21

The article discusses suicide, or rather attempted suicide, from the perspective of murder. The connection between suicide and murder (blood crime) is ancient, as its etymology indicates. In parallel with the clinical exposition based on the case of Isabelle, encountered following her suicidal act in the context of a face-to-face psychotherapy, theory is applied with reference to Freud’s observation in The Ego and the Id that ‘what guarantees the safety of the ego is the fact that the object has been retained’. Suicide then is the murder of the object when this is in danger of being lost as ego, when its sudden otherness threatens the ‘safety of the ego’. The moment of the suicidal act, the murder of the object, resembles a ‘hallucinatory moment’: when psychic reality occupies the entire domain of consciousness.