What is Suicide to the Unconscious?

Question

Sigmeund Freud beckoned the importance of the civilized man's unconscious incapability of acknowledging death.

We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality...

– Reflections on War and Death, Our Attitude Towards Death by Sigmund Freud (1918)

So thus, what is the point of suicide to each individual? This isn't a question of how rational suicide is. It's about the unconscious connection with suicide. If everything originates from the unconscious mind, then the thought of suicide must also. Therefore, the unconscious must be thinking of its own death if to conjure an idea such as suicide.

Answer 1

Inability to imagine something doesn't imply disbelief in its existence. Especially inability to imagine something from the point of view of that thing.

Inability to imagine self being dead is no different than inability to imagine self being in the dreamless alpha phase of dream. It's based on a technicality: to imagine we need awareness of what we imagine; being alive is a prerequisite of awareness.

Still, do you, going to sleep, disbelieve to any degree the fact your subconscious self-awareness will be gone for a couple of hours?

If you choose a short^*) afternoon nap, is it because your unconsciousness is creating a belief you will remain self-aware, or denying it?

In essence the ability to imagine the abstract concept of being awake/alive is entirely orthogonal to origins of wish for sleep/death. The origin is much simpler biological impulse of discomfort/wish for comfort and the decision is a result of chain of logical processing of that impulse through our conscious knowledge base, to a conscious decision.^**)

While all concepts may originate in our subconsciousness, their original shape may be entirely different than what reaches consciousness. You don't need primal image of death to decide on suicide, just as you don't need a primal image of cow to decide on eating a steak - you just need a primal impulse of hunger and a taught memory of steak.

^{*)too short to enter the REM phase and ever experience any subconscious sense of self-in-a-dream, just dreamless sleep.}

^{**)Whether the process itself is performed correctly is entirely irrelevant. A faulty conscious decision is still a conscious decision.}

Answer 2

I think this is a philosophy question, and it's actually fairly easy to answer

the logic for the argument goes:

1) representation occurs consciously, the unconscious cannot 'represent' anything to itself, including death

2) the main determinants of behaviour are unconscious

3) behaviour is largely determined by a belief in imortality

..so the question is, does the absence of a capacity to represent death imply a belief in immortality?

it's what's called a negative proof, inferring that something is by establishing that something is not the case. my answer would be that no, this is not a logically 'waterproof' argument.

Answer 3

If everything originates from the unconscious mind, then the thought of suicide must also.

TAG: psychoanalysis
In psychoanalytic terms, the unconscious does not include all that is not conscious, but rather what is actively repressed from conscious thought or what a person is averse to knowing consciously. Freud viewed the unconscious as a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression.

Before answer your question there is epistemic problems to solve. There is epistemic problems with the psychoanalysis's unconscious concept, because there is epistemic problems with psychoanalysis theory. Sixty years of research about the Freudian concept of "repression", and there is no positive evidence for this concept. Why do you think that this is a philosophical question? My answer is about epistemological aspects of the theory that underlies the question supposed to be “metaphysically in-depth”. If psychoanalysis is useless, the question and a possible answer are useless. To you know why, I needed explain why psychoanalysis is useless.Theories and concepts can only be subjected to empirical testing in group, never in isolation. No hypothesis is ever tested in isolation. A pseudoscience theory has pseudo-theoretic questions and pseudo-answers.

Definition of Psychoanalysis: The beginning of the epistemic problems

A committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association after a concerted and prolonged effort concluded that it was “impossible to find any definition of psychoanalysis that was acceptable to even a large group of members of the American Psychoanalytic Association”. The intervening years since the APA report have done little to develop consensus. In fact, the problem has been compounded.

The Epistemic Problems of Psychoanalysis

Philosophers have long debated whether psychoanalysis is a science or a pseudoscience. The lack of consensus on the testability of psychoanalytic theory is due not merely to differing conceptions of psychoanalytic theory but to differing conceptions of testability. There is a lack of consensus on whether what is in question is a therapeutic or an explanatory enterprise and, if explanatory, which theses are to be considered definitive.There is another general ambiguity. Is factual or methodological psychoanalysis under discussion? Is the subject such statements as ‘the main sources of human character are, for example, the incestuous and sexual conflicts of infancy’, or such statements as ‘the main formative influences and pathogenic occasions in a person's life can be discovered by the use of a method devised by Freud deploying dream interpretation, free association, and analysis of the behaviour of the subject in the analytic situation’?

