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This is a comprehensive work dealing with the social, historical and psychological aspects of suicide as seen in a succession of diversely oriented societies. Many of these separate cultures developed definite attitudes regarding it. It is the author's purpose to trace and examine these attitudes as to their social settings and ascertainable determinants,
thus providing a clearer view of suicide as a continuous historical phenomenon having two constant and essential sides; inner psychological motive, and the “moral” milieu of the given period. The accent is on the latter, but there is much concerning the former in the working out of this full historical survey which students of the mental sciences will find of marked interest.
Before the history of personal suicide is discussed there is a concise summary of the evidences of sacrificial or institutional forms. Here the contrast is between a type of self destruction itself the creation of the communal group, serving a purpose in the psychological whole comprising the rites of the community and governing its world-view, and the later type which from an individual basis is sometimes at variance with societal dictates. This chapter, Servant and Widow, is followed by one entitled The Suicide Horror and the Savage, which deals with the main psychical ramifications basing primitive tabu on suicide and, through the association with the belief in ghosts, the extent to which reactions on this score permeate less ostensibly related fields of primitive life.
In later chapters the survey is extended to the classic types of the Ancient World, The Christian World, The Renaissance, The Eighteenth Century, through to the elaboration of present-day conceptions as shown in later literary records. A review cannot indicate the wealth of material the author has gathered, nor the degree to which he has integrated sociological and mental evidences toward a full view of the whole problem. There is given a complete review of the interpretatio