ABSTRACT
In 1910 the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society held a symposium ‘On Suicide’: with particular reference to suicide amongst young students. Freud explored aggression turned against the self in suicide further in his paper ‘Mourning and melancholia’. Whatever else is said about suicide, it functions as a solution born of despair and desperation. An individual enters a pre-suicide state whenever the normal self-preservative instinct is overcome and their body becomes expendable. During a pre-suicide state the patient is influenced, in varying degrees, by a suicide fantasy, based on the self’s relation to its body and primary objects. The suicide fantasy is the motive force. The suicide fantasy represented a solution to the conflict which results from the wish to merge with mother, on the one hand, and the consequent primitive anxieties about annihilation of the self, on the other. The patients’ suicide fantasies articulated in the present represented internalised early pathological relationships between mother and child and father.
