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The sociological analysis of social meanings of suicide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Jack D. Douglas
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The history of ideas demonstrates conclusively that certain ideas can become so pervasive and central to the thought of a culture that over many centuries the members of that culture unquestioningly apply these ideas in many different ways to new fields of experience (1). Such ideas are what we shall call metaphysical ideas. Such metaphysical ideas normally form the ground for common-sense discourse. The history of ideas has shown that they also form the ground for, and frequently constitute much of the substance of, serious intellectual works. Though science in the western world was born and developed partly as an explicit revolution against all such unexamined, “unempirical” ideas, recent work in the history of science has led to the conclusion that scientific thought is largely the result of and partly constitued by just such metaphysical ideas (2). Moreover, more recent work in the history of science has led to the conclusion that once scientific ideas have been accepted by the members of a scientific discipline, these ideas in turn come to form the unexamined ground and substance of the normal scientific works within that discipline. Though these ideas thus have far more in common with common-sense and humanistic discourse than most scientists would ever care to admit, there are some important differences which are taken into consideration by giving the established, unexamined ideas of sciences a different name—that of paradigmatic ideas (3).

Type
On Suicide
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , November 1966 , pp. 249 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1966

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References

(1) Lovejoy's classic study of the Great Chain of Being idea in Western culture is one such conclusive demonstration.

(2) E.A. Burth's classical work was one of the first to clearly apply this general idea to science. See his The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, (New York, Doubleday, 1954).Google Scholar

(3) See Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1962).Google Scholar

(4) Until the latter part of the 19th century the terms used instead of “sociology” were “moral statistics”, “public hygiene”, “medical statistics”, “social statistics”, etc. Since these various disciplines of thought actually constituted the paradigmatic works for those works (such as Durkheim's Suicide) still treated as sociological paradigms by sociologists, it seems apparent that one should use the term “sociological” in referring to them, even though the earlier authors did not meet that often used rule-of-thumb test of the self-imputation of the name “sociology”. This whole problem of naming brings into sharp focus the whole question of the processes by which this many faceted set of disciplines came to share the one name of “sociology”. It is clear that there was much conflict over the whole question of naming that there was vacillation on the part of some. Why did “sociology” win out over the others, at least in France? Did its generality allow its proponents to gain the support of more traditions of thought in their political struggles to found an independent profession in the academic setting? Was it the failure to achieve such a general name that led to the death of moral statistics in Germany? This whole critical question of the naming of disciplines awaits serious investigation.

(5) Halbwachs has previously argued that this is the key to understanding Quételet's many works. See La Théorie de l'homme moyen: Essai sur Quételet et la statistique morale (Paris 1913).Google Scholar

(6) Rather than any synthesis of the paradigmatic ideas, the early sociologists were normally content to provide a unifying theme to their work, which usually consisted of some general goal of social welfare, such as national power, alleviating suffering, or eradicating evil.

(7) It must be specifically noted here that sociologists have often used many devices for presenting their works as more in agreement with the professionally accepted paradigm, Durkeim's Suicide, than they in fact were. Halbwachs', for example, tried to show that his work, Les causes du suicide, was in agreeement “in principle” with Durkheim's Suicide even though he in fact rejected much of Durkheim's basic argument.

(8) See. Crocker, L.G., Discussion of Suicide in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of the History of Ideas, XIII (1952), pp. 47–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The importance of suicide in French thought of this period was in turn probably partly the result of the importance of the subject in English thought in the seventeenth century. See Sprott, S.E., The English Debate on Suicide (La Salle, Illinois, Open Court Press, 1961).Google Scholar

(9) Tissot wrote a very influential work expressing both this idea and the idea that an increasing “spirit of revolt” was responsible for such social actions, an idea which became more important in the sociological works as the century progressed. (See De la manie du suicide, Paris 1841Google Scholar) The same idea was expressed in the far more balanced work of Jan Masaryk: “Die Selbstmordneigung tritt gegenwärtig in alien civilisirten Ländern mit erschreckender Intensität auf…” (See Der Selbstmord als Sociale Massenerscheinung der Modernen Civilisation (Wien 1881).Google Scholar

Much of this belief in the spreading “mania” of suicide was probably the result of the great importance of suicide in romantic literature. (See, for example, Maigron's attack on the romantics, Le romantisme et les mœurs, Paris 1910.Google Scholar) But the feeling of certainty that the quantity of suicide was steadily increasing was probably the result of the steady increase in the official registrations of deaths caused by suicide. This steady rise in the official counts was most likely the result of a steady growth in the registration activities of the officials, but there was little critical attitude toward the statistics except on the part of doctors who were involved in the problems of trying to categorize the causes of death.

