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Suicide “One of the acutest and most brilliant sociologists.” Bronislaw Malinowski “Suicide is used by Durkheim as a means of demonstrating the key impact of social factors on our personal lives and even our most intimate motives. The book succeeds brilliantly, both as a technical study of suicide and as a fundamental contribution to this broader issue. Students of sociology will continue to be required to study this book, which will remain on the sociological agenda for many years yet to come.” Anthony Giddens “Suicide remains one of the most incisive and profound critiques of modern society ever written. The ﬁrst exemplar of modern ‘scientiﬁc sociology’, Durkheim’s classic demonstrated the relevance of multivariate statistical sociology to the most compelling moral and existential issues of the day. In his insistence on the centrality of social solidarity, Durkheim issued a challenge that contemporary sociologists have yet to meet.” Jeffrey Alexander “Suicide is a sociological masterpiece on three counts: it addresses a problem of great social signiﬁcance which evokes the moral concern of both author and reader, it assembles and analyses a large quantity of factual information and it develops an original and sophisticated theoretical argument.” Gianfranco Poggi



Émile



Durkheim Suicide A study in sociology



Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson Edited with an introduction by George Simpson



London and New York



Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie ﬁrst published 1897, Paris English edition ﬁrst published 1952 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd First published in Routledge Classics 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1951 The Free Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-99432-9 Master e-book ISBN



ISBN 0–415–27831–7 (pbk) ISBN 0–415–27830–9 (hbk)



To those who, with Durkheim, understand the life of reason as itself a moral commitment, and especially to Arthur D. Gayer in economics; Sol W. Ginsburg in psychiatry; Robert S. Lynd in sociology; and Arthur E. Murphy in philosophy



C ONTENTS



Editor’s Preface Editor’s Introduction Preface Introduction



ix xiii xxxiii xxxix



BOOK I Extra-Social Factors



1



1 2 3 4



Suicide and Psychopathic States Suicide and Normal Psychological States— Race, Heredity Suicide and Cosmic Factors Imitation



BOOK II Social Causes and Social Types 1 2 3 4 5 6



How to Determine Social Causes and Social Types Egoistic Suicide Egoistic Suicide (continued) Altruistic Suicide Anomic Suicide Individual Forms of the Different Types of Suicide



3 30 53 74



95 97 105 126 175 201 240



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contents



BOOK III General Nature of Suicide as a Social Phenomenon 259 1 2 3



The Social Element of Suicide Relations of Suicide with Other Social Phenomena Practical Consequences



Appendices Index



261 291 328 360 367



E DITOR’S P REFACE



Of the four major works of the renowned French sociologist, Émile Durkheim, only Le Suicide has remained to be translated. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was ﬁrst published in English in 1915; the Division of Labor in Society in 1933 and The Rules of Sociological Method in 1938. Over half a century has gone by since the ﬁrst edition of Le Suicide, yet far more than antiquarian interest attaches to it in the sociological, statistical, philosophical, and psychological disciplines. But the historical signiﬁcance of the volume in social thought would be enough reason for presenting it to readers in the English-speaking world. As a milestone in social science and an indispensable part in understanding the work of the man who founded and ﬁrmly established academic sociology in France and inﬂuenced many others outside of France, it should have long since been available in translation. Though our statistical material today is more reﬁned and broader, and our socio-psychological apparatus better established than was Durkheim’s, his work on suicide remains the prototype of systematic, rigorous and unrelenting attack on the subject with the data, techniques, and accumulated knowledge available at any given period. Indeed, Le Suicide is among the very ﬁrst modern examples of consistent and organized use of statistical method in social investigation. In the last decade of the nineteenth century when Durkheim was conducting



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the investigations incorporated in this work, repositories (governmental or private) of statistical information on this, or any other subject, were either rare, skimpy, or badly put together. With characteristic energy and the aid of some of his students, especially Marcel Mauss, Durkheim realigned the available statistics so as to answer the question posed by the general problem and its internal details. At the time, statistical techniques were little developed, and Durkheim was forced at given points to invent them as he went along. The elements of simple correlation were unknown except among the pathﬁnders in statistical techniques like Galton and Pearson, as were those of multiple and partial correlation, yet Durkheim establishes relationships between series of data by methodological perseverence and inference. The tables which Durkheim drew up have been left in the translation in their somewhat quaint form, with no attempt to set them up according to present-day standards of statistical presentation. They have that way an historical value, as well as a character of their own. To embellish them would take away the atmosphere in which they were literally forged through necessity. Though more recent data are available, the kind of information Durkheim was trying to impart through them is still the kind that sociologists and actuarialists are interested in. Indeed, one table (on the eﬀect of military life on suicide) has been taken over bodily in one of the best general, recent treatises on suicide.1 The maps which Durkheim placed in the text have been put in Appendices here, along with a special table which Durkheim drew up but could not use for reasons he gives in a footnote to it. The maps have been reproduced as they are with the French titles and statistical legends. But in addition to its historical and methodological import, Le Suicide is of abiding signiﬁcance because of the problem it treats and the sociological approach with which it is handled. For Durkheim is seeking to establish that what looks like a highly individual and personal phenomenon is explicable through the social structure and its ramifying functions. And even the revolutionary ﬁndings in psychiatry and the reﬁnement and superior competence of contemporary actuarial 1



Dublin, Louis I., and Bunzel, Bessie, To Be or Not To Be, New York, 1933, p. 112–113.



editor’s preface



statistics on this subject have yet to come fully to grips with this. We shall have more to say of it in the introduction. There are those, moreover, who look upon Le Suicide as still an outstanding, if not the outstanding, work in what is called the study of social causation.2 And in what has come to be known as the sociology of knowledge, Durkheim’s attempts to relate systems of thought to states of the collective conscience involved in the currents of egoism, altruism, and anomy, in this volume, have been of no little inﬂuence.3 Finally, Le Suicide shows Durkheim’s fundamental principles of social interpretation in action. His social realism, which sees society as an entity greater than the sum of its parts, with its accompanying concepts of collective representations and the collective conscience, is here applied to a special problem-area, and the results are some of the richest it has ever borne. For Durkheim not only enunciated methodological and heuristic principles (as pre-eminently in The Rules of Sociological Method; he also tested them in research of no mean scope. That his work would have to be supplemented, added to, revised, and our knowledge advanced, he would be the ﬁrst to admit, since he rightly saw scientiﬁc endeavor as a great collective undertaking whose ﬁndings are handed on from generation to generation and improved upon in the process. The translation has been made from the edition which appeared in 1930, thirteen years after Durkheim’s death and thirty-three years after the ﬁrst edition in 1897. This edition was supervised by Marcel Mauss. Professor Mauss, in his brief introductory note there, tells us that it was not possible, because of the method of reprinting, to correct the few typographical and editorial errors. With the aid of Dr. John A. Spaulding, I have sought by textual and statistical query, to rectify them wherever they could be discovered. For the version of the translation here, I must take full responsibility. Dr. Spaulding and I worked over the ﬁrst draft, then we both re-worked the second draft. But the ﬁnal changes I made alone. Mr. Jerome H. Skolnick, a student of mine, aided in checking the 2 3



See especially, MacIver, R. M., Social Causation, New York, 1942. See, for example, Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949.



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typescript and in proof-reading. He did not conﬁne his work to routine, and many of his suggestions proved to be of great value to me. George Simpson The City College of New York November 1, 1950.



E DITOR’S INTRODUCTION



The Aetiology of Suicide I The range of Émile Durkheim’s analysis of the interconnectedness of suicide with social and natural phenomena is so wide and varied as to preclude treatment of all its avenues and by-roads in the short space of this introduction. Within the conﬁnes of one not over-long volume, Durkheim has treated or touched on normal and abnormal psychology, social psychology, anthropology (especially the concept of race), meteorological and other “cosmic” factors, religion, marriage, the family, divorce, primitive rites and customs, social and economic crises, crime (especially homicide) and law and jurisprudence, history, education, and occupational groups. But a short appraisal is still possible because throughout Durkheim’s work on each and all of these topics subsidiary to suicide, is the basic theme that suicide which appears to be a phenomenon relating to the individual is actually explicable aetiologically with reference to the social structure and its ramifying functions. The early chapters in Durkheim’s work are devoted to the negation of doctrines which ascribe suicide to extra-social factors, such as mental alienation, the characteristics of race as studied by anthropology, heredity, climate, temperature, and ﬁnally to a negation of the doctrine of “imitation,” particularly as represented in the works of



