ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by critically exploring Freudian and post-Freudian understandings of suicide, although due to limitations of space it is not comprehensive. Several examples drawn from clinical practice are then considered in relation to the theoretical ideas previously discussed. The chapter then moves on to reconsider psychodynamic approaches to suicidal clients from a Levinasian ethical position. The possibility that suicide may be a logical part of what it is to be human, rather than an indication of mental illness, is advanced.
Freud’s notion of the death instinct suggests, at its most minimal, that we want (or need) something we know nothing about, and that we are most drawn to what we think of ourselves as trying to avoid. That we are, essentially, idiosyncratic suicides, but not from despair, but because it is literally our nature to die.
(Phillips, 1999, p. 110)