Initiatory Death and the Urge to Suicide

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Permalink Reply by Fr Gregory Jensen on March 2, 2009 at 1:22pm

Daniel,

Reading your pos brings to mind St Augustine's similiar observation on suicide.

The suicidal individual, Augustine argues in On Free Choice of Will, does not wish to "not be" (i.e., to be dead), but to "not be" in particular way (e.g., in emotional pain). The suicidal desire he concludes, a then not a desire to die, but to live (i.e., "to be") in a new way. The challenge is to tease out the new way of being hidden in the rejection of the old way of being.

Make sense?

Cheers.

+FrG

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Deardorff on March 2, 2009 at 2:20pm

yes! actually the "teasing out the hidden desire" is the primary job of the initiatory elder/guide. We call it tending "the soul condition" of the initiand. The challenge is to attend from the perspective of one's own soul. Otherwise it's just the imposition of some predetermined methodology.
Thanks for bringing Augustine's vision into the conversation.
DD

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Permalink Reply by Alan Briscoe on March 3, 2009 at 3:02am

This would fit with the experience of many that I have spoken to who have survived the urge to suicide: they speak of wanting to kill a part of themselves, or wanting to be dead for a while. Initiatory transformation can meet the needs of the individual in such a way as to reduce their isolation while giving their experience of pain meaning and validity as part of their life story or hero's path.

In the training we provide in suicide intervention, much stress is placed on the importance of allowing the dying side of the person to speak; by giving it space in this way we create the conditions for the individual to hear their own living side. Perhaps the shamanic death takes this one step further and gives it a ritualised, formal context?

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Permalink Reply by martin shaw on March 4, 2009 at 8:16am

Working with all kinds of youth over the last dozen years i see a lack of appreciation of metaphor or mythic imagination leading to literal encounters with death-suicide or accident. That Dark Crow in the chest of youth wants to beat its wings and without a ritual frame to hang around it, it can indeed freeze into a literal process.
It always reminds me of the Norse 'Cinder-Biters'-that desire to lay in ashes for a period of time, to lie still, to move back from the squabbles of the tribe. If we have no perception of that as a psychic possibility, then anything can happen. When one youth commits suicide over here, it almost always instigates a glut of suicides. It needs eldership at both the funeral and localized community to help close that hole. When no libation is offered, a kind of hungry titillation crawls out and pulls others down.
So yeah, i think you're right-it can be some kind of liminoid expression, in a similar way that dressing in your wifes underwear whilst tied to the back of a pick-up can be a desire to rupture the life conditions we find ourselves in. Trouble is, we mostly get the rupture without the rapture.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Deardorff on March 6, 2009 at 11:13pm

I love Alan's description of "allowing the dying side of the person to speak,"; this is also very apt to the initiatory process. In a certain way what's going on with the suicidal person and with the initiand in a rites of passage is that they are outside the circle of ordinary living, and it feels like death—properly, in initiation, it is experienced as a death. In trying to understand this it was helpful to use the imagery of the major arcana in the tarot deck. They are understood to represent a natural progression of stations that one passes through in life; but the Fool is number zero, the Trickster-fool is outside the sequence. The drop into the condition of zero is the no-place, no-thingness, of liminality. If one is fortunate enough to be in one of those rare cultures that still recognize the liminal condition as something sacred then a generative, life enhancing, ritual transformation may occur. But here in the so-called "civilized" world, as Martin so aptly puts it "we get the rupture without the rapture." So it is a wondrous and magnificent thing when a handful of reckless healers decide to listen to and honor the no-place, the no-thingness, the "cinder-biting" dying side of a human being. If one is to survive the never ending thresholds and passages of dying to be born, then we begin to understand that death is life's greatest innovation. As one of my favorite poets, Kenneth Patchen, once wrote: "There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death."

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Permalink Reply by Tim Russell on April 7, 2009 at 2:14pm

I've been following these posts with a lot of interest . I'm very drawn to this idea that "the urge to suicide might be a concretized yet urgent call for initiatory transformation" and extending it to include the phenomenon of self harm , I'm reminded of the story of Lakota holy Man Sitting Bull having 50 pieces of flesh cut out of each arm during a sun dance prior to the Little Big Horn . Now in my world , there exist an awful lot of young men and women who have 50, 100, 150 scars on each arm , each a testament to what I believe in all likelihood is a desire for initiatory transformation . But,,,,
finding the ritual context that might attempt to renew the hoop of their lives, well that's a big question . A worthwhile one and at the moment I can only hope that more gets posted .

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Permalink Reply by Patricia Waters on May 22, 2009 at 4:43pm

Years ago I worked in a day treatment program with many cutters, all of them young women who had been severely abused. Generally, they had low self-esteem and blamed themselves for their abuse, and cutting relieved the tension of their feelings of self-loathing (one of the women verbalized this to me). One woman did not cut but was hospitalized again and again for suicide "attempts". I put that in quotes because they were pretty superficial attempts -- amounting to cutting. She was suffering from what is now called dissociative disorder and at that time was commonly called multiple personality. She (and all her very distinct personalities) were in an art group I led. She was highly intelligent when not "taken over". What I discovered through talking with some of her personalities who did art work in the group was that it was the 10-year-old who was trying to kill her. The woman had children of her own and my take was that that her inner 10-year-old child felt scared and neglected. Unfortunately, I had to leave the program before being able to work with this more. It was in a larger group context and I could not do one-to-one work with her. Hospitalization kept her "safe" in the moment, but certainly didn't help for the long haul. These are such complex issues.

I do think all of these young women needed an initiatory experience of some kind, as do all of our youth -- more than youth since most of us are culturally deprived of true rites of initiation that give real meaning to our lives. I am now working primarily with seniors and mostly women. Learning to value our art for the process itself, working compassionately with the inner critic and sharing this in community through our creativity is, I believe, an ongoing rite of passage.

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