A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society): Volume 33

Faith in Narrative



Historiography in the (remedial) classroom is a narrative of enlightenment in which each new theorist is simply more clever than the last. Perhaps it's felicity with this kind of narrative that allows modern sociologists to dismiss Durkheim (On Suicide, 1897) as a prescriptivist of "social cohesion" and misguided victim of the ecological fallacy. An updated Dictionary of Received Ideas (Flaubert, 1913) would also include an entry on Freud: "Only known victim of the Oedipal complex. Laugh at it pityingly for being quaint and old-fashioned; even so: Thunder Against!" This, of course, discounts Freud's frightening ability, unique among his contemporaries, to have a real Thought. (Freud's Thought still lives on in show more un-death, although our best Freudians (e.g. Julia Kristeva) are all anti-Freudian . . .) Similarly, it was Durkheim's power (now despised) to look behind narrative in order to tell us something we don't already know. His early statistical analysis of seasonal variation in suicide simultaneously undermined narratives of Winter's "moribund dreariness" and Summer's "heat-induced madness."

Narratives are never adequate to the stories they tell — especially the narratives we tell ourselves. This was the lesson of Durkheim's' nascent Sociology and Freud's early Psychology. (Durkheim and Freud only become "quaint and old-fashioned" in their hasty attempts to substitute a new totality for this inadequacy e.g. "social cohesion" and "Greek Tragedy.") Weaver's repudiations of Durkheim appear to come straight from the classroom narrative, scorning the half measures of such early attempts. Certainly more thorough groundwork has been done here, considering the author and his assistants appear to have read every inquest into mid-century suicide in Australasia, though one wonders what has been gleaned from all this. Weaver's findings, summarized in the table above, suggest the most common risk factors for suicide are mental illness, physical illness, alcoholism, and financial hardship i.e. precisely what we would have suspected had we given it any thought. Perhaps this analysis is only capable of telling us something we already know because it's the product of narratives that were already inadequate attempts at interpretation ex post facto. The magistrate, who is no more clever than us, signs the affidavit after concluding that, "certainly she was known to be partial to drink." The following movement, from judicial inquests to the sampling of suicide notes, is not much more fruitful (though Weaver gleans one useable poem). We find these notes also to be dissemblers along with the narratives they tell, exemplifying what Freud might understand as the displacement of the thought one cannot even admit to oneself. show less