Why Did My Friend Kill Himself? Why Does Anyone?

While my approach to suicide is not from the perspective of trauma theory per se, suicide is plenty traumatic for everyone involved.  Many who remain will suffer from PTSD. I have been thinking and posting about trauma for almost a decade now. It’s time to broaden the perspective a little.

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I kept up with my freshman college roommate for over fifty years.  We weren’t close, but we were friends.  He visited my university from time to time on business, and we always had dinner, but we hadn’t had much to do with each other for about a dozen years before he called.  He said he was thinking of killing himself.  After that, we talked on the phone every couple of weeks for almost two years–until he didn’t answer my calls.  About a month later I got the call from his son.

Bob’s wife had divorced him.  Or at least that’s the way he put it.  He was in his early seventies at the time; they had been married for decades.  I don’t know why she initiated divorce.  I know that Bob said he would not and did not fight her.  Nor did he reject her lawyer’s demand for a more–than–generous financial settlement.  It’s a sad story, but not an unfamiliar one.  Unusual is only Bob’s suicide.

Even that is not so unusual.  Single men Bob’s age have the highest suicide death rate of any age-sex group. /1/  Bob was helpful to me during a troubled time in my marriage.  I slept on his couch for a week, and he didn’t ask any uncomfortable questions.  Not because he was polite, but because he wasn’t particularly interested.  I was grateful for this quality in his personality, a certain unrelatedness.  He tended toward the schizoid end of the schizoid-depressive spectrum, to use some jargon.

But I was interested in Bob as he talked more and more about suicide, particularly when he began to assemble his suicide kit, a poisonous gas difficult to obtain for someone who was not an industrial chemist or something similar. Evidently it came in a pressure vessel.  The gas had certain advantages, which I won’t go into, except to say that Bob didn’t want to make a mess and didn’t want to endanger any neighbors if he used it.  He lived in an apartment.

All the while, he tried life, taking up various activities and hobbies, such as dancing.  Most involved some physical contact with women, which he enjoyed.  He saw a psychotherapist twice a week and took the usual cocktail of antidepressants.   In the end he made what I would call a rational decision that the pain of living was going to outweigh the pleasure no matter how hard he tried.  He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t deeply depressed either.  Though semi-retired, he went to his office, and out on a few dates.

Martin: The Freedom to Commit Suicide 

Clancy Martin is a professor of philosophy.  In How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, he tells his class that one of his earliest memories is wishing he were dead.

‘I don’t know how old I was at this time, but I think I was very young, two or three.’  How could a two-year-old wish he were dead? It’s a reasonable question. (p 40)

Does Martin really talk with his class about things like this?  Evidently yes.  The discussion is prompted by his description of his own many suicide attempts on his webpage.  Students curious about their professor discover the page, tell others, and soon most of the class knows.

Readings in his course, which include Schopenhauer’s essay “On Suicide,” foster this focus.  One that leads a surprising number of students to bring up their own suicide attempts, or thoughts about killing themselves (suicidal ideation).

Martin made his earliest suicide attempt in first grade, running in front of a bus (p 41).  The most recent was several years before he wrote this book (published in 2023), attempting to hang himself from the roof beam of his basement office with a dog leash.  It wasn’t quite short enough, and he ended up with a sore throat.

Martin doesn’t just talk about his suicide attempts.  He has a theory, and it’s not a bad one.  The earliest memory he has of wishing he were dead is associated with the panic he felt at missing his mother.  Now I don’t believe for a minute that he remembers anything at two years of age, nor that he experienced missing his mother in anything like the way he would a few years later.  But this does not impugn his theory.

Suicide is the reaction to the loss of attachment to a fundamental source of value.  Generally embodied in a person, this value could be expressed in the loss of faith in a religion or ideology.  Arthur Koestler is exemplary, though his suicide is more complicated than can be dealt with here. /2/  The result is an unbearable panic for which suicide is the solution.  Loss of attachment to sources of value, when total, leads to–or rather, is–a loss of meaning in life.  The meaning of our lives is our attachments.  And without meaning our lives are hardly worth living.

         The possibility of suicide allows some to live

For some, not suicide itself, but the ever-present possibility of committing suicide, is what allows one to continue to live. Martin seems to be among these.  William James put it this way.

A friend and fellow philosopher wrote to me recently, I have not spent a week of my life without thinking of how much better it would all be if I could just end it. Even in the happiest of times. Sometimes I find instant relief just by indulging a quick suicidal ideation. (quoted in Martin, p 126)

James approves, as does Martin.  Thinking suicide, talking suicide, knowing one can choose suicide at any moment, forestalls suicide “for the suicidally inclined.”  How might the inclined person be identified?  As far as I can tell, only by having made several attempts and failed. 