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Gabriel Tarde whose social theory at the time in France had many followers and against whom Durkheim waged unrelenting warfare within the bounds of scholarly and academic amenities. Here in these early chapters Durkheim is involved in a process of elimination: all theses which require resort to individual or other extra-social causes for suicide are dispatched, leaving only social causes to be considered. This is used as a foundation for reaﬃrming his thesis stated in his introduction that the suicide-rate is a phenomenon sui generis; that is, the totality of suicides in a society is a fact separate, distinct, and capable of study in its own terms. Since, according to Durkheim, suicide cannot be explained by its individual forms, and since the suicide-rate is for him a distinct phenomenon in its own right, he proceeds to relate currents of suicide to social concomitants. It is these social concomitants of suicide which for Durkheim will serve to place any individual suicide in its proper aetiological setting. From a study of religious aﬃliation, marriage and the family, and political and national communities, Durkheim is led to the ﬁrst of his three categories of suicide: namely, egoistic suicide, which results from lack of integration of the individual into society. The stronger the forces throwing the individual onto his own resources, the greater the suicide-rate in the society in which this occurs. With respect to religious society, the suicide-rate is lowest among Catholics, the followers of a religion which closely integrates the individual into the collective life. Protestantism’s rate is high and is correlated with the high state of individualism there. Indeed, the advancement of science and knowledge which is an accompaniment of the secularization process under Protestantism, while explaining the universe to man, nevertheless disintegrates the ties of the individual to the group and shows up in higher suicide-rates. Egoistic suicide is also to be seen, according to Durkheim, where there is slight integration of the individual into family life. The greater the density of the family the greater the immunity of individuals to suicide. The individual characteristics of the spouses is unimportant in explaining the suicide-rate; it is dependent upon the structure of the family and the roles played by its members. In political and national communities, it is Durkheim’s thesis that in great crises the suicide-rate



editor’s introduction



falls because then society is more strongly integrated and the individual participates actively in social life. His egoism is restricted and his will to live strengthened. Having established the variation of the suicide-rate with the degree of integration of social groups, Durkheim is led to consider the fact of suicide in social groups where there is comparatively great integration of the individual, as in lower societies. Here where the individual’s life is rigorously governed by custom and habit, suicide is what he calls altruistic; that is, it results from the individual’s taking his own life because of higher commandments, either those of religious sacriﬁce or unthinking political allegiance. This type of suicide Durkheim ﬁnds still existent in modern society in the army where ancient patterns of obedience are rife. Egoistic suicide and altruistic suicide may be considered to be symptomatic of the way in which the individual is structured into the society; in the ﬁrst case, inadequately, in the second case, over-adequately. But there is another form of suicide for Durkheim which results from lack of regulation of the individual by society. This he calls anomic suicide, and is in a chronic state in the modern economy. The individual’s needs and their satisfaction have been regulated by society; the common beliefs and practices he has learned make him the embodiment of what Durkheim calls the collective conscience. When this regulation of the individual is upset so that his horizon is broadened beyond what he can endure, or contrariwise contracted unduly, conditions for anomic suicide tend toward a maximum. Thus, Durkheim instances sudden wealth as stimulative of suicide on the ground that the newly enriched individual is unable to cope with the new opportunities aﬀorded him. The upper and lower limits of his desires, his scale of life, all are upset. The same type of situation occurs, according to Durkheim, in what he terms conjugal anomy exempliﬁed by divorce. Here marital society no longer exercises its regulative inﬂuence upon the partners, and the suicide-rate for the divorced is comparatively high. This anomic situation is more severely reﬂected among divorced men than among divorced women, since it is the man, according to Durkheim, who has proﬁted more from the regulative inﬂuence of marriage. At this point in his analysis, Durkheim claims that the individual



xv



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forms of suicide can be properly classiﬁed. Now that the three aetiological types—egoistic, altruistic, and anomic—have been established, it is possible, he says, to describe the individual behavior-patterns of those exemplifying these types. The other way around—seeking to ﬁnd the causes of suicide by investigating the individual types—Durkheim had originally claimed to be fruitless. In addition to tabulating the individual forms of the three diﬀerent types, Durkheim seeks to establish that there are individual forms of suicide which display mixed types, such as the ego-anomic, the altruist-anomic, the ego-altruist. Thus, the statistics available to Durkheim he ﬁnds not correlated with biological or cosmic phenomena, but with social phenomena, such as the family, political and economic society, religious groups. This correlation he claims indicates decisively that each society has a collective inclination towards suicide, a rate of self-homicide which is fairly constant for each society so long as the basic conditions of its existence remain the same. This collective inclination conforms, Durkheim believes, to his deﬁnition of a social fact given in his treatise, The Rules of Sociological Method. That is, this inclination is a reality in itself, exterior to the individual and exercising a coercive eﬀect upon him. In short, the individual inclination to suicide is explicable scientiﬁcally only by relation to the collective inclination, and this collective inclination is itself a determined reﬂection of the structure of the society in which the individual lives. The aggregate of individual views on life is more than the sum of the individual views to Durkheim It is an existence in itself; what he calls the collective conscience, the totality of beliefs and practices, of folkways and mores. It is the repository of common sentiments, a well-spring from which each individual conscience draws its moral sustenance. Where these common sentiments rigorously guide the individual, as in Catholicism, and condemn the taking of one’s own life, there the suicide-rate is low; where these common sentiments lay great stress on individualism, innovation and free thought, the hold over the individual slackens, he is tenuously bound to society, and can the more easily be led to suicide. The latter is the case with Protestantism. In lower societies; the collective conscience, according to Durkheim, holds individual life of little value, and self-immolation through suicide is the reﬂection of the society at work in the



editor’s introduction



individual. And in higher societies where sudden crises upset the adjustment to which the individual has become habituated through the common sentiments and beliefs, anomy appears which shows itself in a rising suicide-rate. Suicide, like crime, is for Durkheim no indication of immorality per se. In fact, a given number of suicides are to be expected in a given type of society. But where the rate increases rapidly, it is symptomatic of the breakdown of the collective conscience, and of a basic ﬂaw in the social fabric. But suicide and criminality are not correlative, as some criminologists had claimed, although both when excessive may indicate that the social structure is not operating normally. The suicide-rate which Durkheim found increasing rapidly through the nineteenth century cannot be halted in its upward curve by education, exhortation, or repression, he says. For Durkheim all ameliorative measures must go to the question of social structure. Egoistic suicide can be reduced by reintegrating the individual into group-life, giving him strong allegiances through a strengthened collective conscience. This can be accomplished in no small part, he thinks, through the re-establishment of occupational groups, compact voluntary associations based on work-interests. This is the same recommendation he made in the second edition of his Division of Labor in Society apropos of the infelicitous workings of that phenomenon. The occupational group will also serve to limit the number of anomic suicides. In the case of conjugal anomy, his solution is in greater freedom and equality for women. Thus, suicide for Durkheim shows up the deep crisis in modern society, just as the study of any other social fact would. No social fact to him has been explained until it has been seen in its full and complete nexus with all other social facts and with the fundamental structure of society.



II Since Durkheim’s work on suicide, the chief advances in our knowledge of the subject have come from actuarial statistics and psychoanalytic psychiatry. Durkheim’s own approach has been carried forward, tested, and applied further by his student and friend, Maurice



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Halbwachs, in Les Causes du Suicide.1 For the argument here, it must be noted (as Parsons has already pointed out) that Halbwachs saw that there is no antithesis such as Durkheim posited, between the social and the psychopathological explanations of suicide, but that they are complementary.2 The actuarialists have studied the overall extent and trends of suicide, related it to race and color incidence, age and sex distribution, urban and rural areas, seasonality (what Durkheim calls “cosmic” factors), economic conditions, religious aﬃliation, marital status. But the actuarialists have formulated no thorough-going, consistent and systematic hypothesis concerning the causes of suicide, which is what Durkheim is after. A sound compendium of actuarial work on this subject can be found in Louis I. Dublin’s and Bessie Bunzel’s book, To Be or Not To Be.3 But for their interpretative framework, Dublin and Bunzel have had to fall back upon modern developments in psychiatry and mental hygiene.4 Durkheim is skeptical about the reliability of the statistics on suicide with regard to motives, on the ground that recording of motives is done by untrained enumerators in oﬃces of vital statistics, as well as that the motives ascribed by suicides to their acts are unreliable. But the inadequacy of statistics on suicide generally has been even more trenchantly pointed up by psychoanalysts. Gregory Zilboorg has this to say: “. . . Statistical data on suicide as they are compiled today deserve little if any credence; it has been repeatedly pointed out by scientiﬁc students of the problem that suicide cannot be subject to statistical evaluation, since all too many suicides are not reported as such. Those who kill themselves through automobile accidents are almost never recorded as suicides; those who sustain serious injuries during an attempt to commit suicide and die weeks or months later of these 1



Paris, 1930. Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action, New York, 1937, p. 326. 3 New York, 1933. 4 A similar situation holds with an earlier sociological study, Ruth S. Cavan’s Suicide (Chicago, 1928). Here too actuarial and social statistics are presented, along with psychological case-histories, but the crucial relationship—that of the individual case-histories of suicide to the basic elements in the social structure—has been left relatively untouched. 2



editor’s introduction



injuries or of intercurrent infections are never registered as suicides; a great many genuine suicides are concealed by families; and suicidal attempts, no matter how serious, never ﬁnd their way into the tables of vital statistics. It is obvious that under these circumstances the statistical data available cover the smallest and probably the least representative number of suicides; one is justiﬁed, therefore, in discarding them as nearly useless in a scientiﬁc evaluation of the problem.”5 Moreover, Fenichel, following Brill and Menninger, has pointed out the prevalence of “partial suicides,” where death does not occur but which consist of “self-destructive actions, during melancholic states, carried out as self-punishment, as an expression of certain delusions or without any rationalization.” The term, “partial suicides,” Fenichel concludes, “is absolutely correct in so far as the underlying unconscious mechanisms are identical with those of suicide.”6 It is clear that these “partial suicides” never ﬁnd their way into the statistics of suicide. From the aetiological standpoint, they are identical with consummated suicides; but of them all, Fenichel writes: “The factors, doubtlessly quantitative in nature, that determine whether or when the result is to be a suicide, a manic attack, or a recovery are still unknown.”7 And even where statistical regularity appears to be ascertainable, a methodologist of science writes: “What makes the statistical regularity of long-run human conduct so striking is the fact that it shows itself in acts which are not the simple outcomes of a few mechanical forces, like the movements of spun coins, but in masses of close decisions of a very complex sort.” He then goes on to instance the statistics of female suicides in New York City.8 It appears inescapable to state that until we have better records and more literate statistical classiﬁcation in terms of psychiatric nomenclature, we can draw few binding conclusions concerning regularity in terms of age, ethnic groups, social status, etc. As an example, we may 5



“Suicide Among Civilized and Primitive Races,” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 92, 1935–36. 6 Fenichel, Otto, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, New York, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1945, p. 401. 7 Ibid. 8 Larrabee, Harold A., Reliable Knowledge, Boston, Houghton Miﬄin Company, 1945, p. 436.



