The Phenomena of Suicidal Experience
“ However pains may be caused-even by imagination-they themselves are no less real and no less violent on that account”. — Sigmund Freud
What I deem as a “ suicidal experience” is when the ego ( I ) consciously wishes towards self annihilation. Though this wish fulfillment for self annihilation can be made visible through words, the experience itself continues to remain alienating and invisible. This is the unintelligibility of suicide, our inner most hidden violence against ourselves. At best we have approximations of what is invisible through the medium of our behaviors yet we fail to understand the complexity of what R.D Laing calls “inter-experience”.
There is no crisis of suicide but instead a crisis of continuity from experience to experience. For I can never experience you as you experience me and ipso facto, I can only infer from your behavior on how you experience me and vice versa. We know the facts about suicide but we do not “see” those facts. Suicidal ideation is not “inside our heads” but a common human idiom. The bold claim by R.D. Laing is that “everything is experience” and everything is a modality of experience, i.e. ( dreams, phantasies, and perceptions) is worth reflection. His concept of experience is not “inside” the mind or body but completely invisible. Therefore, behaviors are the visible functions of an invisible experience.
How can I explain to you something that you cannot see? How can we properly relate to each other as persons if behaviors are the only medium in which we attempt to understand ? The real tragedy of our times is we study behavior rather than experience. To only understand behavior is to eliminate experience and when we eliminate experience, destructive behavior can result. This Gordian knot could be solved not by some miraculous solution but by a reframing of the problem itself.
Therefore, if we claim that suicide is the annihilation of the self. We are presupposing that it is suicide that is the issue to be solved. However, what is the obvious unquestioned factor in the problem? It is the “self”. This self, the vital center of all human experiences is never doubted. We have rigidly assimilated this “self” vis a vis civilization and the conformities that it demands.
Unfortunately, what modern man has continuously failed to understand as Freud ingeniously pointed out in the nineteenth century, is that with every behavior that is deemed unacceptable for the functioning of society, we are slowly building a repertoire of repressed contents. These are contents/instincts that cannot be acculturated. We have alienated ourselves and alienated each other. The claim that we are “social creatures” is a tragic comedy but to be charitable there is something quite “social” about our self alienation and helplessness. How we are to honestly see each other if our narrowed attention has gone one-sided? The ability to understand the inter-relation between behavior and experience is vital.
There are disastrous conflations within our own experiences. Just because you experience a “self” does not imply that you are a “self”. This “ I” is the center of our experience and the consequence of this center is to be blinded by the things that never come into view, as if you were peaking through a hole and claiming “ if this is all I see, then this is all I am”.
The pain you feel and the death you crave for yourself is a result of an under interpretation. The real crisis is our under interpretation that denies all the possibilities of what a self is and could be. The phrase “ I want to die” is a cry for a re-describing of the “ I”. It is not self annihilation that is desired but the desire for a new center of experience.
The concept of “cure” is strange to me. If we mean “cure” as to become functional in society then we have surely failed once more. How long have we corrected our behaviors but never our experience? To correct each other’s behavior is to treat each other less than persons and to eliminate experience. The frightening question then arises, how long have you focused on correcting your behavior? How long, have you treated yourself as an object by only addressing your behavior? And how long, have we treated each other as objects ?
The real treatment as R.D. Laing would say is the “ way we treat one another”. The task is now before us to take experience in relation to behavior and only then, it may be possible to witness ourselves as “persons”.
Sources:
Psychical Treatment 1890, Sigmund Freud
Politics of Experience, R.D. Laing