Andrew Solomon has tried suicide a few times.  He thinks along lines similar to Martin and James.

Knowing that if I get through this minute I could always kill myself in the next one makes it possible to get through this minute without being utterly overwhelmed. Suicidality may be a symptom of depression; it is also a mitigating factor. The thought of suicide makes it possible to get through depression. I expect that I’ll go on living so long as I can give or receive anything better than pain, but I do not promise that I will never kill myself. Nothing horrifies me more than the thought that I might at some stage lose the capacity for suicide. (Solomon, p 284)

 

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Freud’s speculations about the death drive (Todestrieb) are no longer  accepted by most psychoanalysts. /1/ Yet, Freud’s thoughts about the death drive are worth considering from the perspective of trauma theory, since Freud regarded the inability of the traumatized to let their trauma pass into memory as the strongest evidence in favor of the death drives (he almost always used the plural). A version of the repetition compulsion, Andre Green calls the death drive the “murder of time.” Embeddedness in temporality is the mark of human existence. The murder of time is the murder of lived life.

Freud first posited the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). His English translator, James Strachey, made the mistake of translating two German words, Trieb and Instinkt, with the same term, instinct. There is no death instinct. A drive is a motivation directed by a physical need. A drive is culturally and psychologically mutable within limits. /2/

If people seek pleasure above all else, as Freud had previously assumed, why would a traumatized person hold fast to a terrible memory of trauma, repeating the experience again and again, not just in memory but in the physical sensations accompanying that memory?

Freud’s first answer was that repetition is an attempt to master an experience that was originally too immediate, too intense, or simply too difficult to bear, such as the abandonment of a child by its mother. Freud comments on his grandson’s fort/da game in which the child threw a spool of string away and then reeled it back in during his mother’s absence. Or more frequently, he just threw his toys away, as though to say, “See, I don’t need you anymore. You’re not leaving. I’m sending you away.”  

Freud seems unsatisfied with his own answer, for Freud was never comfortable with the idea of an independent instinct or drive for mastery or control (Beyond, p. 54). Not mastery but the death drive is Freud’s explanation of life beyond the pleasure principle. Trauma incites the death drive, the urge of the organism to return to an original inorganic state. One sees this in Freud’s speculation about the Nirvana principle, which he interprets as the longing for the cessation of stimulation and tension (Beyond, p. 95). We desire our own deaths, but only in our own time and in our own way. If we are fortunate, we savor the journey that takes us from nothingness to nothingness, Nirvana. Trauma may make life so unbearable that a shortcut is tempting (Beyond, pp. 61, 95). To die and so end the constant intrusion of stimuli may seem like liberation from the burden of being.

Freud believed that the psychic drives are conservative. “Their goal is the restoration of a previous state of non-tension, calm, inertia.” This is what Freud means with his remarkable statement, “the aim of life is death.” (Freud, 1920, p 224) In its original formulation, the death drive.  

Has nothing to do with aggressiveness . . . and Freud always refused to recognize the existence of a destructive autonomous energy. (Valdrè, p 24)

Why drives are conservative can be explained by considering the original German title of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Jenseits des Lustprinzips. Jenseits doesn’t mean “beyond” so much as it means the other side of pleasure, the pleasure of no tension. It is another type of pleasure, the pleasure of not having to be, to do, or respond. In the language of psychoanalysis, it is a pure narcissistic pleasure. In the language of Green and Lacan (that is, the French tradition, in which speech takes the place of experience), it is the pleasure of not having to represent oneself in language.

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Aftermath

I’ve rarely devoted a post to criticizing one book.  But there are aspects of Aftermath that highlight all that’s wrong with the adoption of trauma theory by literary critics, a recurring theme of this blog. 

What makes Aftermath different is that it is engaged with an actual trauma.  Instead of using trauma theory to explain a text, it uses the literary imitation of trauma, above all the experience of fragmentation, to explain a genuinely traumatic experience, a double murder.  It doesn’t work.   

A highly regarded book

Preti Taneja, a British author of Indian descent, received the Gordon Burn Prize for Aftermath. The prize honors the year’s most dazzlingly daring and avant-garde work of English-language fiction and non-fiction.  Her first book, We That Are Young, a version of King Lear, set in a modern-day Indian business family, received the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was short-listed for several others.  I found it hard to find critical reviews. Critical comments yes, here and there, but no critical reviews. 