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point out that Durkheim, Dublin and Bunzel, and others show little if any suicide among children, whereas Zilboorg has deemed it signiﬁcant enough to make a special study.9 A further result of the unreliability of the statistics is that they have led to a conclusion that is fairly widespread that suicide grows as civilization advances. This thesis has been seriously challenged by Zilboorg. He concludes that suicide is evidently “as old as the human race, it is probably as old as murder and almost as old as natural death. The lower the cultural niveau of the race, the more deep-seated the suicidal impulse appears. [Italics not in original]. . . . The man of today, as far as suicide is concerned, is deﬁcient, indeed, as compared with his forefathers who possessed a suicidal ideology, mythology, and an unsurpassed technique.”10 Zilboorg speaks of a traditional, almost instinctive bias, one of whose two chief elements is “the misconception that the rate of suicide increases with the development of our civilization, that in some unknown way civilization fosters suicidal tendencies within us.”11 A statement of Steinmetz re-enforces Zilboorg’s view. From his study of suicide among primitive people, Steinmetz reached the conclusion that “it seems probable from the data I have been able to collect that there is a greater propensity to suicide among savage than among civilized peoples.”12 Whether Steinmetz’ conclusion would still hold if we had adequate data on suicides and partial suicides, will remain an unsolved question until we have broken through the thorny thickets of unreliable recording and squeamish acknowledgement.



III Modern developments in motive-analysis and in the description of the fundamental characteristics of the emotional life were unknown to Durkheim, of course. Sigmund Freud had only just begun his investigations of the “unconscious” drives in human behavior when Le Suicide 9



Zilboorg, Gregory, “Considerations on Suicide, with Particular Reference to that of the Young,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, VIII, 1937. 10 American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 92, 1935–36, p. 1361, 1362. 11 Op. cit., p. 1351. 12 Steinmetz, S. R., “Suicide Among Primitive People,” American Anthropologist, 1894, quoted in Zilboorg, op. cit., p. 1352.



editor’s introduction



appeared, and it was to be more than a quarter of a century before his views were widely accepted after continual clinical conﬁrmation, by which time Émile Durkheim was no longer among us. But today, over half a century since Le Suicide was ﬁrst published, psychoanalytic psychiatry has done not overmuch to relate its revolutionary ﬁndings concerning human motives to sociological discoveries (with the exception of some ingenious references by Zilboorg). Indeed, there are psychoanalysts who appear to hold that the fundamental patterns of behavior set in infancy are not seriously aﬀected by social factors at all, and that neuroses are not cured by social analysis. This view seems to rest on the postulate that since therapy is and must be individual, and mental illness related back to the evolution of the psyche, there is no social aetiology ascribable to individual case-histories. Karl A. Menninger exempliﬁes this tendency.13 From the wealth of case-history data and from his extensive and magistral clinical work, Menninger ﬁnds himself able to say only a few words in a concluding chapter titled “Social Techniques in the Service of Reconstruction,” and even these few words end with the ﬁnal conclusion that to the death-instinct there must be opposed the life-instinct, by calling forth from man his will to conquer his own self-annihilatory drives. But Menninger fails to analyze the relation between these self-annihilatory drives and the manner in which they are called forth by social factors, and also what social factors must be strengthened or called into being in order to overcome these drives.



IV Though psychoanalytic psychiatry holds that within the corpus of its interpretative principles of behavior there are tools for ferreting out the causes of suicide, no one yet seems ready to commit himself unreservedly to a set of aetiological postulates, based either on empirical data or deduction from veriﬁed principles. Zilboorg writes: “. . . It is clear that the problem of suicide from the scientiﬁc point of view remains unsolved. Neither common sense nor clinical



13



Man Against Himself, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938.



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psychopathology has found a causal or even a strict empirical solution.”14 In 1918 at a psychoanalytic symposium on suicide in Vienna, Sigmund Freud summarized the discussions as follows: “Despite the valuable material obtained in this discussion, we have not succeeded in arriving at any deﬁnite conclusion. . . . Let us therefore refrain from forming an opinion until the time comes when experience will have solved the problem.”15 Since then, extensive work has been done on suicide by expert, highly trained psychoanalysts including Freud, Zilboorg, Abraham, Menninger, Brill, and others. But an important methodological obstacle must be pointed out, an obstacle which is almost impossible wholly to overcome at the present time. Unless the individual who commits suicide has been under constant and long-time psychiatric examination (either through psychoanalysis or clinical study with full and copious life-history records), an interpretation and classiﬁcation of his suicide becomes an ex post facto reconstruction of his life-history. This is extremely diﬃcult, and probably impossible in most cases. Not even the most ardent opinion-poller or attitude-tester can go around interviewing suicides, and representative samples of a population can scarcely be investigated solely on the anticipatory ground that some of the items in the sample will commit suicide. To some small degree this obstacle has been overcome by psychoanalytic psychiatrists who have re-examined the records of patients who were under treatment or examination and who committed suicide then or later, or of patients who attempted suicide unsuccessfully or toyed with the idea while under treatment. Zilboorg particularly concerned himself with this problem, in a close study of institutionalized cases, and his conclusions must therefore be looked upon as a fairly deﬁnitive statement of where psychoanalytic psychiatry stands in this regard. He found that suicide appeared in those suﬀering from depressive psychoses, compulsive neuroses, and schizophrenia, and was led to the conclusion: “Evidently there is no single clinical entity 14



“Diﬀerential Diagnostic Types of Suicide,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, vol. 35, 1936, p. 271. 15 Quoted by Zilboorg, citation note 14 above, p. 272.



editor’s introduction



recognized in psychiatry that is immune to the suicidal drive.”16 Suicide, according to Zilboorg, “is to be viewed rather as a reaction of a developmental nature which is universal and common to the mentally sick of all types and probably also to many so-called normal persons.”17 He feels that “further psychoanalytic studies . . . will probably permit one later to subject the data to statistical tabulation and thus facilitate and probably corroborate the work on the clinical typology of suicides.”18



V But from the body of principles in psychoanalytic psychiatry we are led to certain aetiological principles concerning suicide. It is the basic hypothesis here that interrelating psychoanalytic discoveries on the motives for suicide with the social conditions under which suicide occurs, oﬀers the most fruitful method of advancing our knowledge of the phenomenon. This hypothesis leads to the forging of several subsidiary ones. In attempting to arrive at such hypotheses, we must neglect the hortatory and speculative views on suicide expressed by some philosophers. Neither William James in his essay “Is Life Worth Living?” with his call to vital existence, nor Immanuel Kant in his ethical treatises with his rather prudish view that suicide is a violation of the moral law, can come to terms with modern scientiﬁc data. It is not enough to dislike the fact of suicide to assuage its havoc in human life. Nor does the defense by David Hume of the individual’s right to commit suicide, nor the suicide’s harmony with the denial of the will to live as in Schopenhauer, advance our scientiﬁc understanding. To announce that human beings have a social or philosophical right to commit suicide does not tell us why they do so. And until we know why they do so, we may condemn it as do James and Kant, or defend it as do Hume and Schopenhauer, but we cannot control it. From the standpoint of psychoanalytic psychiatry, it may be said that every individual has what we may call a suicide-potential, a tendency to 16



Op. cit., p. 282. Op. cit., p. 289. 18 Op. cit., p. 285. 17



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self-murder which varies in degree of intensity from individual to individual. To be sure, this intensity has never been measured by psychometricians, and the diﬃculty of measuring it is obvious and great. The degree of intensity of this potential is established in infancy and early childhood by the fears, anxieties, frustrations, loves and hatreds engendered in the individual by the family-environment in terms of eliminatory processes, weaning, sex-education, sibling rivalry, rejection or over-acceptance by the parents, degree of dependence. Where through excessive mother-love, father-rejection, inferiority induced by siblings, the individual is not readied for responsible adulthood according to the customs and mores of the society he is to participate in, the suicide-potential of an individual may be very high. At the other extreme, is the individual whose rearing has channeled the basic psychic conﬁgurations into work-activities or other activities, with no promises or rewards not possible in the world of reality; here the suicide-potential of the individual is slight. But slight as it may be, the woes, trials, and tribulations of adulthood may aggravate it to a point where self-murder becomes a possibility. Suicide is an egomanifestation even though it is an annihilation of the ego. It is a pain inﬂicted on the ego, which, in being a compensation for guilt or a relief from anxiety, may be the only form of release, the utmost in going “beyond the pleasure principle.” Emotions therefore are not simple qualities of behavior explicable in terms of an immediate situation; they relate back to the life-history of the individual. Feelings of melancholia, depression, or any of the other states which Durkheim describes when he comes to classifying what he calls the morphological types of suicide in terms of their social causes, are not those of the moment of suicide; they have a long history in the individual, and although he may be stimulated to suicide by what looks like an immediate cause, no such stimulus would have resulted in the self-murder unless the underlying patterns of behavior had already been set. In the sense that all human beings have been subjected to the process of frustration and repression, of guilt and anxiety, to that extent suicide is a potential outlet under given kinds of emotional stress. That certain individuals resort to it requires investigation into the intensity with which these feelings are operative in them, as against their weaker operation in those who do not resort to it.



