ORIENTATIONS TOWARD DEATH

A Vital Aspect of the Study of Lives

Edwin S. Shneidman

I t is both stimulating and depressing to contemplate the fact that at this

period in man's history, when, at long last, one can find a few genuine
indications of straightforward discussions and investigations of death,
these pursuits come at the time of man's terrible new-found capacity
to destroy his works and to decimate his kind. For these reasons, it may
be said that a special kind of intellectual and affective permissiveness,
born out of a sense of urgency, now exists for man's greater understanding of his own death and destruction.
For the past few years, a number of us engaged in activities related to the prevention of suicide have habitually looked upon instances
of suicidal phenomena as manifestations of a major scourge, involving,
as they inevitably do, untimely death for the victim and generally stigmatized lives for the survivors. My own special interest in the classification of death phenomena is one outcome of this group concern with
suicidal behaviors.1 The purpose of this chapter is to stimulate a rethinking of conventional notions of death and suicide. A further purpose
is to attempt to create a psychologically oriented classification of death
phenomenaan ordering based in large part on the role of the individual in his own demise.
Reflections on death, including suicide, are found in some of man's
earliest written works. Death and suicide have been depicted and reified
in various ways; numerous misconceptions have grown up around these
1 At the Suicide Prevention Center (supported by the U. S. Public Health
Service) and at the Central Research Unit for the Study of Unpredicted Deaths
(supported by the Veterans Administration)both in Los Angeles. The group includes Norman L. Farberow, Robert E. Litman, and Norman Tabachnick. Some of
the efforts of this group are reflected in the following: E. S. Shneidman and N. L.
Farberow, eds., Clues to Suicide (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), and N. L.
Farberow and E. S. Shneidman, eds., The Cry for Help (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1961). This chapter was written while the author was a U. S. Public Health Service
Special Research Fellow (1961-1962), in the Department of Social Relations,
Harvard University, studying with Henry A. Murray.

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topics. These proliferated intellectual overgrowths are not the specimens

that we wish to describe here. Rather, we have to see them as encumbering underbrush that must be cleared away before we can come to the
heart of the problem. This is the task to which I now turn.
"IDOLS," OR FALSE NOTIONS ABOUT DEATH AND SUICIDE
This section might have been entitled "A Few Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Suicide and the Nature of Death." Such a
heading would, of course, be a minor variation of a theme in Bacon's
Novum Organum. As in Bacon's day, there are "idols and false notions
which are now in possession of the human understanding." Bacon enumerated four classes of "idols" (or fallacies): Idols of the Tribe, Idols
of the Cave, Idols of the Market Place, and Idols of the Theater. Of
particular interest to us in the present context are the Idols of the Cave
"the idols of the individual man, for everyone . . . has a cave or den
of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature."2 In respect
to suicide and death each person figuratively builds for himself, in relation to the cryptic topics of life and death, his own (mis) conceptual
vault of beliefs, understandings, and orientations"Idols of the Grave,"
as I will call them. Further, I would propose five subcategories of these
Idols of the Grave, specifically as they concern: (1) the role of classification or taxonomy in treating dying or suicidal people; (2) the classification of suicidal phenomena; (3) the relationships between suicidal
and death phenomena; (4) the classification of death phenomena; and
(5) the concept of death itself.
The Idol That Maximally Effective Programs of Prevention and Treatment Can Be Developed in the Absence of Taxonomic Understanding
Although one's associations to the word taxonomythe discipline
whose purpose it is to develop concise methods for classifying knowledge
are primarily to the fields of botany and zoology, I wish to focus on
the role of taxonomy in the healing arts and sciences. I t has been axiomatic in these disciplines that definitive therapies or cures stem from
accurate diagnosis and that accurate diagnoses can hardly exist in the
absence of meaningful (including taxonomic) understanding of the phenomena. Before one can meaningfully and efficiently treat, protect, and
help, one must understand; paradoxically, however, the heart of understanding lies in meaningful classification. In the area of mental health
(especially in the areas concerning death and suicide), meaningful taxonomies would seem to be the professionals' sine qua non for effective
2 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorisms XXXVIII, XXXIX, XLII and
LIII.

