November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  The effect of climate on suicide was another controversial subject. After analyzing dozens of studies, Italian professor of psychological medicine Henry Morselli posited the existence of a suicide belt between 47 and 57 degrees north latitude and between 20 and 40 degrees east longitude. “On this area of about 942,000 square kilomètres are found the people who of all others in the civilized world manifest the greatest inclination to suicide,” he wrote. Morselli attributed this inclination to the temperate climate they shared. Another writer agreed, observing that “extremes of heat and cold lessen the prevalence of self-destruction.” But others suggested that extremes of temperature increase suicide by adversely affecting the nervous system. Still others believed that the crucial factor was not the temperature but a sudden change in weather. Boudin concluded that when the thermometer rises, so does the suicide rate. Fodéré and Duglas identified twenty-two degrees Reaumur (approximately 82°F) as the boiling point for suicidal despair. Others linked fluctuations in suicide to the phases of the moon or to the effect of the west wind—perhaps influenced by the popular superstition that strong winds rose whenever someone hanged himself. Villemair maintained that exactly nine-tenths of suicides occur on rainy or cloudy days; Cabanis asserted that a rainy autumn following a dry summer is particularly conducive to violent death. But the long-held belief that gloomy November was the month of suicide was debunked. Suicide was most frequent in the spring. “Suicide and madness are not influenced so much by the intense heat of the advanced summer season as by the early spring and summer,” explained Morselli, “which seize upon the organism not yet acclimatised and still under the influence of the cold season.”

  Nineteenth-century studies left few statistical stones unturned. They tabulated method: “Nationality has a noticeable effect on the choice of means,” observed Masaryk. “The French and Romantic peoples, in general, often shoot themselves; the Scandinavians, Germans, and Slavs frequently hang themselves. The Parisians—men—choose drowning more often than shooting. In Italy, men shoot themselves most frequently; women drown themselves; but hanging is less frequent than in all other lands.” They explored occupation: “A very low suicide frequency appears among clergymen of all forms of worship; poets, artists, and men of genius are often seized by the tendency to suicide,” asserted the author of an early German study. “Crowned heads commit suicide not infrequently; professional beggars almost never.” They explored place of death: a study of Prussian suicides from 1872 to 1875 found that 918 ended their lives in the woods, 639 in rivers, 419 in the streets, 284 in gardens, 220 in jails, 144 in hotels, and 21 in trains, carriages, or ships. They examined height: “The frequency of suicide in the various parts of Italy generally is in a direct ratio with stature,” wrote Morselli, “and the inclination to self-destruction increases from south to north as the stature of the Italians gradually increases.” They explored time of day, day of the week, and weeks of the month: in 1833, M. A. Guerry reported that of 6,587 cases, suicide was committed most frequently on Monday, least frequently on Sunday, while de Boismont found that a majority of suicides occurred during the day and that the suicide rate was highest during the first ten days of the month. Morselli was at a loss to account for this finding. “From whence this fact proceeds is not clear,” he commented, “unless it be that in the first days of each month debauchery, dissipation, orgies, especially in large cities, are more numerous.”

  Although their statistics were admittedly inaccurate—data collection methods varied widely, and then, as now, suicide tended to be underreported—nineteenth-century social statisticians, or sociologists, as they were now called, uncovered several patterns that remain true today: that males kill themselves far more frequently than females; that suicide rates rise with age; that single or divorced people are more apt to kill themselves than married people, Protestants more often than Catholics; that suicide occurs more often in spring than in fall and winter; that it declines in time of war and rises in periods of rapid economic change, political crisis, and social instability. And no matter what variations were found from country to country, one thing on which they concurred was that the number of suicides was soaring. (At century’s end a German priest calculated the total number of nineteenth-century suicides to be more than one and a half million.) Almost all agreed on the cause: “The certainty of the figures and the regularity of the progressive increase of suicide, from the time when statistics were first collected to now,” wrote Morselli in 1881, “is such and so great even in respect to countries different in race, religion, and number of inhabitants, that it is not possible to explain it otherwise than as an effect of that universal and complex influence to which we give the name of civilization.”

  It was clear that society played a role in suicide, but no one knew exactly how. For all the dogged statistical digging, no overarching social theory made sense of the confetti of numbers until the publication of Émile Durkheim’s Le Suicide in 1897. Durkheim, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, was not primarily concerned with suicide. He was interested in establishing the new discipline of sociology as a science. Like many of his peers, however, he had been struck by the fact that industrialization and economic progress seemed to be accompanied everywhere by a rise in suicide, and the trove of suicide statistics afforded him an ample data base from which to formulate and test his sociological theories.