(Though we shall not be directly concerned with recent literary and philosophical works on suicide in this essay, it is important here to note that this concern with suicide as a problem is still very great in the Western world today. In fact, though it may have been a temporary result of the Second World War, there is every indication that the last few decades has been a period in which suicide was considered to be a more serious philosophical and moral problem than at any time in the last century. Albert Camus great work, The Myth of Sisyphus, begins with the brutal assertion that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”. For other important examples see Landsberg, P.L., The Experience of Death: the Moral Problem of Suicide (New York, The Philosophical Library, 1953)Google Scholar; Meynard, Léon, Le suicide, étude morale et métaphysique (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1954)Google Scholar, and Siegmund, Georg, Sein oder Nichtsein: Die Frage des Selbstmordes (Trier, Paulinus-Verlag, 1961).Google Scholar

(10) Many of the most important works forming the link between philosophical, literary, and common-sense works and the sociological works were quoted extensively (and referred to in the bibliography) in Legoyt's very influential work, Le suicide ancien et moderne (Paris 1881).Google Scholar

(11) One of the most important metaphysical ideas in these sociological works will not be directly dealt with here at all. This is their universally shared idea that suicidal actions are “immoral” actions, both in an absolute sense (as in Durkeim's conception of “social pathology”) and in the sense that this is a universally shared social meaning of suicide in Western societies. This idea was behind the explicit theoretical idea that a breakdown or decrease in “social constraint” (or “social organization”, etc.) was in some way the cause of the increasing suicide rates in Western societies.

(12) This metaphysical idea sharply distinguished sociological thought from the paradigmatic thought of the “social mechanists” and some of the more extreme positivists who simply sought to use the theories of the natural sciences as paradigms for analyzing social actions. For an excellent treatment of the “social mechanists”, see Sorokin, Pitirim A., Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York, Harper, 1928), pp. 3–63.Google Scholar

(13) Sussmilch, Johann Peter, Die Göttliche Ordnung in den Veränderungen des Menschlichen Geschlechts (Berlin 1761).Google Scholar

(14) For an excellent treatment of the general cultural development in the Western World, of the ideas and values of quantitative precision see Clark, G.N., Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1949).Google Scholar

(15) Guerry, A.M., Essai sur la statistique morale de la France (Paris 1833), p. 9.Google Scholar

(16) Ibid. p. 11.

(17) Both de Guerry and Quételet expressed this position well. Consider, for example, the following statement by Quételet: “Society includes withing itself the germs of all the crimes committed, and at the same time the necessary facilities for their development. It is the social state, in some measure, which prepares these crimes, and the criminal is merely the instrument to execute them. Every social state supposes, then, a certain number and a certain order of crimes, these being merely the necessary consequences of its organization.” (A Treatise on Man, (Edinburgh 1842), p. 6Google Scholar, originally published as Sur l'homme in Paris in 1835.)

(18) This idea was clearly developed by the time of Morselli, 's, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (New York 1882).Google Scholar

(19) Morselli seems to have shared much of this idea, but his greater caution in constructing statistical arguments between the external categories and the internal, meaningful states seems to have dissuaded him from developing the idea. See, for example, his excellent statement of this position on page 114 of Ibid.

(20) The most important work in this school of thought is Esquirol, 's Maladies mentales (Paris 1838).Google Scholar

(21) Though our discussion of sociologism is somewhat different, distinctive aspects of Durkheim's sociologism have previously been well discussed by Tiryakian, Edward in Sociologism and Existentialism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1962).Google Scholar

(22) One of the finest discussions of this method in relation to other methods used by sociologists is by Bernard, L.L.in The Development of Methods in Sociology, The Monisi, XXXVIII (1928), 292–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Montaigne discussed suicide at length in “Custom of the Island of Cea”. It should be stressed that the use of literary and historical cases of suicide remained very important throughout the nineteenth century. Such works as that of Legoyt were largely based on historical material and in certain fundamental respects this form of data was far more reliable and valid than that of twentieth century sociologists. (See the extensive criticisms of official statistics below.) Historical and literary case material still remains, of course, the best source for studies of changes in the moral meanings of suicide. Such material was used very well for this purpose by Lecky, W.E.H. in History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 2 vols. (New York 1869)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It was used excellently in the finest study done thus far on the moral meanings of suicide, Bayet, A.'s Le suicide et la morale (Paris, Alcan, 1922).Google Scholar

