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A formal discussion of this article would imply reviewing the literature, for which time is lacking. However, there are two points which I would like to make:
In his paper, Dr. Litman refers to “identification.” It is true that Freud discusses identification, but in Mourning and Melancholia on page 160 of the old English 1925 edition, he also states: “The ego wishes to incorporate this object into itself and the method by which it would do so, in this oral or cannibalistic stage, is by devouring it … We should not hesitate to include among our special characteristics of melancholia a regression from object-cathexis to the still narcissistic oral phase of the libido.”
In omitting this concept from his description, Dr. Litman consequently also omits the idea that patients with this mechanism are unconsciously killing the introjected object rather than themselves when they commit suicide, and that here the gratification of this unconscious wish is accompanied by the talion punishment of self-destruction.
Freud discusses the concept that in certain types of suicide the unconscious wish is to rejoin some loved person in the hereafter, but he does not emphasize that death in this sense is not conceived of as dying, but rather as entering a more desirable life in which the lost object is regained, and that suicide is conceived of as being reborn rather than as dying.