  In Le Suicide, Durkheim analyzed European suicide statistics for the last half of the nineteenth century and, like his predecessors, noticed that suicide occurs with varying frequency in different populations. Durkheim then examined the impact of race, heredity, imitation, humidity, and temperature on the suicide rate and concluded that they had little effect. To understand suicide, he said, it was necessary to examine social forces rather than isolated individual motives. Suicide was explicable only by the state of the society to which the individual belonged. While a certain number of suicides were inevitable in every society, some societies were more conducive to self-destruction than others. In societies where social ties were strong, there would be little suicide; where they were weak, there would be more. The more an individual was integrated into social groups—religion, family, community—the less likelihood of suicide.

  Durkheim suggested that every suicide could be classified as one of three types—egoistic, altruistic, or anomic—according to its social context. Egoistic suicide occurs when an individual is left to his own resources instead of being well integrated into a social group, whether it be family, religion, or community. This, said Durkheim, helped explain why the rate of suicide by Protestants was higher than that of Catholics although both religions condemn the act. Protestantism, which encourages the spirit of free inquiry and emphasizes free will, may tend to encourage suicide, while the traditional, strictly ordered belief system of the Catholic Church offers a more tightly stitched social community. Similarly, the traditional family life of grandparents, parents, and children living under one roof offered stability in a world in which divorce and transience were increasingly prevalent. Thus the suicide rate of unmarried people was higher than that of married people of similar age. Children offered added protection; the more children in a family, the lower the rate of suicide for the parents. So, too, rural communities offered greater opportunity for social contact than did big, impersonal cities and therefore had lower suicide rates. The egoistic suicide is often the lonely, the unemployed, the single, the divorced person living alone, who has no one or nothing to which to belong. One way of belonging, oddly enough, is war. Observing that suicide rates tend to dwindle during wars and other national emergencies, Durkheim reasoned that in times of crisis, society literally rallies round the flag, and personal problems are dwarfed by concern for family and country.

  The opposite of egoistic suicide is altruistic suicide, in which an individual is excessively integrated into a social group. In some cases society’s hold is too strong on certain individuals, who sacrifice their own identities and goals, and even their lives. Such suicides, said Durk
heim, result from insufficient individuation. Many Greek and Roman suicides, Indian suttee, and Japanese seppuku are examples of altruistic suicides. Durkheim noted that altruistic suicides are more common in primitive societies where under certain circumstances suicide is encouraged (the aging Eskimo who walks off into the snow rather than burden his community), and in rigidly structured groups like the military, where certain suicides have a sacrificial element: the soldier who tosses himself on a grenade to save his platoon. As notions of suicide have changed over time, altruistic suicide is said to have become rare in the Western world, but each culture has its examples. The Eskimo is not unlike Captain Lawrence Oates, who wandered off to die in the antarctic snow believing his weakness made him a hindrance to Scott’s 1912 polar expedition; the Hindu woman who throws herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre is not unlike the captain who goes down with his ship; the 967 Jews who killed themselves at Masada rather than surrender in AD 73 are not unlike the 912 who swallowed cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at Jonestown in 1978; the kamikaze pilots of World War II who crashed their fighters into American aircraft carriers are not unlike the contempory Palestinian and Al-Queda terrorists who serve as human bombs. Many people resist thinking of these sacrificial deaths as suicides. But in recent years psychiatrists have pointed out that many “altruistic” suicides are not entirely selfless but arise from a complex tangle of motives that may include the need to give one’s death—and life—a higher meaning.

  Anomic suicide, Durkheim’s third category, occurs when a person’s life changes so abruptly that he is unable to cope. Like a man in a dream who finds himself in a strange town, he feels lost, his accustomed way of life seems useless, his normal supports are gone. He is overwhelmed by anomie. The change might be triggered by a death in the family, a painful divorce, a sudden financial reversal, or even unexpected wealth. Or it might be provoked by a more general disturbance—a plague, a decline in religious beliefs, or a stock market crash—that jars a society’s equilibrium. At these times an entire society may experience anomie. Thus, suicides increased when the Black Death disrupted the stability of the Middle Ages, just as centuries later the U.S. suicide rate peaked during the Great Depression. Durkheim demonstrated a correlation between the economy and suicide, which tends to rise steeply during a depression—as well as during a boom. At these times the wealthy were more likely to turn to suicide than the poor. “Lack of power, compelling moderation, accustoms men to it. . . . Wealth, on the other hand, by the power it bestows, deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only. . . . The less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears.”

