ABSTRACT
A pre-suicide state of mind is influenced, in varying degrees, by a suicide fantasy, based on the self’s relation to its body and its primary objects. The fantasy may or may not become conscious, but at the time of execution it has distorted reality and has the power of a delusional conviction. The term body barrier describes the resistance that exists in everybody to translating a conscious fantasy of violence into physical action. The suicidal individual has withdrawn from others in favour of the cathexes of his own body, so that the primitive anxieties of annihilation are experienced in relation to his body, which has become identified with the engulfing or abandoning object. The patient’s pressure to involve the therapist in the suicide scenario is the primary factor in the creation of a collusive countertransference response to the patient’s pre-suicide state of mind.
