Exploring the Major Sociological Theme of Suicide - Essay Example

__________ ID: ______ History of Modern Social Thought "Exploring the major Sociological theme of Suicide" The earliest theories of suicide were largely based upon demonological and theological perspectives and the relation between individual and a society. A good deal of speculation and argument centered over the right of the individual to take his own life. That suicide was considered a conscious volitional act, which was evidenced by laws that existed against suicide, and by its being banned by some religions. However, both Hobbes and Berkeley, among others, discussed the intriguing quality of death because of its unknown aspects and the invitation for a new beginning, which it offered in fantasy. What a seventeenth-century observer thinks of the burial of a suicide is: "The dead man is drawn by a horse to the place of punishment and shame, where he is hanged on a gibbet, and none may take the body down but by the authority of the magistrate. 1" Montesquieu's thought can be seen and evaluated from a string of passages which span his whole adult life from the Lettres Persanes of 1721 to the Essai sur le Gout of 1756. In the Lettres Persanes he speaks of "the misery of the human condition". Speaking of the suicide of Brutus and Cassius, this is what Montesquieu writes: "Self-love, the love of our preservation, transforms itself into so many shapes, and acts by such contradictory principles, that it even induces us to sacrifice our existence for the love of our existence; and such is the fuss, which we make of ourselves that we agree to put an end to our life by dint of a natural and obscure instinct which makes us love ourselves more than our life itself 2". In France, the end of the eighteenth century had seen the beginning of a shift from a moral discourse on suicide to a growing concern with suicide rates. By 1842, Quetelet was investigating the extent to which moral phenomena of suicide could be said to resemble physical phenomena, his answer being that large numbers served to cancel out individual peculiarities and to reveal the institutional and general features of society in the figure of the 'social man', a fictitious being conforming to the median results of statistical analysis. In France, Bertillon's statistical experimentation inspired Durkheim's later adoption of replicative analysis. By the 1850s, French social commentators linked industrialization and the expansion of urban, commercial life to the development of 'gosme' and 'odieux individualisme', both defined in terms Durkheim later applied to anomie, as consequences of moral paralysis. On one hand, pathological individualism was taken to be at the root of social disorder, apathy and exploitation; on both sides of the political spectrum, there was talk of a 'general malaise', of the possibility of social dissolution, and of a 'national decadence', one sign of which was taken to be a falling birth rate and it is interesting to note, as Lukes does, that Durkheim authored a paper on birth rates and suicide in 1888. There was a felt sense that the decline of those traditional moral controls associated with pre-revolutionary social formations had left a vacuum. If one were anticlerical, this vacuum was to be filled by a new, secular morality, answerable in the abstract to reason and in practice to a science of normalcy or health. If one were a Catholic traditionalist, it would be addressed by a revival of Christian moral education and the social authority of the Church. On the other hand, social anarchy, and political anarchism, was likened to forms of 'hysteria' arising from excessive individualism on one hand and the formation of 'crowds' on the other. The mass popularity of romantic literature was blamed for a degenerate aestheticism leading to a suicide 'mania' escorting the types designated social conditions affecting suicide rates, not motivations for individual acts. But it is worth noting that Durkheim's more specific images of the types of suicide are often couched in subjectively vivid terms of unhappily married women, overwhelmed and disorganized widowers, loyal military officers bound to a code of death before dishonour, states of 'exasperation et de lassitude irrite', the constantly renewed torture of 'une soif inextinguible 3'. The contrast between these evocative passages and the starkness of the statistical analysis accounts for much of the rhetorical power of suicide. In each instance, Durkheim identified the types of suicide with specific social pathologies attending either of the two polar types of solidarity. Thus, altruistic and fatalistic suicide are pathologies of mechanical solidarity; egoistic and anomic suicide, of organic solidarity. The latter two types, then, are the particular diseases of modern life, each symptomatic of an excessive development of some aspect of modern social organization in the form of suicidogenic currents, elements of a 'collective melancholy'. Durkheim's descriptions of these currents are often organized in terms of explicit parallels between personal and social malaise 4. The term "suicidology" deserves a brief remark in this connection. Coined in Germany as Suicidologie in 1929, the term became popular after World War II, when its use was promoted by Edwin Shneidman 5. According to Shneidman, "It may well be that in light of current concepts and facts about human self-destruction a new and more accurate term may eventually come into general usage . . . . Suicidology is defined as the scientific study of suicidal phenomena. 