“Consenting to its own Destruction”: A Reassessment of Freud's Development of a Theory of Suicide

Suicide is a problematic subject in Freud's work. Although he wrote systematically about most other disorders, Freud did not write a paper on suicide. His thoughts about suicide appear as fragments in his theoretical works. Therefore, it is thought sometimes that Freud's formal writings about suicide are “minimal” and incidental (Hamilton, 2002), or, alternatively, the richness and breadth of the fragments have been noticed (Litman, 1970). Both of these views, I argue here, misrepresent the extent to which Freud thought about suicide, the problems suicide posed Freud as a subject for psychoanalytic thinking, and the place suicide has in his theories as a whole. In spite of appearances to the contrary, suicide played an important and even, at times, a role underpinning the development of Freud's thinking. The absence of a comprehensive paper on the subject needs to be understood not as an indication of a lack of interest, but, rather, as the outcome of a number of constraints that Freud was under—emotionally, personally, professionally, socially—with regard to this. To some extent, Freud's thinking about suicide has become obscured. Recovering a more rounded appreciation of Freud's thinking about suicide is important for contemporary practice and theory.

This paper seeks to develop a deeper understanding of Freud's thinking about suicide. It aims to assess whether Freud did have a coherent and consistent theory of suicide, and then, if this can be identified, to describe its main features. Finally, the paper aims to assess why Freud's thinking of suicide took the shape it did.