ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the use of attacks on the body to get rid of a painful mental state. For suicidal patients ‘it is the body that is treated as an object and concretely identified with the lost and hated person’. The author argues that each is underlined by a wish for the ‘surviving self to ‘merge with an idealised maternal imago’, that is, suicide is intended to kill the bad, annihilating mother and to permit fusion with the ideal mother. He discusses had throughout his life felt let down and neglected by his father, abandoned to a sado-masochistic relationship with his mother. Although the patient’s suicide fantasies were based on a pathological bond with his mother, during the pre-suicide state the internalised father who had failed to protect his son from the father was evoked in the counter-transference to function as a sanction for the suicidal act.
