ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case of Jane, an 18-year-old girl, and discusses in more general terms some of the assumptions about attempted suicide in adolescence that led us to choose this as one area of study. We began to feel that a suicide attempt is a loss of the sense of reality about death, so that the depression is more in the nature of a depressive illness with a vulnerability to psychotic functioning. According to her description, 'Jane' had been seriously depressed for two years before her attempt. Shortly before her suicide attempt, her conflicting feelings about her mother began to express themselves in an anxiety about her intellectual capabilities, and she began to feel potential failure in that area of her life too, again feeling that it was her own fault and due to her weakness in ever having given in to her mother's demands in the first place.