editor’s introduction



The most widely accepted view today in psychoanalysis is that suicide is most often a form of “displacement”; that is, the desire to kill someone who has thwarted the individual is turned back on the individual himself. Or technically stated: the suicide murders the introjected object and expiates guilt for wanting to murder the object. The ego is satisﬁed and the superego molliﬁed through self-murder. All of the emotions manifested in suicides are, then, explicable in terms of the life-history of the individual, particularly the channeling of the basic psychic conﬁgurations through the family. It may thus be possible to do what Durkheim thought was impossible—namely, classify suicides originally in terms of motives and what he calls morphologically. For the emotions of the suicide are psychogenic and unilateral in the sense that the individual emotion-structure has been laid down in infancy and childhood. It has been said that individual behavior must thus be construed not only as determined, but as overdetermined, in the sense that it is relatively diﬃcult to overcome the original structuring of the emotional life in the early years. But this recognition that behavior is what has been called over-determined can establish a situation where intelligence may redirect it. Suicidal behavior is behavior which has not been redirected. The resurgence of old psychic wounds and frustrations more than oﬀsets what life has to oﬀer at present or in prospect. But it is important to investigate precisely what causes the resurgence, unless it is contended that no matter what life holds in store for the individual, his suicidepotential is so overwhelming that sooner or later it will win out. The struggle of the individual to win out over the death-instinct may thus be seen as a battle won, or partially or wholly lost, in infancy or childhood through the family and the schoolroom; or which is refought in the clinic or analytic room to a new stalemate or victory. At this point, psychoanalytic psychiatry has failed to push the issue into the social realm. The basic reason for this failure lies in the preoccupation of psychoanalysis with therapy, that is, with the cure of mental illness. Now this type of therapy is obviously individual, and requires the recognition by the individual of his unconscious desires and wishes, the manner in which they have been frustrated and repressed, and the psychic toll they have taken of him. Through this recognition arrived at through “free association” in the analytic room



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(although on occasion possible also in clinic where depth-analysis proves unnecessary), the individual discovers why he behaves the way he does and is within the limits of the neurosis-intensity able to orient his behavior into new channels. But though this type of therapy is necessarily individual and requires that the individual piece together the motivation-nexus for his conduct, this does not mean that social factors have not been causally involved in the neurosis. Neuroses, and suicide seems to present profound neurotic elements even when committed by a so-called normal person, must be treated medically as an individual phenomenon, but their causes may lie deep in the social life-history of the individual.



VI The basic problem for social research must be to interrelate the lifehistories of individual suicides and attempted suicides with sociological variables, on the hypothesis that certain social environments may (a) induce or (b) perpetuate or (c) aggravate the suicide-potential. If we can correlate for masses of data, suicides or attempted suicides with their having been induced, perpetuated, or aggravated by certain social environments, then we are in a position to establish laws of generalized occurrence. It was Durkheim’s contention that it was impossible to start an aetiological investigation of suicide as a social phenomenon by seeking to establish types of individual behavior in suicides, We now know better, and with the unﬂagging ability Durkheim always showed in utilizing the ﬁndings of psychologic science, there is every precedent in his work for believing that he would strive to bring his sociological analysis into harmony with psychoanalysis. Below are oﬀered some hypotheses for research today. Basic to all of these hypotheses is the underlying major hypothesis that suicidal behavior is a combination of psycho-instinctual impulse and social precipitation. Problems of Collection of Data. We must investigate the possibility of getting matched samples so that individuals with the same social background may be compared—as to those who commit suicide and those who do not. This raises the intricate methodological problem whether



editor’s introduction



there is any identity of social background on the emotional level. Reliable statistics on suicide cannot be compiled unless we have ready-athand accurate and painstakingly recorded psychiatric life-histories on all. This requires that the intimate life of the family be recorded in so far as it aﬀects the individual, and that this be done from early age. Hypotheses as Regards the Family. The emotional patterns of those attempting or committing suicide are laid down in infancy and early childhood by familial relationships. Socialization in the family is a process of frustration for all, and thus suicide is a potential outlet for everybody. It is necessary to ﬁnd the relation of later social precipitants of suicide to the early emotional patterning. Moreover, it is necessary to seek to interrelate the case-histories of suicides and attempted suicides with the type of family-rearing, including such variables as ethnic group, religious aﬃliation, income-group, size of family and place of the individual suicide in the family, educational level. Suicide and Nationality. Suicide-rates diﬀer from country to country. In part, this may be due to diﬀerences in record-keeping or quality of vital statistics. Countries of Germanic inﬂuence show high suicide-rates, and so does Japan. In Germanic countries this may be the result of religion. The eﬀect of Lutheranism and Calvinism, which throw guilt-feelings back on the individual, and make frustration general with no compensating belief in the religious sanctity of such things as poverty, humility, and celibacy, must here be thoroughly investigated. The rates are not high for Catholics in Germanic countries. The case of Japan (and certain segments of the population in India) involves investigation into family-life and social beliefs. The psychological development of the Japanese on the score of suicide appears to be completely inverted compared with that of our type of society. How can the same fundamental psychological mechanisms have such diametrically opposite results? This again raises the vexing problem of the relation of underlying instinctual patterns of behavior, and the diﬀerent ways in which they can be objectiﬁed through social conditioning. Not to mention the manner in which patterns of social behavior are handed down from generation to generation. An interesting sidelight here is the eﬀect which our attempt today to democratize Japan and change its people over to Western ways will have upon the Japanese suicide-rate.



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xxviii editor’s introduction Urban Life and Suicide. Present ﬁndings, that rates are high in urban areas, must be re-investigated in terms of the psychic aggravation of urban living. It is one thing to discover that urban rates are high because of aggravation and perpetuation of basic emotional patterns; it is quite another to hold that urban living induces suicide. Suicide and Religious Aﬃliation. There is general agreement that the suicide-rate for Catholics is lowest of all religious groups. This requires investigation into the emotional outlets oﬀered to Catholics for repressed instinctual desires, as against other religious groups. This leads to inquiry into the causes of suicide among those Catholics who do commit it. These should show up as conﬁrmatory of causes among non-Catholics. And what of the suicide-rate among Catholic converts; is this lower or higher than among other Catholics, and among other religious groups? This in turn raises the problem whether suicides of Catholics are being accurately reported since the religious prohibition against suicide in the Catholic church may well lead to serious complications. The suicide rate for Protestants everywhere shows itself as higher than that for Catholics, and often for the Jews. This has been ascribed by Morselli and Durkheim to the individualism emphasized by Protestantism and its emphasis upon reﬂective thinking and the individual conscience. If this holds true, then the most individualistic Protestant sects should show the highest suicide rates. For example, in the United States, Unitarians should show a very high rate, and high-church Episcopalians a very low rate. Do they? We do not know. Moreover, we have no data that relates psychiatric life-histories to religious aﬃliation. Where there has been emphasis in Unitarian churches on mental hygiene and the ministers have referred troubled members of their ﬂock to psychoanalytic psychiatry as a general practice, the rate may be low. Whereas in the nineteenth century, the suicide-rate for the Jews appeared to be lowest of the three main currents of religion in Western civilization, more recent ﬁgures (reﬂecting particularly political events in Europe under the Nazis) would probably show that it has increased beyond the other two. The religious environment may be strictly linked with psychiatric interpretation of suicide. Durkheim’s hypothesis of the comparative



editor’s introduction



immunity of Catholics to suicide, which appears to be conﬁrmed within the undoubtedly narrow limits of accuracy of contemporary actuarial and social statistics, may sink deep roots in psychiatric science. Durkheim ascribed Catholicism’s immunity-giving power to the way in which it integrates the individual into the group, through a complete, thorough and all-encompassing body of common sentiments and beliefs. But to what do these common sentiments and beliefs refer? Catholic sentiments and beliefs seek to relieve the individual of guilt, make all sins expiable, establish an intricate, hierarchical system of father-substitutes, and an ingenious, poetic image of the mother. And the less rigorous Protestant sects give no sublimatory outlet for infantile repression and frustration, through poetry, art, and ritual, and there is a rampaging of the sense of guilt which cannot be expiated through the confessional but which faces God and his elders’ wrath in all its individual nakedness. Calvinism, and to no small degree, Lutheranism, deal with sin repressively and individualistically. In early Protestantism, the unconscious is thrown back upon itself, and later only exclusively non-religious social sanctions hold it in check. Suicide and Sex. Consummated suicides are higher among men than among women, but it seems that attempted suicides are higher among women than among men. Laying aside the unreliability of the statistics, we may ask, is this because of the social position of women, or because of the emotional diﬀerences between men and women, or an interrelationship of both, and how and to what degree? Suicide and Age. The suicide-rate is believed to increase with age. But is this not possibly because early frustrations are aggravated by failures in middle life? And what relation is there between middle-age suicide-rates and failure in intimate marital and familial relations? The suicide-rate increases, according to the statistics we have, with advance in age. It is particularly high among the aged. Several problems arise here. First, is it that there is less reluctance to admit that death resulted from suicide when the individual is aged? Second, old-age is the time when degenerative diseases reach their mortal climax, and the aﬀect upon the psyche may be immense. Third, shall we also call suicide the self-murder which is perpetrated in the knowledge that death is not far oﬀ anyhow? Fourth, is the social oblivion to which the aged are subjected an invitation to what the psychoanalysts call the



