Dostoievsky’s Kirilov said that there are only two reasons why we do not all kill ourselves: pain and the fear of the next world. We seem, more or less, to have got rid of both. In suicide,

‘No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another.’ Historically, all

uniqueness. In the circumstances, death may come but it is superfluous.o Without this wild drama of psychosis, there is a kind of

You see that yawning precipice?

The Freudian analyst, Karl Menninger, has said that there are three components of suicide: the wish to kill, the wish to be killed, the wish to die. Kleinian

certain point of despair a man will kill himself in order to show he is serious. It

shriller, less assured, more outraged.

Life dependeth on the will of others, death on ours.4

have that last, partial and lop-sided triumph turned, for reasons of decency and bureaucracy, into a malicious accident is to compound failures with final failure.