Durkheim himself relied almost entirely on literary cases taken from the Romantics to construct his types of suicide. Dukkheim, E., Suicide (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1951), pp. 227–294.Google Scholar

(24) Voltaire's essay on suicide in the Philosophical Dictionary made use not only of the traditional historical cases but also of contemporary newspaper cases. From such sources he attempted to arrive at certain scientific conclusions about suicide: 1) suicide is more frequent in cities than in rural regions; 2) the explanation of the greater urban frequency of suicide is that cities produce more melancholia (or depression) in individuals because they have more free time from physical labor to think; 3) suicide can be physically inherited because moral character is inherited (an idea which Morselli and many others most emphatically accepted); and 4) some suicides, such as Euripide's Phaedra, commit suicide in order to get revenge against someone (an idea which became of great importance only in the twentieth century works on suicide).

(25) de Boismont, Brierre, Du suicide et de la folie suicide (Paris 1856).Google Scholar

(26) This idea was largely adopted from the psychiatric theorists, especially from Esquirol's work (op. cit.) in which suicide was considered to be a symptom of insanity.

(27) The Rules of Sociological Method (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1962), XXXVIIGoogle Scholar. The importance of the new method for the new academic discipline (or the other way around) was indicated by Durkheim himself in his Introduction to The Rules of Sociological Method: “A happy combination of circumstances, among the more important of which may rightly be placed the proposal to establish a regular course in sociology in the Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux, enabled us to devote ourselves early to the study of social science and, indeed, to make it our vocation. Therefore, we have been able to abandon these general questions (of philosophical sociology) and to attack a certain number of definite problems. The very force of events has thus led us to construct a method that is, we believe, more precise and more exactly adapted to the distinctive characteristics of social phenomena” (Ibid. p. ix.).

(28) Durkheim dit not actually completely eliminate data on individuals, even when consistency called for this. Through his Aristotelian ideas concerning causality, Durkheim retained a form of negative (nay-saying) causality for individuals. This was a form of material causality whereas the efficient causality, which is what concerns science, was society. For an analysis of such aspects of Durkheim's argument see Appendix II, “The Individual and Society in Durkheim's Suicide”, of Douglas, Jack D., The Social Meanings of Suicide, forthcoming by Princeton University Press, 1967.Google Scholar

(29) The statistical method of argument would surely not be sufficient in itself to explain this elimination of data on individuals. Besides the factors of founding an independent profession, there were other intellectual forces leading in the same direction: political theory had come to treat the nation state as independent of the individual members; race psychology had developed ideas of extraindividual, meaningful forces causing actions by individuals: and the organic analogy was a powerful one throughout the nineteenth century.

(30) See Picavet, F., Les idéologues (Paris 1891).Google Scholar

(31) Recherches statistiques sur le suicide (Paris 1844).Google Scholar

(32) Du suicide (Paris 1856).Google Scholar

(33) Die Moralstatistik (Erlangen 1882).Google Scholar

(34) Die Gesetzmössigkeitin den scheinbar willhurlichen menschlichen Handlungen (Hamberu 1864).Google Scholar

(35) Cours élémentaires de statistique (Paris 1895).Google Scholar

(36) This interpretation of Durkheim's Suicide has previously been established in the author's The Social Meanings of Suicide, Part I, chap, 1 and 2, forthcoming by Princeton University Press. The whole history of the social research of these many schools has been dealt with in The Rise of Social Research, ed. by Anthony Oberschall and Jack D. Douglas, forthcoming by Harper and Row.

(37) Since there are some who would probably dispute calling Durkheim's Suicide a work of moralstatistics we should point out that Suicide was reviewed in the first volume of l'Année sociologique (1896–1897), 397–406Google Scholar, under the general category of “Statistique morale”. We might also point out that the unnamed author of this review was very critical of Durkheim's “denying” all causal significance to individual factors.

