The Inner Debate on Self Destruction, Agency Pathology and Impulse

“ But it gives no slightest hint of the real state of the man who is deliberating within himself whether he will commit suicide or no; no hint of the real arguments that pass in shadow through his mind:—the weariness of life which summons him to end all; the nameless, indefinable dread of the mystery and darkness and night into which death carries us, which makes him hesitate. If we would really understand the mind of the suicide, not merely the mind of the philosopher coolly debating suicide, we must turn to the poet. ”

“ Many committed suicide to save their babes. Certainly they were not cowards. Although guilty of great crimes they had enough of honor, of manhood, left to save their innocent children. This was not cowardice.
Without doubt many suicides are caused by insanity. Men lose their property. The fear of the future overpowers them. Things lose proportion, they lose poise and balance, and in a flash, a gleam of frenzy, kill themselves. The disappointed in love, broken in heart—the light fading from their lives—seek the refuge of death. ”

“ Is a suicide necessarily insane? was the first question, to which Colonel Ingersoll replied:
Answer. No. At the same time I believe that a great majority of suicides are insane. There are circumstances under which suicide is natural, sensible and right. When a man is of no use to himself, when he can be of no use to others, when his life is filled with agony, when the future has no promise of relief, then I think he has the right to cast the burden of life away and seek the repose of death.
Question. Is a suicide necessarily a coward? ”

“ Out of years of insanity had sprung a supreme moment of sanity, and no one understands it. The common stupidity, I should say the common insanity, of the world on the subject of suicide is quite comic. A man may destroy his own property, which would certainly be of use to some one, but he may not destroy his own life, which possibly is of use to no one; and if two men conspire to commit suicide and one fails, the other is tried for murder and hanged. Can the mind conceive more perfect nonsense? ”

“ This divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.
The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. ”

“ It is a very prevalent but erroneous belief that suicide is invariably preceded by insanity. Self-destruction is always an unnatural act, and a violation of the laws of nature, but is not, therefore, necessarily an insane act. ”

“ Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide. Barely more than a year ago I was sitting at your table and dallying with the thought of publishing an anthology of your works. ”

“ As a rule, the man who contemplates suicide is not a sufferer from inevitable natural causes, but one who for some foolish act has put himself into what seems to him an intolerable position out of which escape without disgrace is impossible, and he is afraid to face the consequences of his own acts. It is from the fear of mental worry and of the condemnation of others rather than from any dread of physical suffering and pain that men commit suicide. ”

“ But there is a phase of the philosophy of suicide which can be seen only from the occult or metaphysical side of life. It has been said that it is the cowardly and unmanly man who wilfully destroys his own life, but for all that a great deal of mental strength and bravery may be required to become too great a coward to combat even little annoyances. ”

“ Death in the struggles of this kind is an ideal death.
Apart from this, the comrades among us, who believe that they will be awarded death, should await that day patiently when the sentence will be announced and they will be hanged. This death will also be beautiful, but committing suicide - to cut short the life just to avoid some pain - is cowardice. I want to tell you that obstacles make a man perfect. ”

“ This, no doubt, is the fundamental cause of all suicide. But it is only with the direct incentive that society is capable of dealing, and these direct causes are so numerous and varied that it is almost impossible to classify them with any degree of accuracy. The individual may be impelled to self-destruction by circumstances, by an innate craving or instinct, by an uncontrollable impulse, by the unhealthy reasoning of a disordered intellect, and by many other influences. ”

“ On the contrary, a large minority—some authorities say the majority—of suicidal acts are perpetrated by persons who cannot be called other than sane, though their mental state is indisputably more or less abnormal at the time, and the organic action of the brain and nervous system sometimes in a state of excitement bordering on real pathological irritation. ”

“ The tendency to commit suicide, which is so common among the insane and those predisposed to insanity, is especially prevalent in patients who suffer from depression, sleeplessness and delusions of persecution. Suicidal acts may be divided into accidental, impulsive and premeditated. The accidental suicides occur in patients who are partially or totally unconscious of their surroundings, and are generally the result of terrifying hallucinations, to escape 602 from which the patient jumps through a window or runs blindly into water or some other danger. ”