The most critical comments were reserved for Goodreads, a reader response website sponsored by Amazon.  Many readers stated that large parts of the book were incomprehensible due to its stylistic peculiarities: absent punctuation, large gaps between words and phrases, incomplete sentences, and so forth.  One reader says rip out 80 pages, presumably the ones written in an attempt to represent the traumatic experience as a textual one, and the book makes sense as a history and critique of the Muslim experience in India and England.  I agree.  The book gets better toward the end.

The Atrocity and its background

Though the book often reads as though Taneja was in the midst of the double murder, she wasn’t.  She didn’t learn about it until the next day when her partner read the newspaper to her over breakfast, and Taneja realized she knew the name of the attacker, Usman Khan.  The 28-year-old had taken the creative writing course Taneja led at a high-security prison two years earlier. The attack took place at a reunion of the program.  The newspaper reported that he had been shot dead by police, after stabbing five people, two fatally.  One was her colleague, Jack Merritt.  Darkly amusing to some was the fact that Khan was initially subdued by a participant using a Narwhal tusk fastened to the Cambridge conference room wall. 

Taneja had been invited, but stayed home, preparing for a literary festival. She says she feels both relieved and guilty to have missed the horror and has been left wondering how to make sense of her peripheral connection to the atrocity.

She tells me she has now come to call it “disenfranchised grief … for those who had known the perpetrator, it was something unspeakable”. She is now, she notes in Aftermath, writing “in the wreck”. (Guardian, November 27, 2021) *

“Astro-city”: the attempt to represent trauma in a text

The simplest way to convey the narrative style is to point out that “atrocity” is spelled “astro-city” every single time, I estimate well over one-hundred times throughout the book.  It took me 88 pages to figure out what she was trying to say with this affectation.   The state did it, creating the conditions that led to the atrocity.  One problem with this use is that it denies Khan his autonomy.  Furthermore, at other points she presents a nuanced account of the question of where the responsibility began and ended.  The narrative portion of the book is capable of subtleties the stylistic portion can’t capture. 

Taneja uses fractured form to reproduce in the text the experience of trauma.  Trouble is, actual trauma becomes confused with textual trauma, as when she refers to “the atro-city, this prison of narrative and counternarrative.” (p 60) Elsewhere she states that “prison is a palace made of narrative . . . nothing in there but narrative.”   No, prison is a place made of concrete and steel.  It’s hard and its real.  “Concrete Mama” it’s called by some prisoners (McCoy and Hoffman).  It’s hard and its cold but it’s always there, always waiting to take you back.  To be sure, prison is alive with stories.  I listened to prisoners’ stories for more than a year (Alford,1997).   But no one tells stories in solitary confinement (“administrative segregation”), and confined lives lead to confined stories, lacking in imagination.  Dreams, a realm of freedom, are the exception, and prisoners generally keep dreams to themselves. 

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People come here to die: Winnicott and the the trauma of old age 

This essay draws on my experience with a continuing care retirement community (CCRC).  It is an essay on trauma–the trauma of old age and impending death.  The CCRC serves as what D. W. Winnicott calls a transitional object.  Only in the case of the CCRC, it’s a transitional object in reverse.  That’s good and bad.  Mostly it’s interesting, especially for me, since I live in one.  

People come here to die.  A CCRC, of which there are over 2,000 in the United States, provides independent living, assisted living, and nursing home care under one roof in the smaller communities.  The larger CCRCs often occupy a campus, but the same principle applies.  I live in one of the smaller CCRCs, with about 200 residents in independent living.

My wife died close to five years ago now.  I lived alone in a big house for about two years.  Keeping up the house and living alone became too much, and I moved to the CCRC.  I’ve lived here now for almost three years.  

The CCRC as transitional object in reverse

I’ve thought a lot about the psychology of living in a CCRC.  What set me off was the remark by my first friend here.  He said people don’t make close friendships in retirement communities because they know their friends will soon die.  My friend died about a year after I met him (he was in his 90s), and I think what he said was only partly true.  

The CCRC serves as a transitional object.   What’s unusual about the CCRC is that it’s a transitional object in reverse.  The infant and young child’s use of the transitional object serves to help him or her separate me from not-me, and so move from dependence to relative independence.  The CCRC is the opposite, helping the residents move from independence to relative dependence.

The flipper is a good example, the first step in this move.  The flipper is a little tear-drop-shaped piece of wood that swings on the outside of the independent living resident’s door.  A worker pushes it against the door late at night, and it flips to a down position when I open the door in the morning.  If the door isn’t opened by about 11am, the flipper stays up, and someone checks to see if I’m dead or seriously ill.  

The flipper is the first step in a series of events—call them care—that usually eventuate in the resident dying in the nursing facility in an adjacent building. 

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