(38) Chateaubriand was especially important in this respect. For some of the details on this relationship see Douglas, Jack D., The Sociological Study of Suicide: Suicidal Actions as Socially Meaningful Actions (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, Princeton University, Princeton), pp. 20–26.Google Scholar

(39) This formulation of Durkheim's task leaves out of consideration the very important intellectual warfare aspect of Suicide, that is, the task of justifying the independent existence of a profession of sociology. This is very important for understanding the whole work but not for understanding that part of it which concerns us here.

(40) Especially valuable in this respect is Rumsey, H.W., Essays and Papers on Some Fallacies of Statistics (London 1875).Google Scholar

(41) For a consideration of the many dimensions of meaning involved in attempts to formally define “suicide” and of the implications of this for determining the common-sense meanings of suicide, see Douglas, Jack, “The Social Aspects of Suicide”Google Scholar, forthcoming in volume IX of the new International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences; and Appendix I of The Social Meanings of Suicide, op. cit.

(42) Halbwachs, M., Les causes du suicide (Paris 1930)Google Scholar. (The author is currently preparing an English edition of The Causes of Suicide, to be published by the University of California Press.)

(43) This had in fact been noted by Buckle in a footnote concerning errors in the addresses of London mail, but he failed to draw the general implication.

(44) The whole argument and mass of data against the validity and reliability of official statistics on suicide has been dealt with in great detail in Part III of Douglas, Jack D., The Sociological Study of Suicide, op. cit. pp. 259–406.Google Scholar

(45) Ibid.

Most of the previous arguments against the use of official statistics have been by psychiatrists. (See, especially, the fine work by Achille-Delmas, F., Psychologie pathologique du suicide (Paris, Alcan, 1933)Google Scholar. Though these works have often been right in particulars, they have never tried to show that there exist (systematic) biases in the statistics and that these biases are related to the social structure and the official categorization processes in specific ways.

(46) De Boismont was especially important in this manner and probably provided most of Durkheim's knowledge of individual cases of suicide. See Jack D. Douglas, ibid. pp. 20–112.

(47) See, especially, Rodney Needham's, “Introduction” to Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M., Primitive Classification (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. xiii–xv.Google Scholar

(48) Bayet, A., Le suicide et la morale (Paris, Alcan, 1922), p. 3.Google Scholar

(49) Roger Lacombe, in his excellent general critique of La méthode sociologique de Durkheim (Paris, Alcan, 1926)Google Scholar has argued that the fundamental weakness of Durkheim's whole method was his failure to recognize the need for any scientific means of determining the inner (psychological) meanings which Durkheim believed to be the causes of social actions. Lacombe did not, however, see the reasons for this in the very nature of Durkheim's positivistic method nor did he have a specific solution to offer to the problem.

(50) As Bayet (op. cit.) argued so excellently, Durkheim's whole “realist” conception of law and its relations to morality and actions is completely untenable. Bayet, however, did not see that this method of analyzing moral meanings was a necessary outcome of Durkheim's whole method.

(51) Morselli, H., Suicide, op. cit. p. 305.Google Scholar

(52) Durkheim, E., Suicide, op. cit. pp. 215–216.Google Scholar

(53) The whole argument concerning this interpretation of Suicide can be found in Part I of Douglas, Jack D., The Social Meanings of SuicideGoogle Scholar, forthcoming by Princeton University Press.

(54) Though being very cautious in criticizing the master of the French school, Halbwachs clearly saw the reliance of Suicide upon the “dialectique”:

«En fermant cet ouvrage, plus d'un lecteur, surtout plus d'un lecteur philosophe, a sans doute eu le sentiment que le problème du suicide ne se posait plus, et qu'on connaissait désormais la solution. Est-ce la dialectique, sont-ce les statistiques qui emportaient la conviction? L'un et l'autre sans qu'on sut bien toujours distinguer ce qui était l'autre. Quelquefois la dialectique plus que les faits, non par la faute de Durkheim d'ailleurs. Mais cela présentait plus d'un inconvénient. On ne s'apercevait pas que l'édifice reposait sur des fondements qui n'étaient point partout aussi solides. Comment en eût-il été autrement? II n'y a pas d'œuvre scientifique que de nouvelles expériences n'obligent à réviser et compléter.» Halbwachs, M.. Les causes du suicide, op. cit., p. 3.Google Scholar

(55) The inadequacies and the limits of usefulness of psychological and psychiatric case studies of suicide have been analyzed at length in Douglas, Jack D., The Sociological Study of Suicide, op. cit. pp. 377–406.Google Scholar

