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The discussions contained a number of important contributions. Dr. Warburg's two points are brief but most significant. Freud was convinced that in the unconscious there is no conception of self-death or suicide. For this and other reasons, psychoanalysts feel that concepts of suicide are represented quite differently in the id, superego and ego.
Of course, the act of suicide is executed by a portion of the ego. In the moments preceding suicide, the ego typically is fragmented and the perplexing problem of which fragment is the executor and which fragment is the object can only be settled by direct observation under special circumstances. I have the impression that often the powerful introjected object captures the avenues that control motility and kills the self.
Dr. Garma, who has written extensively on all aspects of self-destructiveness, emphasizes the primary role of masochism and gives us a brief illumination of the Oedipus drama in its sadomasochistic aspects. Very little has been written about suicide recently in the North American psychoanalytic literature. But this is not true for the South Americans, who have contributed some dramatic theoretical reformulations. For example, Mauricio Abadi (Suicide: A Psychoanalytic Approach, Acta Neuropsiquiat. Arg. 5:366-374, 1959) states boldly that every self-murder is a psychotic act; that it is an ultimate and triumphant ego defense mechanism to escape paranoid anxiety and persecution; but the death is not a real one but a magic death, with fantasies of resurrection; and, finally, the compulsion to suicide implies a deep regression to the schizo-paranoid position.