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desire for maternal oblivion; that is, a return to the kindly sleep of the unborn? These questions, and others, must obviously be to the forefront in the new branch of medicine called geriatrics, particularly in the light of what has been termed our aging population. Suicide and Income-Groups. Suicide-rates are relatively high among the highest income-groups. Wealth, the touchstone of success in our type of society, is no assurance of immunity. Is this because of overprotection in infancy and youth? And what of suicides among selfmade men? Dublin and Bunzel come to the conclusion that there is no simple causal relation between economic factors and suicide. Should, then, suicides among all economic groups show up conﬁrmatory of the same emotional diﬃculties? Suicide and War. In the midst of a shooting war, suicide-rates tend to decline; so the statistics say. But a shooting war oﬀers for those in battle optimum opportunity for suicide to be committed without anyone being aware of it. What looks like courage may be suicidal proclivity; and anyway one may not contemplate suicide if the chances are greater that life may soon be over. As far as the civilian population is concerned, the whole question of the impact of war upon psychic desiderata remains to be investigated. Suicide and Marital Status. Marital status and suicide are presumed to be strictly interrelated. Divorced men have a higher suicide-rate than the undivorced, divorced women a higher rate than undivorced women but lower than divorced men. What of suicide-rates among the divorced who have re-wed? Among the widowed, childless marriages give high rates. But the interpretation of such phenomena seems to require generalization based on psychiatric case-histories, and some understanding of the relation of marital status to emotional life as patterned before marriage, divorce, or widowhood. And what of suicide-rates of the widowed who re-wed? If marriage protects against suicide, particularly fertile marriage, why does it not protect all such marriages? Is it that the suicide-potential overcomes even the devotion to spouse and family in the case of suicides? And if so, how did the suicide-potential get so powerful? Suicide and the Negro. The rate for Negroes is very low compared to whites, in our society. There is obviously (if the statistics are correct)



editor’s introduction



no correlation between Negro underprivilege and suicide, as might be expected. Is this because systematic oppression and under-privilege lead individuals to be adjusted to the misery and tragedy of human existence which is visited upon all? Expecting nothing of life, they may not be disappointed at how little it does oﬀer them. But here a serious check must be made by studies of suicide among upper-class and welleducated Negroes, and among low-income and poorly educated Negroes. Do Negroes who are on the margin of upper-class white standards of living, materially and intellectually, commit suicide more than do other Negroes? But Negro women have a rate somewhat closer to white women, than Negro men have to white men. Here intimate knowledge of the private lives of such Negro women would be of help. Also questions of high and low coloration may be necessarily involved throughout the problem of the relation of Negroes to suicide. Suicide and Curative Therapy. Where, from analytic-room and clinic, the suicidal proclivity originally appeared high in given individuals, and curative therapy proved successful, what is the suicide-rate in later life among these individuals? Has the proclivity been redirected towards life? And what kind of life?



VII To raise these hypotheses is certainly not to answer them. Since the respect for human personality in our society is so great, we hold as a fundamental value an abhorrence of suicide. This in turn raises the problem of what to do about combatting suicide. From the psychiatric point of view, the answer would seem to be the vigorous training of parents and parents-to-be in the principles of mental hygiene, a rigorous training of nursery-school, grade-school, and high-school teachers in these principles, and an extensive system of psychiatric record-keeping in these “coming-of-age” organizations. Sociologically considered, it is necessary to assuage the suicidal proclivities of whatever social environments we ﬁnd inducing and aggravating and perpetuating tendencies towards self-murder among individuals. Some social scientists have for some time been chagrined by the



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increasing trend in professional guilds to establish programs for research, and not to give answers. Here, in the case of suicide, research has gone on for over ﬁfty years, and some may feel that it is high time we had some answers. To this the answer is that it is only recently that we have found the key to this Pandora’s box, but that this key itself can only open the box; it cannot quickly conquer the released wild and dark furies of irrationality to which human beings are heir. All those who would enter this arena of research had better be prepared for the diﬃculties which await; and no ready cures should be expected. It is not administrative devices that will bring fewer suicides, but kindly ministration based on the tragedy of humanity in being imprisoned by irrational biology and psychology whose depths we have only just plumbed, and which in turn are nursed by prudery and squeamishness in acknowledging them as realities. To ﬁght irrationality, the ﬁndings of science and human reason must be incorporated into the social structure and the functioning of the individual in that structure. In the long tradition of Western thought, Durkheim joins with psychoanalysis in emphasizing that the life of reason has many enemies, the chief of which today is the failure to apply what we have discovered on sound evidence, to the social world about us. That he did not have our evidence at his disposal is an accident of birth and history; but, to use some of his own words in the preface to Le Suicide: “There is nothing necessarily discouraging in the incompleteness of the results thus far obtained; they should arouse new eﬀorts, not surrender. . . . This makes possible some continuity in scientiﬁc labor,—continuity upon which progress depends.” George Simpson



P REFACE



Sociology has been in vogue for some time. Today this word, little known and almost discredited a decade ago, is in common use. Representatives of the new science are increasing in number and there is something like a public feeling favorable to it. Much is expected of it. It must be confessed, however, that results up to the present time are not really proportionate to the number of publications nor the interest which they arouse. The progress of a science is proven by the progress toward solution of the problems it treats. It is said to be advancing when laws hitherto unknown are discovered, or when at least new facts are acquired modifying the formulation of these problems even though not furnishing a ﬁnal solution. Unfortunately, there is good reason why sociology does not appear in this light, and this is because the problems it proposes are not usually clear-cut. It is still in the stage of system-building and philosophical syntheses. Instead of attempting to cast light on a limited portion of the social ﬁeld, it prefers brilliant generalities reﬂecting all sorts of questions to deﬁnite treatment of any one. Such a method may indeed momentarily satisfy public curiosity by oﬀering it so-called illumination on all sorts of subjects, but it can achieve nothing objective. Brief studies and hasty intuitions are not enough for the discovery of the laws of so complex a reality. And, above all, such large and abrupt generalizations are not capable of any



xxxiv preface sort of proof. All that is accomplished is the occasional citation of some favorable examples illustrative of the hypothesis considered, but an illustration is not a proof. Besides, when so many various matters are dealt with, none is competently treated and only casual sources can be employed, with no means to make a critical estimate of them. Works of pure sociology are accordingly of little use to whoever insists on treating only deﬁnite questions, for most of them belong to no particular branch of research and in addition lack really authoritative documentation. Believers in the future of the science must, of course, be anxious to put an end to this state of aﬀairs. If it should continue, sociology would soon relapse into its old discredit and only the enemies of reason could rejoice at this. The human mind would suﬀer a grievous setback if this segment of reality which alone has so far denied or deﬁed it should escape it even temporarily. There is nothing necessarily discouraging in the incompleteness of the results thus far obtained. They should arouse new eﬀorts, not surrender. A science so recent cannot be criticized for errors and probings if it sees to it that their recurrence is avoided. Sociology should, then, renounce none of its aims; but, on the other hand, if it is to satisfy the hopes placed in it, it must try to become more than a new sort of philosophical literature. Instead of contenting himself with metaphysical reﬂection on social themes, the sociologist must take as the object of his research groups of facts clearly circumscribed, capable of ready deﬁnition, with deﬁnite limits, and adhere strictly to them. Such auxiliary subjects as history, ethnography and statistics are indispensable. The only danger is that their ﬁndings may never really be related to the subject he seeks to embrace; for, carefully as he may delimit this subject, it is so rich and varied that it contains inexhaustible and unsuspected tributary ﬁelds. But this is not conclusive. If he proceeds accordingly, even though his factual resources are incomplete and his formulae too narrow, he will have nevertheless performed a useful task for future continuation. Conceptions with some objective foundation are not restricted to the personality of their author. They have an impersonal quality which others may take up and pursue; they are transmissible. This makes possible some continuity in scientiﬁc labor,—continuity upon which progress depends. It is in this spirit that the work here presented has been conceived.



preface



Suicide has been chosen as its subject, among the various subjects that we have had occasion to study in our teaching career, because few are more accurately to be deﬁned and because it seemed to us particularly timely; its limits have even required study in a preliminary work. On the other hand, by such concentration, real laws are discoverable which demonstrate the possibility of sociology better than any dialectical argument. The ones we hope to have demonstrated will appear. Of course we must have made more than one error, must have overextended the facts observed in our inductions. But at least each proposition carries its proofs with it and we have tried to make them as numerous as possible. Most of all, we have striven in each case to separate the argument and interpretation from the facts interpreted. Thus the reader can judge what is relevant in our explanations without being confused. Moreover, by thus restricting the research, one is by no means deprived of broad views and general insights. On the contrary, we think we have established a certain number of propositions concerning marriage, widowhood, family life, religious society, etc., which, if we are not mistaken, are more instructive than the common theories of moralists as to the nature of these conditions or institutions. There will even emerge from our study some suggestions concerning the causes of the general contemporary maladjustment being undergone by European societies and concerning remedies which may relieve it. One must not believe that a general condition can only be explained with the aid of generalities. It may appertain to speciﬁc causes which can only be determined if carefully studied through no less deﬁnite manifestations expressive of them. Suicide as it exists today is precisely one of the forms through which the collective aﬀection from which we suﬀer is transmitted; thus it will aid us to understand this. Finally, in the course of this work, but in a concrete and speciﬁc form, will appear the chief methodological problems elsewhere stated and examined by us in greater detail.1 Indeed, among these questions there is one to which the following work makes a contribution too 1



Les règles de la Methode sociologique, Paris, F. Alcan, 1895. (Translated into English as The Rules of Sociological Method, and published by the Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1950.)