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diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. All this is not to imply that there
have not been classifications of death and suicidal phenomena but rather
to suggest that we must continue to attend to the classificatory aspect of
our enterprise if we mean to increase, over the years, our effectiveness
an effectiveness which must rest on expanded understanding.
The Idol That the Present Classifications of Suicidal Phenomena Are
Meaningful
The use of an illustration may be the best introduction to this topic.
A woman of around thirty years of age was seen on the ward of a large
general hospital after she had been returned from surgery. She had, a
few hours before, shot herself in the head with a .22 caliber revolver,
the result being that she had enucleated an eye and torn away part of
her frontal lobe. Emergency surgical and medical procedures had been
employed. When she was seen in bed subsequent to surgery, her head
was enveloped in bandages, and the appropriate tubes and needles were
in her. Her chart indicated that she had attempted to kill herself, the
diagnosis being "attempted suicide." It happened that in the next bed
there was another young woman of about the same age. She had been
permitted to occupy the bed for a few hours to "rest" prior to going
home, having come to the hospital that day because she had cut her
left wrist with a razor blade. The physical trauma was relatively superficial and required but two stitches. She had had, she said, absolutely
no lethal intention, but had definitely wished to jolt her husband into
attending to what she wanted to say to him about his drinking habits.
Her words to him had been, "Look at me, I'm bleeding." She had taken
this course after she had, in conversation with her husband, previously
threatened suicide. Her chart, too, indicated a diagnosis of "attempted
suicide."
Common sense should tell us that if we obtained scientific data from
these two casespsychiatric anamnestic data, psychological test data,
etc.and then grouped these materials under the single rubric of "attempted sucide," we would obviously run the risk of masking precisely
the differences which we might wish to explore. Common sense might
further tell us that the first woman could most appropriately be labeled
as a case of "committed suicide" (even though she was alive), and the
second woman as "nonsuicidal" (even though she had cut her wrist with
a razor blade). But, aside from the issue of what would be the most appropriate diagnosis in each case, it still seems evident that collating
these two casesand hundreds of similar instancesunder the common
heading of "attempted suicide" might definitely limit rather than extend the range of our potential understanding.

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Individuals with clear lethal intention, as well as those with ambivalent or no lethal intention, are currently grouped under the heading
of attempted suicide: we know that individuals can attempt to attempt,
attempt to commit, attempt to be nonsuicidal. All this comes about
largely because of oversimplification as to types of causes and a confusion
between modes and purpose. (The law punishes the holdup man with
the unloaded or toy gun, precisely because the victim must assume
that the bandit has, by virtue of his holding a "gun," covered himself with
the semantic mantle "gunman.") One who cries "help" while holding a
razor blade is deemed by society to be suicidal. Although it is true that
the act of putting a shotgun in one's mouth and pulling the trigger
with one's toe is almost always related to lethal self-intention, this particular relationship between method and intent does not hold for most
other methods, such as ingesting barbiturates or cutting oneself with a
razor. In most cases the intentions may range all the way from deadly
ones, through the wide variety of ambivalences, rescue fantasies, cries for
help, and psychic indecisions, all the way to clearly formulated nonlethal
intention in which a semantic usurpation of a "suicidal" mode has been
consciously employed.
It may not be inaccurate to state that in this century there have
been two major theoretical approaches to suicide: the sociological and
the psychological, identified with the names of Durkheim and Freud,
respectively. Durkheim's delineation of etiological types of suicide
anomic, altruistic, and egoisticis probably the best-known classification.3 For my part, I have often felt that this famous typology of suicidal
behaviors has behaved like a brilliantly conceived sociologic motorcycle
(anomie) with two psychological sidecars, performing effectively in textbooks for over half a century, but running low on power in clinics, hospitals, and consultation rooms. This classification epitomizes some of
the strengths and shortcomings of any study based almost entirely on a
social, normative, tabular, nomothetic approach. It is probably fair to
say, however, that Durkheim was not so much interested in suicide per
se, as he was in the explication of his general sociological method.
Freud's psychological formulation of suicide, as hostility directed
toward the introjected love objectwhat I have called "murder in the
180th degree"was more a brilliant inductive encompassment than an
empirical, scientific particularization.4 This concept was given its most
far-reaching exposition by Karl Menninger, who, in Man Against Himself, not only outlined four types of suicidechronic, focal, organic, and
3 fimile Durkheim, Suicide, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson
(Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1951), originally published as Le Svicide (1897).
4 Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," Collected Papers (London:
Hogarth Press, 1924), IV, 162-163; and "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," ibid., I I , 220.