“ No one who is in a really healthy state of mind, whose faculties are perfectly balanced, or who is at peace with God and man, commits suicide. The temporary exaltation of grief, despondency or disappointment produces as utter a state of insanity as disease itself. ”

“ A suicide inspired by passion is the inevitable termination of a pathological condition. Every individual who commits suicide had to commit suicide. You are merely the incidental cause of an accident, which is, of course, deplorable, but the importance of which should not be exaggerated. ”

“ But this is quite different from suicidal insanity, in which the impulse is often strongest at a time when there are the most reasons for living and the greatest happiness in life if the tormenting demon urging to self-murder could be excluded. Such people finally kill themselves, in spite of their best resolutions and efforts to the contrary, if the various faculties of the mind become more and more involved as the disease goes on and the power of self-control is progressively weakened. More general insanity of the degenerative type is sometimes developed from suicidal insanity. ”

“ Without doubt many suicides are caused by insanity. Men lose their property. The fear of the future over powers them. Things lose proportion, they lose poise and balance, and in a flash, a gleam of frenzy, kill their selves. The disappointed in love, broken in heart—the light fading from their lives—seek the refuge of death. Those who take their lives in painful, barbarous ways—who mangle their throats with broken glass, dash themselves from towers and roofs, take poisons that torture like the rack—such persons must be insane. ”

“ It is perfectly apparent that there are many people incapable by nature of bearing the burdens of life, incapable or preserving their mental poise in stress and strain of disaster, disease and loss, and who by failure, by misfortune and want, are driven to despair and insanity, in whose darkened minds there comes like a flash of lightning in the night, the thought of death, a thought so strong, so vivid, that all fear is lost, all ties broken, all duties, all obligations, all hopes forgotten, and naught remains except a fierce and wild desire to die. ”

“ And so it is that suicide becomes easy; for the bodily pain that is bound up with it loses all importance in the eyes of one who is tormented by excessive mental suffering. This is particularly obvious in the case of those who are driven to commit suicide through some purely morbid and discordant feeling. They have no feelings to overcome; they do not need to rush at it, but as soon as the keeper who looks after them leaves them for two minutes they quickly put an end to their life. ”

“ Melancholic patients are most inclined to suicide, but any insane person, whatever the mental state, may commit the act. Delusions of depression generally cause the suicidal ideas, but hallucinations sometimes play an important part. Some persons are simply tired of life, and see no hope in living; some think they are a burden to their friends, and that they are taking food away from their children ”

“ Emotional disturbances lead directly to the overthrow of the mental balance, which divides the normal man from the madman and the neurasthenic. Modern psychiatrists lay stress on the emotional character of the latter affection. The underlying features of "functional neurosis" reveal themselves in symptoms denoting the clash of emotional elements within, together with a corresponding lack of adaptability to outer environment, and are characterized by instability and exaggeration of emotion rather than impaired intellect. ”

“ I have heard the evidence hitherto given, and the letters read, and I say this,—that, although nothing could be more deliberate and determined than the act of suicide, I am of opinion that his mind was so overcharged and thrown off its balance by the dread of approaching inevitable poverty, that he was driven in a moment of despair to put an end to his existence ”

“ For this purpose it is important to know just what are the conditions and motives that predispose to suicide and, above all, to realize that it is not the result of insufferable pain {714} or anguish, but rather of the concentration of mind on some comparatively trivial ailment, or exaggeration of dread with regard to the consequences of physical or moral ills.
Suicides are often said to be irrational; in a certain sense they are. No one who weighs reasonably all the consequences of his act will take his own life. ”