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xxxvi preface important for us to fail to call it immediately to the attention of the reader. Sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual. There is no principle for which we have received more criticism; but none is more fundamental. Indubitably for sociology to be possible, it must above all have an object all its own. It must take cognizance of a reality which is not in the domain of other sciences. But if no reality exists outside of individual consciousness, it wholly lacks any material of its own. In that case, the only possible subject of observation is the mental states of the individual, since nothing else exists. That, however, is the ﬁeld of psychology. From this point of view the essence of marriage, for example, or the family, or religion, consists of individual needs to which these institutions supposedly correspond: paternal aﬀection, ﬁlial love, sexual desire, the socalled religious instinct, etc. These institutions themselves, with their varied and complex historical forms, become negligible and of little signiﬁcance. Being superﬁcial, contingent expressions of the general characteristics of the nature of the individual, they are but one of its aspects and call for no special investigation. Of course, it may occasionally be interesting to see how these eternal sentiments of humanity have been outwardly manifested at diﬀerent times in history; but as all such manifestations are imperfect, not much importance may be attached to them. Indeed, in certain respects, they are better disregarded to permit more attention to the original source whence ﬂows all their meaning and which they imperfectly reﬂect. On the pretext of giving the science a more solid foundation by establishing it upon the psychological constitution of the individual, it is thus robbed of the only object proper to it. It is not realized that there can be no sociology unless societies exist, and that societies cannot exist if there are only individuals. Moreover, this view is not the least of the causes which maintain the taste for vague generalities in sociology. How can it be important to deﬁne the concrete forms of social life, if they are thought to have only a borrowed existence? But it seems hardly possible to us that there will not emerge, on the contrary, from every page of this book, so to speak, the impression that the individual is dominated by a moral reality greater than himself:



preface



namely, collective reality. When each people is seen to have its own suicide-rate, more constant than that of general mortality, that its growth is in accordance with a coeﬃcient of acceleration characteristic of each society; when it appears that the variations through which it passes at diﬀerent times of the day, month, year, merely reﬂect the rhythm of social life; and that marriage, divorce, the family, religious society, the army, etc., aﬀect it in accordance with deﬁnite laws, some of which may even be numerically expressed—these states and institutions will no longer be regarded simply as characterless, ineﬀective ideological arrangements. Rather they will be felt to be real, living, active forces which, because of the way they determine the individual, prove their independence of him; which, if the individual enters as an element in the combination whence these forces ensue, at least control him once they are formed. Thus it will appear more clearly why sociology can and must be objective, since it deals with realities as deﬁnite and substantial as those of the psychologist or the biologist.2 We must, ﬁnally, acknowledge our gratitude to our two former pupils, Professor N. Ferrand of the École primaire supérieure at Bordeaux and M. Marcel Mauss, agrégé de philosophie, for their generous aid and assistance. The former made all the maps contained in this book; the latter has enabled us to combine the elements necessary for Tables XXI and XXII, the importance of which will appear later. For this purpose the records of some 26,000 suicides had to be studied to classify separately their age, sex, marital status, and the presence or absence of children. M. Mauss alone performed this heavy task. These tables have been drawn up from documents of the Ministry of Justice not appearing in the annual reports. They have been most kindly submitted to us by M. Tarde, Chief of the Bureau of Legal Statistics. His assistance is most gratefully acknowledged. Émile Durkheim



2



Nevertheless on pages 289–90, footnote, we shall show that this way of looking at it, far from ruling out all liberty, is the only means of reconciling liberty with the determinism revealed by the statistical data.



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I NTRODUCTION I Since the word “suicide” recurs constantly in the course of conversation, it might be thought that its sense is universally known and that deﬁnition is superﬂuous. Actually, the words of everyday language, like the concepts they express, are always susceptible of more than one meaning, and the scholar employing them in their accepted use without further deﬁnition would risk serious misunderstanding. Not only is their meaning so indeﬁnite as to vary, from case to case, with the needs of argument, but, as the classiﬁcation from which they derive is not analytic, but merely translates the confused impressions of the crowd, categories of very diﬀerent sorts of fact are indistinctly combined under the same heading, or similar realities are diﬀerently named. So, if we follow common use, we risk distinguishing what should be combined, or combining what should be distinguished, thus mistaking the real aﬃnities of things, and accordingly misapprehending their nature. Only comparison aﬀords explanation. A scientiﬁc investigation can thus be achieved only if it deals with comparable facts, and it is the more likely to succeed the more certainly it has combined all those that can be usefully compared. But these natural aﬃnities of entities cannot be made clear safely by such superﬁcial examination as produces ordinary terminology; and so the scholar cannot take as the subject of his research roughly assembled groups of facts corresponding to words of common usage. He himself must establish the groups he wishes to study in order to give them the homogeneity and the speciﬁc meaning



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necessary for them to be susceptible of scientiﬁc treatment. Thus the botanist, speaking of ﬂowers or fruits, the zoologist of ﬁsh or insects, employ these various terms in previously determined senses. Our ﬁrst task then must be to determine the order of facts to be studied under the name of suicides. Accordingly, we must inquire whether, among the diﬀerent varieties of death, some have common qualities objective enough to be recognizable by all honest observers, speciﬁc enough not to be found elsewhere and also suﬃciently kin to those commonly called suicides for us to retain the same term without breaking with common usage. If such are found, we shall combine under that name absolutely all the facts presenting these distinctive characteristics, regardless of whether the resulting class fails to include all cases ordinarily included under the name or includes others usually otherwise classiﬁed. The essential thing is not to express with some precision what the average intelligence terms suicide, but to establish a category of objects permitting this classiﬁcation, which are objectively established, that is, correspond to a deﬁnite aspect of things. Among the diﬀerent species of death, some have the special quality of being the deed of the victim himself, resulting from an act whose author is also the suﬀerer; and this same characteristic, on the other hand, is certainly fundamental to the usual idea of suicide. The intrinsic nature of the acts so resulting is unimportant. Though suicide is commonly conceived as a positive, violent action involving some muscular energy, it may happen that a purely negative attitude or mere abstention will have the same consequence. Refusal to take food is as suicidal as self-destruction by a dagger or ﬁrearm. The subject’s act need not even have been directly antecedent to death for death to be regarded as its eﬀect; the causal relation may be indirect without that changing the nature of the phenomenon. The iconoclast, committing with the hope of a martyr’s palm the crime of high treason known to be capital and dying by the executioner’s hand, achieves his own death as truly as though he had dealt his own death-blow; there is, at least, no reason to classify diﬀerently these two sorts of voluntary death, since only material details of their execution diﬀer. We come then to our ﬁrst formula: the term suicide is applied to any death which is the direct or indirect result of a positive or negative act accomplished by the victim himself.



introduction



But this deﬁnition is incomplete; it fails to distinguish between two very diﬀerent sorts of death. The same classiﬁcation and treatment cannot be given the death of a victim of hallucination, who throws himself from an upper window thinking it on a level with the ground, and that of the sane person who strikes while knowing what he is doing. In one sense, indeed, few cases of death exist which are not immediately or distantly due to some act of the subject. The causes of death are outside rather than within us, and are eﬀective only if we venture into their sphere of activity. Shall suicide be considered to exist only if the act resulting in death was performed by the victim to achieve this result? Shall only he be thought truly to slay himself who has wished to do so, and suicide be intentional self-homicide? In the ﬁrst place, this would deﬁne suicide by a characteristic which, whatever its interest and signiﬁcance, would at least suﬀer from not being easily recognizable, since it is not easily observed. How discover the agent’s motive and whether he desired death itself when he formed his resolve, or had some other purpose? Intent is too intimate a thing to be more than approximately interpreted by another. It even escapes self-observation. How often we mistake the true reasons for our acts! We constantly explain acts due to petty feelings or blind routine by generous passions or lofty considerations. Besides, in general, an act cannot be deﬁned by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behavior may be adjustable to too many diﬀerent ends without altering its nature. Indeed, if the intention of self-destruction alone constituted suicide, the name suicide could not be given to facts which, despite apparent diﬀerences, are fundamentally identical with those always called suicide and which could not be otherwise described without discarding the term. The soldier facing certain death to save his regiment does not wish to die, and yet is he not as much the author of his own death as the manufacturer or merchant who kills himself to avoid bankruptcy? This holds true for the martyr dying for his faith, the mother sacriﬁcing herself for her child, etc. Whether death is accepted merely as an unfortunate consequence, but inevitable given the purpose, or is actually itself sought and desired, in either case the person renounces existence, and the various methods of doing so can be only varieties of a single class. They



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possess too many essential similarities not to be combined in one generic expression, subject to distinction as the species of the genus thus established. Of course, in common terms, suicide is pre-eminently the desperate act of one who does not care to live. But actually life is none the less abandoned because one desires it at the moment of renouncing it; and there are common traits clearly essential to all acts by which a living being thus renounces the possession presumably most precious of all. Rather, the diversity of motives capable of actuating these resolves can give rise only to secondary diﬀerences. Thus, when resolution entails certain sacriﬁce of life, scientiﬁcally this is suicide; of what sort shall be seen later. The common quality of all these possible forms of supreme renunciation is that the determining act is performed advisedly; that at the moment of acting the victim knows the certain result of his conduct, no matter what reason may have led him to act thus. All mortal facts thus characterized are clearly distinct from all others in which the victim is either not the author of his own end or else only its unconscious author. They diﬀer by an easily recognizable feature, for it is not impossible to discover whether the individual did or did not know in advance the natural results of his action. Thus, they form a deﬁnite, homogeneous group, distinguishable from any other and therefore to be designated by a special term. Suicide is the one appropriate; there is no need to create another, for the vast majority of occurrences customarily so-called belong to this group. We may then say conclusively: the term suicide is applied to 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. An attempt is an act thus deﬁned but falling short of actual death. This deﬁnition excludes from our study everything related to the suicide of animals. Our knowledge of animal intelligence does not really allow us to attribute to them an understanding anticipatory of their death nor, especially, of the means to accomplish it. Some, to be sure, are known to refuse to enter a spot where others have been killed; they seem to have a presentiment of death. Actually, however, the smell of blood suﬃciently explains this instinctive reaction. All cases cited at all authentically which might appear true suicides may be quite diﬀerently explained. If the irritated scorpion pierces itself with its sting



introduction



(which is not at all certain), it is probably from an automatic, unreﬂecting reaction. The motive energy aroused by his irritation is discharged by chance and at random; the creature happens to become its victim, though it cannot be said to have had a preconception of the result of its action. On the other hand, if some dogs refuse to take food on losing their masters, it is because the sadness into which they are thrown has automatically caused lack of hunger; death has resulted, but without having been foreseen. Neither fasting in this case nor the wound in the other have been used as means to a known eﬀect. So the special characteristics of suicide as deﬁned by us are lacking. Hence in the following we shall treat human suicide only.1 But this deﬁnition not only forestalls erroneous combinations and arbitrary exclusions; it also gives us at once an idea of the place of suicide in moral life as a whole. It shows indeed that suicides do not form, as might be thought, a wholly distinct group, an isolated class of monstrous phenomena, unrelated to other forms of conduct, but rather are related to them by a continuous series of intermediate cases. They are merely the exaggerated form of common practices. Suicide, we say, exists indeed when the victim at the moment he commits the act destined to be fatal, knows the normal result of it with certainty. This certainty, however, may be greater or less. Introduce a few doubts, and you have a new fact, not suicide but closely akin to it, since only a diﬀerence of degree exists between them. Doubtless, a man exposing himself knowingly for another’s sake but without the certainty of a fatal result is not a suicide, even if he should die, any more than the daredevil who intentionally toys with death while seeking to avoid it, or the man of apathetic temperament who, having no vital interest in anything, takes no care of health and so imperils it by neglect. Yet these diﬀerent ways of acting are not radically distinct from true suicide. They result from similar states of mind, since they also entail mortal risks not unknown to the agent, and the prospect of these is no 1



