Suicide and the agony of seper
Suicide and the agony of seperThe nature of the forces which motivate a person to take his or her own life usually remain hidden from those who are left behind, for if the suicide has been completed, no further psychological inquiries can be made, and if incomplete, only tentative hypotheses are possible due to the fact that there really was not a suicide. However, there does seem to be a common mental condition which underlies not only suicide
(whether completed, abandoned, or thwarted), but also the loneliness and depression which often lead up to this act. Such a mental condition goes by many names, but I will call it "separateness," or
more accurately, a separative consciousness.
Let us not deceive ourselves by merely pointing to this condition in "others,"
for we all share it to some extent. "Their" agony is our agony, even though it
may now manifest less intensely in us. And to be completely honest, let us
even allow that we are they. A surprisingly large group of our population has
either contemplated or actually attempted suicide at some time or other. For
many of those seemingly happy people we meet on the street or in our jobs, the thought of suicide
has been a more or less silent alternative in the midst of life's reversals. It is not an impulse that people
commonly publicize regarding themselves, hence one naturally imagines that few others experience it.
Sympathetic friends typically regard a suicidal person as being an unfortunate victim--of blind chance,
of other people's thoughtlessness, of an unfair social system--or some combination thereof. While this
impression of a suicidal person as a victim is probably frequently held, there is another view--that an
attempter's "victim psychology" may be the logical outcome of his own subtle but deadly ego trip.
What does it mean to say that suicide can be the result of an "ego trip"? We could define an ego trip
as the separative frame of mind already mentioned, usually accompanied by an inaccurate image of
one's own worth. Careful observation...
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