  Le Suicide was a landmark book. Not only did it establish the field of sociology but it marked the beginning of the modern study of suicide. It offered the first comprehensive social theory of suicidal behavior—that “suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part.” Since its publication in 1897 (an English translation did not appear until 1951), Le Suicide has been analyzed, refined, and criticized. Subsequent sociologists have challenged Durkheim’s conclusions as being based on unreliable data. They have pointed out exceptions to his general rules—Catholic Austria, for instance, has long had one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Studies using more advanced statistical techniques have found that suicide may be as common among the poor as among the rich; as common in rural areas as in the cities. Still other critics assert that Durkheim’s typology is too broad and that the distinction between anomic and egoistic suicide is often blurred. (Durkheim admitted that egoism, anomie, and altruism “are very often combined with one another, giving rise to composite varieties; characteristics of several types will be united in a single suicide.”) But no one has ever seriously challenged Durkheim’s basic theory, and his work has served as the foundation for all subsequent sociological investigations of the subject.

  While Le Suicide was a milestone in the study of suicide, it did not explain why some people who were Protestant, widowed, or divorced killed themselves when most did not. Durkheim’s belief that “social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual,” made the psychology of the individual suicide virtually irrelevant to his theory. Without a psychological understanding of suicide, however, the work of Durkheim and his predecessors was incomplete. “When we learn that the most densely populated parts of the world have the highest incidence of suicide, and that suicides cluster in certain months of the year, do we thereby learn a single adequate, explanatory motive?” asked psychoanalyst Alfred Adler in 1910. “No, we learn only that the phenomenon of suicide is also subject to the law of great numbers, and that it is related to other social phenomena. Suicide can be understood only individually, even if it has social preconditions and social consequences.”

  Adler was speaking at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’s special session on suicide in children, thirteen years after the publication of Durkheim’s masterpiece. The focus of the discussion in Freud’s living room was light-years away from the social determinism of Durkheim and his disciples. The talk was not of religious affiliation, marital status, or amount of annual rainfall but of revenge, inferiority, and sexual repression. Each analyst explained suicide according to his own theoretical perspective. Adler emphasized the strength of the aggressive drive and the desire of the suicidal person to inflict pain on surviving relatives. “Thus the unconscious creates a situation in which sickness, even death, is desired,” he said, “partly in order to hurt the relatives, and partly to show them what they have lost in the one they have always slighted.” Isidor Sadger asserted that “the decisive factor here is erotic. . . . The only person who puts an end to his life is one who has been compelled to give up all hope of love.” The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel emphasized the role of aggression and murderous impulses: “No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another.”

  Freud’s input that evening was limited to a few general remarks. Although his theories of depression and aggression would provide the framework for a psychoanalytic understanding of suicide, he never developed a comprehensive theory of suicide or wrote about it as a subject in itself. Freud brought the 1910 meeting to a close by urging, “Let us suspend our judgment till experience has solved this problem.” And yet, as psychiatrist Robert Litman has pointed out in his paper “Sigmund Freud on Suicide,” the fifty-three-year-old Freud had had ample experience—both clinical and personal—with suicide. In 1883, Freud wrote his fiancée, Martha Bernays, about the suicide of a friend, a young doctor named Nathan Weiss, who hanged himself shortly after an ill-advised marriage. In 1885, a year before their stormy four-year courtship ended in marriage, Freud alluded to suicide in another letter to Martha: “I have long since resolved on a decision, the thought of which is in no way painful, in the event of my losing you. That we should lose each other by parting is quite out of the question. . . . You have no idea how fond I am of you, and I hope I shall never have to show it.” The twenty-nine-year-old Freud, like some lovesick teenager, exemplified an observation he would make many years later in a discussion of melancholia: “In the two opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.” Although Freud suffered periods of depression throughout his life, this was the only time he is believed to have mentioned suicidal thoughts of his own.

  Freud’s case histories contain numerous descriptions of suicidal behavior. The only sister of the patient known as the Wolf Man committed suicide by poisoning. Plagued by hallucinations, the paranoid Dr. Schreber made frequent attempts to drown himself in his bath. The eighteen-year-old patient known as Dora forced her parents into obtaining treatment for her by leaving a letter threatening suicide in a place where they were sure to find it. Freud noted the attention-getting aspects of her act, and in analysis, when Dora spoke of her father’s suicidal threats, Freud commented on the significanc
e of the suicidal child’s identification with the suicidal parent. In 1898 a patient of Freud’s killed himself. “A patient over whom I had taken a great deal of trouble had put an end to his life on account of an incurable sexual disorder,” he wrote in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he described his own unconscious efforts to repress the memory of the suicide.

  In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud returned to a consideration of the murderous component in suicide. “We find that impulses to suicide in a neurotic turn out regularly to be self-punishments for wishes for someone else’s death,” he wrote. In Mourning and Melancholia (1915), Freud restated his belief that murderous impulses turned inward could lead to suicide, but how did the mechanism function? Freud had based his work on his conviction that human behavior is ultimately shaped by instinctual drives. At the time of the meeting he believed that these drives were libido and self-preservation. How did suicide satisfy these drives? How could the ego consent to its own destruction?