6" The breakthrough in the understanding of suicide occurred from two separate fields: Freud's psychodynamic elucidation and Durkheim's sociologic approach. Freud paper "Mourning and Melancholia"7, which depicted the dynamics of depression, also provided the framework for the psychoanalytic theory of suicide. This theory, in brief, is essentially one, which posits the turning of sadism against the individual himself. As Freud said: "The ego sees itself deserted by the superego and lets itself die."8 Fenichel extends Freud's ideas, stating, in essence, that suicide is the outcome of a strong ambivalent dependence on a sadistic superego and the necessity to get rid of an unbearable guilt tension at any cost. He mentions that the desire to live means to feel certain self-esteem, and to feel supported by the protective forces of the superego. When this feeling vanishes, the original feeling of annihilation which the individual experienced as the deserted hungry baby reappears. Since the superego is made up of introjects which represent incorporated love objects, suicide involves the murder of the original object whose incorporation helped to create the superego. Along with the self-murder goes the hopeful illusion that forgiveness and reconciliation will be attained by the killing of the punishing superego and the regaining of union with the protective superego. Anna Freud 9 has stressed that turning against the superego may be strengthened by identification with an aggressor. On the other hand, Durkheim10 approached the problem of suicide from a sociological point of view. His interest was not in the individual but in the forces of society, which affect the individual much as the tides are at the mercy of the moon. The three types of suicide that Durkheim described are: Egoistic suicide, in which the individual is not sufficiently integrated into his society; Altruistic suicide, in which there is an over integration of the individual with society and he sacrifices himself as in the case of a soldier on the battlefield; and Anomic suicide, in which the individual's adjustment to society is suddenly disrupted, as through great economic depressions or by sudden wealth. In essence, Durkheim arrived at some conclusions, which still hold well. He dismissed climate and certain other "extra social" influences as causes of suicide and suggested that a major factor is a lack of sympathetic acceptance of an individual by his social group. According to Emile Durkheim, "All cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.11" This definition fudges the difference between suicidal conduct and suicide and would label by its behavioral analysis as a suicide a physician who dies, while fighting a plague, or a patient who refuses medical treatment and dies 12. Le Suicide was Durkheim's first and only empirically based sociological study. The data used in writing it were in part first-hand, but to a much larger extent they were drawn from second or even third hand sources. Moreover, Durkheim expected his data to yield more information than they were capable of delivering, and he did not possess statistical tools adequate to the task. Suffice it to point out that his constant use of the method of concomitant variation was not backed by the coefficient of correlation, and that he sometimes employed the method in a logically inexact manner. Durkheim used the method of associated variation in an attempt to demolish the purported relationships between psychopathological states and suicide, between alcoholism and suicide, and between genetic factors and suicide. In doing so, he probably went too far in his destructive endeavour, and especially with regard to the first of the three relations. Durkheim showed that if ever there was a phenomenon linked more than any other to the variability of the relations between society and the individual, it was suicide. Evidence was to be deduced from social statistics, notwithstanding the private reticence and public visibility, which for many decades made statistics on suicide so unreliable and difficult to interpret 13. It was unclear how much weight should be attributed to social factors that worked in favour of or against the exercise of free will. Correlations among variables and therefore differences in suicide rates by age, marital status, sex, profession, urban or rural residence, religion, season of the year, climate, political crisis, economic instability, the methods and means used to commit suicide, and the ratios between statistics on suicide and homicides raised the problem of how certain statistical dimensions and quantities could have moral qualities and social significance. The distinction drawn between the normal and the pathological suicidal norms undoubtedly had a significant effect on Durkheim's conception of suicide, for it implied that in a normal society the suicide rate should fall, and the rate of fatal self-aggression could reasonably be attributed to individual free will. By contrast in a pathological society, or in one with a low level of integration, the percentage of socially induced fatal aggressiveness should increase. However, Durkheim considered the two types of aggression to be heterogeneous in their causes and effects. His distinction between egoistic and altruistic types of suicide, as well as anomic suicide, demonstrates the extent to which they were tied to the influence of the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological. This had important effects, most notably the 'demoralization' of the phenomenon of suicide from the point of view of its contextual identification. 