Perspectives on Suicide

In psychoanalytic terms suicide might seem something of an enigma--a flagrant violation of the powerful life instinct. Yet Freud claimed that psychoanalysis had solved this enigma with the following discovery: People do not have the psychological capacity to violate the life instinct by killing themselves unless in doing so they are also killing a love object with whom they have identified themselves. In other words, suicidal persons are bent not so much on destroying themselves as on destroying another person, a "significant other" whose image they have incorporated into their own psyche.
In some of his later writings, Freud theorized that such aggressive impulses issued from a death instinct, a kind of yearning to return to the nothingness we experienced before birth. This theme of the death instinct was picked up by Menninger1938,  who proposed that suicide represented the triumph  of peoples destructive aspects over their constructive, life-affirming tendencies. According to Menninger, the desire to live contained in the superego. When there is no self -steem, for what ever reasons, suicidal persons regress to the state of the hungry, deserted infant; who wishes  to annihilate the incorporated love object. By committing suicide, they succeed in annihilating that original love object whose incorporation helped create the superego.
Much of this anger on which Freud and Menninger place so much emphasis has to do, then with the loss of the significant other. In psycho-dynamic theory, object loss , both past and present, plays a significant role in suicide, as in depression. Rejection by significant others early in life may cause people to develop defences against the pain they unconsciously come to expect as adults. If these defences give way and such a person confuses the overwhelming pain of the early loss with a current rejection or separation, he or she may commit suicide.
Similarly, some children who are traumatized by an early devastating loss grow believing that close interpersonal relationships cannot continue over time.   They may even develop some kind of internal "time clock" by which they gauge how long they can expect such a relationship to endure before the inevitable separation. These are  the people who tend to commit "anniversary suicides" ending their lives on a date that has some special personal meaning, like their birthday or their wedding anniversary.
Treatment of the suicidal patient tends to follow traditional lines However, in the case of the potential suicide therapists typically stress the matter of emotional support, Adequately trained and experienced therapists are usually careful to avoid doing, or saying anything that the patient could view as rejection. And in teir analysis of the patients behaviour, they are likely to interpret suicidal threats as an appeal for love, whether frm the therapist or form others. They also try to help the patient develop more constructive ways of achieving intiacy. One means to this end family therapy.