ABSTRACT
In her chapter ‘The paradox of suicide: issues of identity and separateness’ Joan Schachter discusses the analysis of a man in his early twenties who had made several serious suicidal attempts prior to his starting analysis. Like in the other papers in this collection, the analyst understands the suicide attempts as expressing the patient’s failure to negotiate and establish an adequate sense of separateness from his primary objects, especially the mother. The attacks on his body became the pathway for the expression of intense affects. The author understands the suicidal acts as representing in phantasy a solution to the developmental impasse in adolescence of being unable to resolve his conflictual sense of personal and sexual identity. The analyst understands, in her analysis of the transference and the counter-transference, the powerful sense of entrapment this patient experienced in relation to his internal mother coupled with an absence of a strong internal paternal figure.