'Egoistic' suicide is so called because it is an act in which the individual self overwhelms the social self. This can obviously only happen in a society characterized by organic solidarity, so that the collective conscience loses that grip which Durkheim believed so necessary for the health of individuals. However, he did not elucidate this relationship. He developed it implicitly by examining the relationship between suicide rates and the degree of social integration in the three most important forms of society: religious, familial and political. He sought to show, again using the method of concomitant variation, that suicide rates were higher among Protestants than among Catholics or Jews. Concentrating his analysis on the two Christian groups, he sought to explain the difference between them in terms of the different natures of their religious systems. In Le Suicide he sought to show that the family, when it is properly developed and defended, is a safeguard against suicide and therefore a factor in social and personal order. Using the method of concomitant variation, he demonstrated that married individuals with numerous children were less likely to commit suicide. However, he did not put forward alternative hypotheses, for example that the personalities of individuals who marry and have children are not prone to suicidal tendencies. Durkheim drew the general conclusion that the suicide rate varied in inverse ratio to the integration of a community and then attempted to explain egoistic suicide. His theory started with the fact that man is in part a child of nature and in part a child of society, but it is to society that humans owe their higher activities such as morality. Consequently, an excess of individualism removes all value from the latter 14. In particular, suffering becomes bereft of every moral value, and the individual prefers to take his or her life; which amounts to the assertion that life is generally unbearable for those who do not have ends that transcend it. Society has self-consciousness: it is aware of the fact that it is disintegrating, and it thus realizes that the individuals whom it has shaped and who posit it as their end, are losing every reason to exist. Consequently society grows melancholic. Given the intimate relationship between individuals and society, currents of depression and disenchantment traverse every aspect of existence. Life-denying ideologies arise, followed by new moral codes, which recommend suicide, or at least covertly urge it. Caught in the crossfire, so to speak, assailed from within and without, individuals take their lives and the suicide rate rises. The most significant type of suicide is anomic suicide, which Durkheim viewed as resulting from rapid and uncontrolled change, and therefore as the form of suicide typical of a society in crisis. Initially, Durkheim concentrated on economic crises with their correlated increases in the suicide rate. He believed that every change, for better or worse, made individuals more vulnerable to suicidal tendencies. The essential fact, he claimed, was that the material needs of individuals are limited, but their moral needs are boundless and can never be fully satisfied. Social order and personal equilibrium are closely interconnected, and they can only be achieved if external restraints are imposed on desires by a higher power; a power obeyed not only out of fear but also out of respect. Here Durkheim anticipates the position that he later developed in L'Education morale 15 and which brought him only a step away from discovery of the internalization of norms as the basis of the social order. Durkheim believed that he had proved the suicide rate to be dependable not on changeable human motives but on suicide-inducing processes. These collective forces operated independently of individuals, acting constrictively on them according to the logic of egoism, altruism and anomie. They were objective, measurable and comparable: social facts, which allowed the growth of sociology as a science, as he declared in Rules of Sociological Method. Assessments of Durkheim's contribution to the study of suicide as a 'social fact' tend to dwell on his typology, neglecting that this is the result of a different analysis, which should be perceived as his more lasting achievement, namely his shift from morphological to structural factors in the determination of social differentiation. In other words, the tripartition of suicide egoistic, altruistic and anomic distinguishes among modes of being and objective states of society before it distinguishes among types of suicide 16. Durkheim's categories of altruistic and fatalistic suicide have been much neglected by later sociologists in comparison with the attention bestowed on anomic and egoistic suicide. Indeed, one sociologist has spoken of Durkheim's 'one cause of suicide' 17. Such radicals wish to eliminate, or at least to forget about, altruistic and fatalistic suicide altogether, and some also wish to fuse egoism and anomie into one single concept conveying an absence of both integration and regulation. From this crude point of view there is one simple explanation of suicide rates: the lower the levels of integration and regulation, the higher the suicide rate. Suicide when considered in the modern world as part of Durkheim's attack on the idea of happiness as the driving force of social evolution, so that it is not made altogether clear how it touches on "the ultimate question", on which science is not silent, of whether we should will to live or not. Nor is the answer clear until the development of the argument of Suicide itself. It is not simply that to withdraw from society is to risk killing ourselves since, as in the earliest statement of the identity argument, we "cannot withdraw from it without degeneration and collapse". On the contrary, we risk losing the will to live and killing ourselves because we remain part of our society, with its individualist ideal complete with individualism's pathologies penetrating us from all sides. So the answer is again that the source of ideals and identity in this case, the human ideal and self-identification as individual and person lies in the society itself 18. Read More