“ Finally, the automatic character of these impulses approximates them to the class of reflex actions, attempts at suicide being repeated in the same form during a recurrence of the same circumstances—e.g., somnambulism, intoxication, the menstrual period. All these characteristics assign to irresistible suicide an organic origin, which is equivalent to saying that its ultimate cause lies in temperament. The conservative instinct exists in all men, but it may exist in any degree. In some there is an innate joy of life capable of resisting all disasters ”

“ We know that a great many of those who ultimately destroy themselves fight for years against the impulse. How are we to account in such cases for the persistence of the tendency toward suicide, which seems to be a part of their nature, a part which draws them instinctively to death just as the normal creature is drawn to a desire to live? ”

“ The thought which leads to suicide makes the deepest impression on the mind, far deeper, in fact, than even the thought which commits murder. Why? Because we love our own life more than anybody else's or than anything else on earth. It, therefore, requires an extraordinarily powerful thought to overpower that innate, intense love of our life and incite us to destroy it. The thought back of this self-murder, therefore, makes the deepest impression on, our mind and thus becomes the most powerful Karma-seed of all Karma-seeds. ”

“ Self-inflicted injuries are, as a rule, a compromise between this impulse and the forces working against it, and even where it really comes to suicide the inclination has existed for a long time with less strength or as an unconscious and repressed tendency.
Even suicide consciously committed chooses its time, means, and opportunity; it is quite natural that unconscious suicide should wait for a motive to take upon itself one part of the causation and thus free it from its oppression by taking up the defensive forces of the person. ”

“ This illustrates how strongly suggestive the concentration of attention may make an idea, and how much a single idea, when it alone occupies the center of consciousness, tends to work itself out in act, though there is no reason at all for willing in that direction. It is not improbable that in some inexplicable cases of suicide the tendency has actually worked itself out. ”

“ Whoever believes in the occurrence of semi-intentional self-inflicted injury—if this awkward expression be permitted—will become prepared [Pg 202] to accept through it the fact that aside from conscious intentional suicide there also exists semi-intentional annihilation—with unconscious intention—which is capable of aptly utilizing a threat against life and masking it as a casual mishap. Such mechanism is by no means rare. For the tendency to self-destruction exists to a certain degree in many more persons than in those who bring it to completion. ”

“ We all know that there are times when we cannot get rid of the thoughts that will think themselves within us, though they drive away sleep and peace and joy. In the face of this law, benign as it eases us of the labour of original thought and decision about the everyday affairs of life, terrible when it gets beyond our power of control and diversion, what hope for those in whose debauched brain vile thoughts, involuntary, automatic, are for ever running with frightful rapidity in the one well-worn track? ”

“ When the real thing comes—the thing that only does come to a few of us—we can only feel it, and there is no thought of analysis. Moreover, the action is purely involuntary. We feel strange things—such things as murder—and we cannot help feeling it. We may cringe and shrink; we may toss in our beds when we wake up with such thoughts living, moving, having their being in our brains—but we cannot toss them off. ”

“ But somehow or some way the average man and woman finds in the so-called philosophy of suicide a most bewitching theme for conversation and discussion, and it is just possible that not a few are persuaded to try the realities of it by letting their minds dwell upon the subject too much. That there is a certain fascination in the problem of life and death, no one will deny, but the thoughtful person would not seek its solution in self-destruction. ”

“ And here it is the suicide's selfishness shows itself. His life has become a burden, difficulties confront him, disgrace stares him in the face, he becomes sentimental and morose, he despairs, and ends it all in death. And men, mind you, are wonderfully imitative; suicide easily becomes epidemic, and will you tell me that he who leads that grim march to destruction has nothing to answer for for those who follow? ”

“ As a matter of fact, it only takes some reasonably forceful countervailing notion to set a train of suggestions at work that will prevent suicide. If those contemplating suicide are made acquainted with some of these curious facts we know, then the notion of suicide loses more than half its terrible {720} attraction by being stripped of all of its supposed inevitableness. Almost any motive that attracts attention, even apparently so small a thing as disgrace after death, makes these people realize the littleness and the cowardice of the act. ”