We can only discover what falsifies psychoanalysis by taking note of what is permitted to count against it, and it is so equivocal that almost a century later radically divergent accounts are still given of its commitments. The testability of psychoanalytic theses is sometimes confused with the testability of statements about the consequences of crediting them. Catholic theology does not become testable because the consequences of pilgrimages to Lourdes are. Therapeutic efficacy is incapable by its nature of warranting the historicity of a reconstruction or the veridicality of an interpretation; these may be false and the therapy based on them nevertheless efficacious, just as they may be true but therapeutically unhelpful.

The testability of the therapeutic claims themselves is also in dispute because although a thesis may seem to be testable, advocates have in fact modified its interpretation in the light of falsifying reports. A theory is untestable unless the advocates had no discretion in its interpretation in the light of falsifying reports.

The relevance of the outcome of epidemiologically testable inquiry is in any case bypassed by those who hold that psychoanalytic discourse ought not to be subjected to the same modes of assessment as are conventionally held to characterize sciences such as medical epidemiology. An alternative criterion often invoked, and to which Freud himself frequently appealed, is that of narrative comprehensiveness. Freud holds his infantile sexual etiology up like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle and defies his critics to give an adequate account of the neuroses without it. A disabling assumption is that it is the legitimacy of this narrative rationale which divides critics from supporters of psychoanalytic theses, and the conviction that psychoanalytic narratives tend to be unpersuasive or tendentious.

What makes an explanatory narrative credible? The first problem is one of devising rules of thumb for judging the goodness of a case for a causal connection, and perhaps its analogy to better-attested, less questionable ones, to warrant a choice between narratives. The second problem is that of deciding, in cases where narrative coherence is insufficiently probative, whether its probative value can be enhanced, or even replaced, by the endorsement of the patient. Freud normally met the suggestibility objection by denying that he had any prior conviction which might have influenced his patients' responses. Apologists have often claimed for Freud's narratives virtues which he did not consistently claim for them himself, appealing rather to unreproducible nuances of the psychoanalytic interaction. What makes a narrator credible to absolve those who insist on discussing the credibility of psychoanalytic narrators of gratuitously personalizing the issue?

The Epistemic Problems at the Source

The strongest reason for considering Freud a pseudoscientist is that he claimed to have tested theories which are either untestable or even if testable had not been tested.

If is possible to connect every conceivable experimental outcome with Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, then no experiment could refute the theory, the theory is untestable. The reason analysts in general had not encountered exceptions to Freudian theory is that Freudian theory provides no clear account of what an exception would look like. Freud wrote: “I can only repeat over and over again – for I never find it otherwise – that sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general.” What makes this a spurious claim is that Freudian theory provides no sufficiently determinate conception of what would constitute ‘finding it otherwise’. It is therefore not surprising that Freud could claim after thirty years of practice that “all my experience shows that the neuroses are based on sexual instinctive forces”. Freud writes as if he had, at the back of him, a great body of tested doctrine.

Can therapeutic outcome provide a test of freud’s infantile etiology? Therapeutic success could not confer testability on psychoanalytic theses which are not independently testable any more than the cures at Lourdes could confirm or falsify the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

The Epistemic Problems Then and Now

To mark the first centenary of the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis published a paper by six New York analysts who purported to report on the first experimental test ever of psychoanalysis in the course of one century. Actually, this was no experiment at all, since it involved no control group. Hence, those authors had no right to conclude that the observed improvements were due to the treatment; they could just as well have been spontaneous. Thus, psychoanalysts make no use of the scientific method, because they do not know what this is. After all, they were not trained as scientists but only, at best, as medical practitioners.

Core Propositions and the Fatal Flaw

In one sense, there are no core propositions-that is, nothing that a given analyst wouldn't jettison in a pinch. Psychoanalysis was replete with ambiguities and self-contradictions from the very outset, and as it splintered into various rival orthodoxies and began coping with objections by half-incorporating them into its doctrine, the confusion got steadily worse. Today, analysts have little in common with one another, or with Freud, beyond a certain pose of deep knowingness and a determination to stay in business at all cost.

