Psychological Approaches to Suicidal Tendencies

Abstract

Elements obtained in the course of psychotherapy suggest that errors in childhood education, the aforementioned traumas in the molding periods, are of capital importance in the genesis of suicidal ideas, as they exacerbate the already existing manifestations of innate death instinct; that circumstantial factors of old age - loneliness, abandonment and scarcity of vital stimuli - reactivate unconscious conflicts and the manifestation of the death instinct already existing in the periods of molding, and that the hypothesis of psychosomatic fantasy would contribute to clarify the intimate mechanism of the suicidal act. We can come to formulate the following hypotheses about the suicidal act that is psychosomatic. This hypothesis is based not only on psychoanalysis but also on phenomenology, on modern structuralism. In order to carry out this psychosomatic hypothesis about the origins of suicidal ideas in depressive states about the psychogenic etiopathogenesis of thanatisms, there is the need to consider the following theories: 1) Gestaltism; 2) The new psychoanalytic currents; 3) New phenomenological currents; 4) The new currents of structuralism; 5) The philosophy defended by Duns Scotus; 6) Specificity and object relations.