in the psychoanalytical literature on the subject of suicide, “most often there is a misplaced emphasis on the aspect of the original hostility and murderous impulses” and that “Freud's dictum that suicide starts with a death wish against others … has been overly accentuated among some psychotherapists … and has become a cliché.”
The existence of intense sadistic wishes in suicides is not to be doubted, but these are frequently the result of their masochistic reaction to external and internal objects. They arise more from the need to provoke masochistic guilt feelings with which to justify the act of suicide, rather than from the desire to satisfy sadistic feelings. This is the situation described by Freud in “Criminals From a Sense of Guilt” with the difference that the suicide directs the criminal act against himself.
Freud occasionally shares the misplaced
emphasis on sadism as an explanation of pathological behavior patterns. Thus, in describing the Oedipus complex, he lays much more stress on parricidal wishes than on the foregoing filicidal behavior of Laius and Jocasta. Masochism was present in Oedipus before the appearance of sadism, and in fact was the cause of it. The name Oedipus means “swollen feet” and thus in his very identity we perceive the masochistic traces of his pare