What is the most fatal flaw of psychoanalysis? Its epistemic nullity. When you generate "knowledge" in a private setting through manifestly suggestive procedures, applying hermeneutic "rules" that amount to the sheerest license; when you report your uncheckable findings in self-servingly anecdotal form; and when you then reply to criticism by declaring the critics to be unconsciously troubled, as witnessed by their inability to agree with you, you have fashioned something that's the very opposite of an authentic investigative instrument. This should be kept in mind when the analysts tell us about the "progress" they've made since Freud's day. We can all be grateful that penis envy and the death instinct are in retreat, but on what basis should we lend credence to the innovations that are replacing them? So far as I can tell, psychoanalytic methodology is just as primitive today as it was in 1900.

Psychoanalytic Therapy even if Testable has Little Support.

A methodological critique of the studies for the evidence supporting psychoanalysis therapy shows retrospective, nonrandomized, uncontrolled, nonblinded studies in which outcome measures of untested validity are used and the serious problems of selection bias, expectational bias, and confounding variables are barely acknowledged. Such studies, 6, offer psychoanalysis little support. Psychoanalysis eroded this support even further. For example, the concept of repression of traumatic memories, which Freud once termed the “cornerstone” of psychoanalysis,1, has come under widespread attack, both in the literature 2, 3 and in the courts, 4, 5. Practitioners of therapies aimed at repressed and recovered memory are facing mounting malpractice verdicts. A French 2004 report from INSERM said that psychoanalytic therapy is far less effective than other psychotherapies (among which cognitive behavioral therapy). It used a meta-analysis of numerous other studies to find whether the treatment was "proven" or "presumed" to be effective on different diseases,7.

1 Freud S. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Strachey J, trans. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press, 1957:16. 2 Frankel FH. Discovering new memories in psychotherapy -- childhood revisited, fantasy, or both? N Engl J Med 1995;333:591-594 3 Pope HG Jr. Psychology astray: fallacies in studies of “repressed memory” and childhood trauma. Boca Raton, Fla.: Upton Books, 1997. 4 Johnston M. Spectral evidence: the Ramona case: incest, memory, and truth on trial in Napa Valley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 5 Loftus EF. Creating false memories. Sci Am 1997;277:70-75 6 Fonagy P, Target M. Predictors of outcome in child psychoanalysis: a retrospective study of 763 cases at the Anna Freud Centre. J Am Psychoanal Assoc 1996;44:27-77 7 Psychotherapy: Three approaches evaluated. INSERM Collective Expert Reports [Internet]. Paris: Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale; 2000-2004.

References
-Is Psychoanalysis Science? N Engl J Med 1997; 337:1635 November 27, 1997
-Bahr, S.S., Thombs, B.D., Pignotti, M., Bassel, M., Jewett, L., Coyne, J.C., & Beck, A.T. Is longer term psychodynamic psychotherapy more efficacious than shorter term therapies? Review and critique of the evidence. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
-Anestis, M.D., Anestis, J.C., & Lilienfeld, S.O. The devil is in the details: Are the conclusions of Shedler (2010) consistent with the evidence? American Psychologist.
-Bahr, S.S., & Beck, A.T. (2009). Treatment integrity of studies that compare short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy with cognitive-behavior therapy. Clinical Psychology: Science & Practice, 16, 370-378
-Modern Psychoanalysis: New Directions & Perspectives, edited by Judd Marmor, 1995
-Frank Cioffi, Philosophical Problems of Psychoanalysis. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.) 2005
-The Philosophy behind Pseudoscience, Mario Bunge, The Skeptical Inquirer, 07-01-2006
-The Making of a Freud Skeptic, An Interview with Frederic Crews, Skeptic 7. 3 (1999): 42

Answer 4

Of the 200+ people interviewed who jumped off bridges to commit suicide, but survived, all of them felt the same sentiment the moment they stepped off and started to fall.

Get. back. on the bridge.

All of them were glad they're still alive.

Hope that helps.