A very small but highly suspicious number of cases may not be explicable in this way. For instance as reported by Aristotle, that of a horse, who, realizing that he had been made to cover his dam without knowing the fact and after repeated refusals, ﬂung himself intentionally from a cliﬀ (History of Animals, IX, 47). Horse-breeders state that horses are by no means averse to incest. On this whole question see Westcott, Suicide, p. 174–179.



xliii



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introduction



deterrent; the sole diﬀerence is a lesser chance of death. Thus the scholar who dies from excessive devotion to study is currently and not wholly unreasonably said to have killed himself by his labor. All such facts form a sort of embryonic suicide, and though it is not methodologically sound to confuse them with complete and full suicide, their close relation to it must not be neglected. For suicide appears quite another matter, once its unbroken connection is recognized with acts, on the one hand, of courage and devotion, on the other of imprudence and clear neglect. The lesson of these connections will be better understood in what follows.



II But is the fact thus deﬁned of interest to the sociologist? Since suicide is an individual action aﬀecting the individual only, it must seemingly depend exclusively on individual factors, thus belonging to psychology alone. Is not the suicide’s resolve usually explained by his temperament, character, antecedents and private history? The degree and conditions under which suicides may be legitimately studied in this way need not now be considered, but that they may be viewed in an entirely diﬀerent light is certain. If, instead of seeing in them only separate occurrences, unrelated and to be separately studied, the suicides committed in a given society during a given period of time are taken as a whole, it appears that this total is not simply a sum of independent units, a collective total, but is itself a new fact sui generis, with its own unity, individuality and consequently its own nature—a nature, furthermore, dominantly social. Indeed, provided too long a period is not considered, the statistics for one and the same society are almost invariable, as appears in Table I. This is because the environmental circumstances attending the life of peoples remain relatively unchanged from year to year. To be sure, more considerable variations occasionally occur; but they are quite exceptional. They are also clearly always contemporaneous with some passing crisis aﬀecting the social state.2 Thus, in 1848 there occurred an abrupt decline in all European states. 2



The numbers applying to these exceptional years we have put in parentheses.



introduction



If a longer period of time is considered, more serious changes are observed. Then, however, they become chronic; they only prove that the structural characteristics of society have simultaneously suﬀered profound changes. It is interesting to note that they do not take place with the extreme slowness that quite a large number of observers has attributed to them, but are both abrupt and progressive. After a series of years, during which these ﬁgures have varied within very narrow limits, a rise suddenly appears which, after repeated vacillation, is conﬁrmed, grows and is at last ﬁxed. This is because every breach of social equilibrium, though sudden in its appearance, takes time to produce all its consequences. Thus, the evolution of suicide is composed of undulating movements, distinct and successive, which occur spasmodically, develop for a time, and then stop only to begin again. On Table I one of these waves is seen to have occurred almost throughout Europe in the wake of the events of 1848, or about the years 1850–1853 depending on the country; another began in Germany after the war of 1866, in France somewhat earlier, about 1860 at the height of the imperial government, in England about 1868, or after the commercial revolution caused by contemporary commercial treaties. Perhaps the same cause occasioned the new recrudescence observable in France about 1865. Finally, a new forward movement began after the war of 1870 which is still evident and fairly general throughout Europe.3 At each moment of its history, therefore, each society has a deﬁnite aptitude for suicide. The relative intensity of this aptitude is measured by taking the proportion between the total number of voluntary deaths and the population of every age and sex. We will call this numerical datum the rate of mortality through suicide, characteristic of the society under consideration. It is generally calculated in proportion to a million or a hundred thousand inhabitants. Not only is this rate constant for long periods, but its invariability is even greater than that of leading demographic data. General mortality, especially, varies much more often from year to year and the variations 3 In the table, ordinary ﬁgures and heavy type ﬁgures represent respectively the series of numbers indicating these diﬀerent waves of movement, to make each group stand out in its distinctiveness.



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introduction Table I Stability of suicide in the principal European countries (absolute ﬁgures) Years



France



Prussia



1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872



2,814 2,866 3,020 2,973 3,082 3,102 (3,647) (3,301) 3,583 3,596 3,598 3,676 3,415 3,700 3,810 4,189 3,967 3,903 3,899 4,050 4,454 4,770 4,613 4,521 4,946 5,119 5,011 (5,547) 5,114



1,630 1,598 1,720 1,575 1,700 1,707 (1,852) (1,649) (1,527) 1,736 1,809 2,073 1,942 2,198 2,351 2,377 2,038 2,126 2,146 2,105 2,185 2,112 2,374 2,203 2,361 2,485 3,625 3,658 3,544 3,270 3,135 3,467



England



1,349 1,275 1,248 1,365 1,347 1,317 1,315 1,240 1,392 1,329 1,316 1,508 1,588 1,554 1,495 1,514



Saxony 290 318 420 335 338 373 377 398 (328) 390 402 530 431 547 568 550 485 491 507 548 (643) 557 643 (545) 619 704 752 800 710



Bavaria



Denmark



244 250 220 217 215 (189) 250 260 226 263 318 307 318 286 329 387 339



377 317 301 285 290 376 345 (305) 337 340 401 426 419 363 399 426 427 457 451 468



410 471 453 425



411 451 443 469 498 462 486



introduction



it undergoes are far greater. This is shown assuredly by comparing the way in which both phenomena vary in several periods. This we have done in Table II. To manifest the relationship, the rate for each year of both deaths and suicides, has been expressed as a proportion of the average rate of the period, in percentage form. Thus the diﬀerences of one year from another or with reference to the average rate are made comparable in the two columns. From this comparison it appears that at each period the degree of variation is much greater with respect to general mortality than to suicide; on the average, it is twice as great. Only the minimum diﬀerence between two successive years is perceptibly the same in each case during the last two periods. However, this minimum is exceptional in the column of mortality, whereas the annual variations of suicides diﬀer from it rarely. This may be seen by a comparison of the average diﬀerences.4 To be sure, if we compare not the successive years of a single period but the averages of diﬀerent periods, the variations observed in the rate of mortality become almost negligible. The changes in one or the other direction occurring from year to year and due to temporary and accidental causes neutralize one another if a more extended unit of time is made the basis of calculation; and thus disappear from the average ﬁgures which, because of this elimination, show much more invariability. For example, in France from 1841 to 1870, it was in each successive ten-year period 23.18; 23.72; 22.87. But, ﬁrst, it is already remarkable that from one year to its successor suicide is at least as stable, if not more so, than general mortality taken only from period to period. The average rate of mortality, furthermore, achieves this regularity only by being general and impersonal, and can aﬀord only a very imperfect description of a given society. It is in fact substantially the same for all peoples of approximately the same degree of civilization; at least, the diﬀerences are very slight. In France, for example, as we have just seen, it oscillates, from 1841 to 1870, around 23 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants; during the same period in Belgium it was successively 23.93, 22.5, 24.04; in England, 22.32, 22.21, 22.68; in Denmark, 22.65 (1845–49), 20.44 (1855–59), 20.4 (1861–68). With the 4



Wagner had already compared mortality and marriage in this way. (Die Gesetzmässigkeit, etc., p. 87.)



xlvii



xlviii introduction exception of Russia, which is still only geographically European, the only large European countries where the incidence of mortality diﬀers somewhat more widely from the above ﬁgures are Italy, where even between 1861 and 1867 it rose to 30.6, and Austria, where it was yet greater (32.52).5 On the contrary, the suicide-rate, while showing only slight annual changes, varies according to society by doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and even more (Table III below). Accordingly, to a much higher degree than the death-rate, it is peculiar to each social group Table II Comparative variations of the rate of mortality by suicide and the rate of general mortality A. ABSOLUTE FIGURES Suicides per 100,000 inhabitants



Deaths per 1,00 inhabitants



1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846



8.2 8.3 8.7 8.5 8.8 8.7



23.2 24.0 23.1 22.1 21.2 23.2



Averages



8.5



22.8



Period 1841–46



Suicides per 100,000 inhabitants



Deaths per 1,000 inhabitants



1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855



10.0 10.1 10.0 10.5 9.4 10.2 10.5



27.3 21.4 22.3 22.5 22.0 27.4 25.9



Averages



10.1



24.1



Period 1849–55



Suicides per 100,000 inhabitants



Deaths per 1,000 inhabitants



1856 1857 1858 1859 1860



11.6 10.9 10.7 11.1 11.9



23.1 23.7 24.1 26.8 21.4



Averages



11.2



23.8



Period 1856–60



B. ANNUAL RATE RELATED TO THE AVERAGE IN PERCENTAGE FORM 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846



96 97 102 100 103.5 102.3



101.7 105.2 101.3 96.9 92.9 101.7



1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855



Averages



100



100



Averages 100



5



98.9 100 98.9 103.8 93 100.9 103



113.2 88.7 92.5 93.3 91.2 113.6 107.4



1856 1857 1858 1859 1860



103.5 97.3 95.5 99.1 106.0



97 99.3 101.2 112.6 89.9



100



Averages



100



100



According to Bertillon, article Mortalité in the Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des sciences medicals, V. LXI, p. 738.



