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My interests in suicide and suicide prevention over the past seventeen years, building first on the theoretical structure of Freud, and later on the (to me) more viable and meaningful formulations and outlooks of Murray, have moved from an initial focus on suicide on to an intermediate interest in death, and now currently to a concern with the wider area of self-destruction in man.
This current interest encompasses the topic of self-imposed death (cessation) as well as related conditions such as temporary or permanent cessation of a part of the psychic life—the cessation of affect (feeling almost dead), or the cessation of an orientation of conscious life, such as the cessation of social life, or of spiritual life (what Murray refers to as “dead to the outer world” and “dead to the inner world” respectively). These have to do with a variety of psychic states characterized by marked diminution or near cessation of affect.
In my opinion an interest in self-imposed death must perforce include an interest in partial deaths and in the attritions, truncations, and demeanings of life—the whole range of inimical or maladaptive behavior. Dr. Litman's chronological exegesis of Freud's thoughts on suicide provides the student and the therapist of self-destruction with a baseline of fundamental understandings from which a variety of useful and meaningful conceptualizations can be made.
The popular notion of Freud's concept of suicide as solely lethal hostile impulses turned against the introjected love object (which I have called “murder in the 180th degree”)
is currently shared by lay person and professional alike.
Dr. Litman has done a notable service in explicating the various psychodynamic elements: love (including its shades and nuances of different kinds of love), the need for communication, anguish, revenge, self-punishment, and especially helplessness and dependency elements which occur in self-destruction, in addition to and even in lieu of the ubiquitous hostility sugg