(56) The determination and analysis of the social meanings of suicide in other cultures poses very difficult problems. The best attempt to do so thus far is Devereux, G.'s Mohave Ethnopsychiatry and Suicide (Washington, U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1961).Google Scholar

(57) See Douglas, Jack D., The Social Meanings of Suicide, op. cit., Part. IV.Google Scholar

(58) For a detailed presentation of the various formal, theoretical definitions of “suicide” see Schneider, P.B., La tentafive de suicide (Paris, Delachaux, 1954), pp. 9–59Google Scholar. For an analysis of these dimensions of meanings in the formal definitions, see Douglas, Jack D., Appendix II, The Social Meanings of Suicide, op. cit.Google Scholar

(59) The author is currently analysing the cross-cultural “revenge” meanings of suicide in a work entitled Revenge Suicide, to be published by Prentice-Hall.

(60) Harvey Sacks has previously analyzed these patterns of meanings in “No One to Turn to”, in Schneidman, E., ed., Essays in Self-Destruction, to be published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar

(61) See Douglas, Jack D., Tine Sociological Study of Suicide, op. cit. pp. 440–511.Google Scholar

(62) We should point out that throughout this paper we have discussed and concentrated on “suicide” rather than on the very broad spectrum of different social categories of “suicidal” phenomena in the Western world. The reason for this is simply one of simplification. We could not discuss other categories in any detail in such a brief work. The general properties of “suicide” probably hold for these other categories, but there are many important, specific differences. (Some of these have been discussed briefly in Douglas, Jack D., The Social Meanings of Suicide, op. cit.)Google Scholar

(63) Quoted from Stengel, and Cook, , Attempted Suicide (London, Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 56.Google Scholar

(64) Psychologists and sociologists have very generally come to consider “suicide” to be one form of “aggression”. See, for example, Henry, A.F. and Short, J.F., Suicide and Homicide: Some Economic, Sociological and Psychological Aspects of Aggression (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1954)Google Scholar. They have not seen, however, that the success of such an aggressive intent is due to the reflexive nature of the social meanings of suicide. They have really missed the whole social nature of such an action.

(65) One can construct the meanings of his suicidal actions in such a way as to “blame the world”or “blame Hollywood” (as seems to have been partially true in the death of Marilyn Monroe) and so on. However, because our commonsense theories of persons tend to strongly emphasize persons as the causal factors in explaining our actions, it is especially easy to see other individuals as the something that is to blame for a suicidal action.

(66) This case is quoted from Dublin, Louis I. and Bunzel, Bessie, To Be or Not To Be (New York, Smith and Haas, 1933) pp. 294–295.Google Scholar

(67) Hendin has tried to show that in Denmark persons are believed to be not only a fundamental cause of the actions of others, as they are in the whole Western World, but that they should be held responsible for the actions of others far more than is the case in most of the United States. It would thus seem that the fundamental difference, a difference which makes it far more possible to use suicidal actions as a threat (thus to achieve whatever one wants to achieve) and as revenge, is due to a difference in the social definition of “responsibility” for the actions (welfare, etc.) of others, rather than in any difference in definitions of the causality of such events. See Hendin, , Suicide and Scandinavia (New YorkGrune and Stratton, 1964), pp. 28–29.Google Scholar

This example brings up the whole problem of sub-cultural patternings in the meanings of suicide. Clearly there are such patternings, some of which are national. (“Romantic suicide” in Germany would be another instance.) However, though little is known about them as yet, they seem to be variations on the generally shared patterns.

(68) Here we have had to bring in some of the other dimensions and patterns of the social meanings of suicide. This shows the fundamental need for a general comparative approach in which one sees each pattern or dimension in the context of all the others. Any other approach completely distorts the meanings. (This has been done in Part IV of Douglas, Jack D., The Social Meanings of Suicide, op. cit.)Google Scholar

(69) This whole analysis has been taken from The Social Meanings of Suicide.

(70) An extensive analysis of such a suicidal process has been given in Chap. V of Part IV in Ibid.

(71) Deshaies, G., Psychologic du suicide (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1947)Google Scholar. (This case has been translated by the author of this essay.)

(72) This suggested “primacy effect” is one of the very many properties of communications which one would have to understand quite well before he could give any nearly definitive interpretations of the meanings of suicidal phenomena.

(73) This analysis has been taken from Part IV of Douglas, Jack D., The Social Meanings of Suicide, op. cit.Google Scholar