introduction C. DEGREE OF DIFFERENCE Between two consecutive years Greatest difference



Least difference



General mortality Suicide-rate



8.8 5.0



2.5 1



General mortality Suicide-rate



24.5 10.8



0.8 1.1



General mortality Suicide-rate



22.7 6.9



1.9 1.8



Above and below the average Average difference Per. 1841–46 4.9 2.5 Per. 1849–55 10.6 4.48 Per. 1856–60 9.57 4.82



Greatest below



Greatest above



7.1 4



4.0 2.8



13.6 3.8



11.3 7.0



12.6 6.0



10.1 4.5



Table III Rate of suicides per million inhabitants in the different European countries Period



Italy Belgium England Norway Austria Sweden Bavaria France Prussia Denmark Saxony



Numerical position in the



1866–70 1871–75



1874–78



1 period



2 period



3 period



30 66 67 76 78 85 90 135 142 277 293



38 78 69 71 130 91 100 160 152 255 334



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11



1 3 2 4 7 5 6 9 8 10 11



1 4 2 3 7 5 6 9 8 10 11



35 69 66 73 94 81 91 150 134 258 267



where it can be considered as a characteristic index. It is even so closely related to what is most deeply constitutional in each national temperament that the order in which the diﬀerent societies appear in this respect remains almost exactly the same at very diﬀerent periods. This



xlix



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introduction



is proved by examining this same table. During the three periods there compared, suicide has everywhere increased, but in this advance the various peoples have retained their respective distances from one another. Each has its own peculiar coeﬃcient of acceleration. The suicide-rate is therefore a factual order, uniﬁed and deﬁnite, as is shown by both its permanence and its variability. For this permanence would be inexplicable if it were not the result of a group of distinct characteristics, solidary one with another, and simultaneously eﬀective in spite of diﬀerent attendant circumstances; and this variability proves the concrete and individual quality of these same characteristics, since they vary with the individual character of society itself. In short, these statistical data express the suicidal tendency with which each society is collectively aﬄicted. We need not state the actual nature of this tendency, whether it is a state sui generis of the collective mind,6 with its own reality, or represents merely a sum of individual states. Although the preceding considerations are hard to reconcile with the second hypothesis, we reserve this problem for treatment in the course of this work.7 Whatever one’s opinion on this subject, such a tendency certainly exists under one heading or another. Each society is predisposed to contribute a deﬁnite quota of voluntary deaths. This predisposition may therefore be the subject of a special study belonging to sociology. This is the study we are going to undertake. We do not accordingly intend to make as nearly complete an inventory as possible of all the conditions aﬀecting the origin of individual suicides, but merely to examine those on which the deﬁnite fact that we have called the social suicide-rate depends. The two questions are obviously quite distinct, whatever relation may nevertheless exist between them. Certainly many of the individual conditions are not general enough to aﬀect the relation between the total number of voluntary deaths and the population. They may perhaps cause this or that separate individual to kill himself, but not give society as a whole a greater or lesser tendency to suicide. As they do not depend on a certain state of social organization, they have no social repercussions. 6



By the use of this expression we of course do not at all intend to hypostasize the collective conscience. We do not recognize any more substantial a soul in society than in the individual. But we shall revert to this point. 7 Bk. III, Chap. 1.



introduction



Thus they concern the psychologist, not the sociologist. The latter studies the causes capable of aﬀecting not separate individuals but the group. Therefore among the factors of suicide the only ones which concern him are those whose action is felt by society as a whole. The suicide-rate is the product of these factors. This is why we must limit our attention to them. Such is the subject of the present work, to contain three parts. The phenomenon to be explained can depend only on extra-social causes of broad generality or on causes expressly social. We shall search ﬁrst for the inﬂuence of the former and shall ﬁnd it non-existent or very inconsiderable. Next we shall determine the nature of the social causes, how they produce their eﬀects, and their relations to the individual states associated with the diﬀerent sorts of suicide. After that, we shall be better able to state precisely what the social element of suicide consists of; that is, the collective tendency just referred to, its relations to other social facts, and the means that can be used to counteract it.8 8



Whenever necessary, the special bibliography of the particular questions treated will be found at the beginning of each chapter. Below are references on the general bibliography of suicide: I. Oﬃcial statistical publications forming our principal sources: Oesterreichische Statistik (Statistik des Sanitätswesens).—Annuaire statistique de la Belgique.—Zeitschrift des Koeniglisch Bayerischen statistischen Bureau.—Preussische Statistik (Sterblichkeit nach Todesursachen und Altersklassen der Gestorbenen).—Würtembürgische Jahrbücher für Statistik und Landeskunde.—Badische Statistik.—Tenth Census of the United States. Report on the mortality and vital statistics of the United States, 1880, 11th part.— Annuario statistico Italiano.—Statistica delle cause delle Morti in tutti i communi del Regno.—Relazione medico-statistica sulle conditione sanitarie dell’ Exercito Italiano.— Statistische Nachrichten des Grossherzogthums Oldenburg.—Compte-rendu general de l’administration de la justice criminelle en France. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin.—Statistik der Stadt Wien.—Statistisches Handbuch für den Hamburgischen Staat.—Jahrbuch für die amtliche Statistik der Bremischen Staaten.—Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris. Other useful information will be found in the following articles: Platter, Ueber die Selbstmorde in Oesterreich in den Jahren 1819–1872. In Statist. Monatsh, 1876.—Brattassevic, Die Selbstmorde in Ousterreich in den Jahren 1873–77, in Stat. Monatsh., 1878, p. 429.—Ogle, Suicides in England and Wales in relation to Age, Sex, Season and Occupation. In Journal of the Statistical Society, 1886.—Rossi, Il Suicidio nella Spagna nel 1884. Arch. di psychiatria, Turin, 1886.



li



lii



introduction II. Studies on suicide in general: De Guerry, Statistique morale de la France, Paris, 1835, and Statistique morale comparée de la France et de l’Angleterre, Paris, 1864.—Tissot, De la manie du suicide et de l’esprit de révolte, de leurs causes et de leurs remèdes, Paris, 1841.—Etoc-Demazy, Recherches statistiques sur le suicide, Paris, 1844.—Lisle, Du suicide, Paris, 1856.—Wappäus, Allgemeine Bevölkerungsstatistik, Leipzig, 1861.—Wagner, Die Gesetzmässigkeit in den scheinbar wilkürlichen menschichen Haudlungen, Hamburg, 1864, Part 2.—Brierre de Boismont, Du suicide et de la folie-suicide, Paris, Germer Bailliere, 1865.—Douay, Le suicide ou la mort volontaire, Paris, 1870.—Leroy, Etude sur le suicide et les maladies mentales dens le department de Seine-at-Marne, Paris, 1870.—Oettingen, Die Moralstatistik, 3rd Ed., Erlangen, 1882, p. 786–832 and accompanying tables 103–120.—By the same, Ueber acuten und chronischen Selbstmord, Dorpat, 1881.—Morselli, II, suicidio, Milan, I879.—Legoyt, Le suicide ancien et moderne, Paris, 1881.— Masaryk, Der Selbstmord als sociale Massenerscheinung, Vienna, 1881.—Westcott, Suicide, its history, literature, etc., London, 1885.—Motta, Bibliografa del Suicidio, Bellinzona, 1890.—Corre, Crime et suicide, Paris, 1891.—Bonomelli, Il suicidio, Milan, 1892.—Mayr, Selbstmordstatistik, In Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, herausgegeben von Conrad, Erster Supplementband, Jena, 1895.—Hauviller, D., Suicide, thesis, 1898–99.



Book I Extra-Social Factors



1 SUICIDE AND PSYCHOPATHIC STATES 1 There are two sorts of extra-social causes to which one may, a priori, attribute an inﬂuence on the suicide-rate; they are organic-psychic dispositions and the nature of the physical environment. In the individual constitution, or at least in that of a signiﬁcant class of individuals, it is possible that there might exist an inclination, varying in intensity from country to country, which directly leads man to suicide; on the other hand, the action of climate, temperature, etc., on the organism, might indirectly have the same eﬀects. Under no circumstances can the hypothesis be dismissed unconsidered. We shall examine these two sets of factors successively, to see 1



Bibliography.—Falret, De l’hypochondrie et du suicide, Paris, 1822.—Esquirol, Des maladies mentales, Paris, 1838 (V. I, p. 526–676) and the article Suicide, in Dictionnaire de médecine, in 60 vols.—Cazauvieilh, Du suicide et de l’aliénation mentale, Paris, 1840—Etoc-Demazy, De la folie dans la production du suicide, in Annales medico-psych., 1844.—Bourdin, Du suicide considéré comme maladie, Paris, 1845.—Dechambre, De la monomanie homicide-suicide, in Gazette Medic., 1852.—Jousset, Du suicide et de la monomanie suicide, 1858.—Brierre de Boismont, op. cit.— Leroy, op. cit.—Art. Suicide, in Dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratique, V. XXXIV, p. 117.— Strahan, Suicide and Insanity, London, 1894. Lunier, De la production et de la consommation des boissons alcooliques en France, Paris, 1877.—By the same, art. in Annales medico-psych., 1872; Journal de la Soc. de stat., 1878.—Prinzing, Trunksucht und Selbstmord, Leipzig, 1895.



4



suicide



whether they play any part in the phenomenon under study and if so, what.



I The annual rate of certain diseases is relatively stable for a given society though varying perceptibly from one people to anot