According to the WHO, one million people commit suicide every year in the world and ten million attempt it.
There are different theories as to why suicide occurs, ranging from sociological theories such as Durkheim’s, which would consider that it is society that commits suicide through its individuals, cognitive theories that attribute social or individual factors present in a person’s life and the interpretation they make of them, psychoanalytical theories that go through the fundamental idea of the death drive, an unconscious aspect that resides in each one of us to a greater or lesser extent and that can manifest itself in the form of direct self-harm and the vision of Carl G. Jung’s view of suicide as the destruction of the harmony between conscious and unconscious resulting from repressed aggressive impulses.
If neurosis according to the Swiss analyst would derive from the conflict between the essential archetype of the person on the one hand and the construction of an ego identity – a personality, a person, a mask in short – psychosis would occur at the moment of the split between the two.
But what happens if circumstances prevent us from developing those archetypal aspects which, at bottom, we could consider a metaphor for the result of combining our DNA in relation to the environment?
How can we develop what we are in essence if there are affective deprivations, economic hardships, cultural models, lack of individual freedom, or if we are forced to survive by adaptation, either because of these needs or because we grow up in a family or socially asphyxiating environment, or because we have suffered traumatic circumstances in some period of our life, especially in childhood or adolescence?
Here it is not necessary that archetype and ego-construction are in conflict because one has not been able to minimally develop what one could have been.
Who is this individual who only “is” as an adapted subject? What is his or her identity?
For if it is circumstances (in terms of cognitive theory), a divorce, a dismissal, loneliness, psychic or physical pain that lead to the suicidal act, the question would be, would an adequate “archetypation” have contained this impulse, or even would such unfavourable circumstances have been reached?
Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, considered that a patient with suicidal impulses could only be accompanied on this path on certain occasions.
Something with which I clearly do not agree.
The archetypal nature of an individual, that which is essential to him, beyond those roles, also close to his deepest being, through which he may pass in the course of his life, beats strongly even in the most fragile moments of his existence. Even when surrounded by illness or hostile circumstances, the being recognises, recognises itself, in what it fundamentally is, and perhaps only requires the capacity and ability to be able to release it, probably by a therapist.
When the truth, his truth, is expressed by himself or by another with absolute empathy and devotion, with radical respect for what he sees drowned in a falsely constructed self or in circumstances that are so apparently kind but intimately abhorrent, at that moment, a breath of life appears, a moment of hope, and it is necessary to know how to grasp it in time and give it the dimension it requires.
I remember on one occasion many years ago, in my youth, I was on an excursion with a friend and it was getting dark, we couldn’t go back, I don’t remember why. We met a man on the road and asked him if he knew of a place nearby where we could stay the night. He told us that there was a hostel just two kilometres away, but that the owner had committed suicide the night before, leaving behind a wife, two daughters, a functioning business and a job as a manager in a company, to which he added, “he seemed very happy, everything was going very well for him, I don’t know what had gone through his head”.
One of the possible explanations could be the fact that he had built himself, with intensity and perseverance, a “golden prison”, something in which the Western middle classes are highly specialised.
Faced with the possibility of suicide, it is possible to help the person to find himself or, as I wrote earlier, to recognise himself. This is not a heroic or salvific act on the part of the therapist or whoever wants to accompany the person. It is a matter of both having the freedom and the courage to put words to what is glimpsed, to what is happening inside the being, without prejudices of any kind, without valuations, simply allowing the authentic life to appear, which, even in the most suffering of men, continues to beat.
Damián Ruiz
Barcelona, 25 September, 2023