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actualbut also proposed three basic psychological components: the

wish to kill, the wish to be killed, and the wish to die.5
Neither of these two theoretical approaches to the nature and
causes of suicide constitutes the classification most common in everyday
clinical use. That distinction belongs to a rather homely, supposedly
common-sense division, which in its barest form implies that all humanity can be divided into two groupings, suicidal and nonsuicidal, and
then divides the suicidal category into committed, attempted, and threatened.8 Although the second classification is superior to the suicidal-versusnonsuicidal view of life, that it is not theoretically nor practically adequate
for understanding and treatment is one of the main tenets of this chapter. It may well be that the word suicide currently has too many loose
and contradictory meanings to be scientifically or clinically useful.
The Idol That Living and Dying Are Separate
Living and dying have too often been seen erroneously as distinct,
separate, almost dichotomous activities. To correct this view one can
enunciate another, which might be called the psychodynamics of dying.
One of its tenets is that, in cases where an individual is dying over a
period of time, which may vary from hours to years in persons who
"linger" in terminal illnesses, this interval is a psychologically consistent
extension of styles of coping, defending, adjusting, interacting, and other
modes of behavior that have characterized that individual during most
of his life up to that time. Feifel says, "A man's birth is an uncontrolled
event in his life, but the manner of his departure from life bears a definite relation to his philosophy of life and death. We are mistaken to
consider death as a purely biological event. The attitudes concerning it
and its meaning for the individual can serve as an important organizing
principle in determining how he conducts himself in life."7 How an individual dies should no less reflect his personal philosophy, the goodness
of his personal adjustment, his sense of fruition, fulfillment, self-realization. Feifel further states that ". . . types of reactions to impending
death are a function of interweaving factors. Some of the significant
ones appear to be . . . the psychological maturity of the individual; the
kind of coping techniques available to him; variables of religious orienta5 Karl Menninger, Man Against Himself (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,
1938).
6 This important distinction was made by Norman L. Farberow in 1950, "Personality Patterns of Suicidal Mental Hospital Patients," Genetic Psychology Monographs, XLII (1950), 3-79, and supported in 1954 by A. Rosen, W. M. Hales, and
W. Simon, "Classification of 'Suicidal' Patients," Journal of Consulting Psychology,
XVIII (1954), 359-362.
7 Herman Feifel, ed., The Meaning of Death (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959),
p. 128.

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tion, age, socio-economic status, etc.; severity of the organic process; and
the attitudes of the significant persons in the patient's world."8
Dr. Arthur P. Noyes is reported to have said, "As we grow older,
we grow more like ourselves." I believe that this illuminating but somewhat cryptic remark can also be taken to mean that during the dying
period, the individual displays behaviors and attitudes which contain
great fealty to his lifelong orientations and beliefs. Draper says: "Each
man dies in a notably personal way."9 Suicidal and/or dying behaviors
do not exist in vacuo, but are an integral part of the life style of the individual.10
The Idol That the Traditional Classification of Death Phenomena Is
Clear
The International Classification of the Causes of Death lists 137
causes, such as pneumonia, meningitis, malignant neoplasms, myocardial
infarctions11; but, in contrast, there are only four commonly recognized
modes of death: natural death, accident, suicide, and homicide. In some
cases, cause of death is used synonymously to indicate the natural cause
of death. Thus, the standard U. S. Public Health Service Certificate of
Death has a space to enter cause of death (implying the mode as natural) and, in addition, provides opportunity to indicate accident, suicide,
or homicide. Apparently, it is implied that these four modes of death
constitute the final ordering into which each of us must be classified.
The fact that some of us do not fit easily into one of these four crypts
is the substance for this section.
The shortcoming of the common classification is that, in its oversimplification and failure to take into account certain necessary dimensions, it often poses serious problems in classifying deaths meaningfully.
The basic ambiguities can be seen most clearly by focusing on the distinctions between natural (intrasomatic) and accidental (extrasomatic)
deaths. On the face of it, the argument can be advanced that most
deaths, especially in the younger years, are unnatural. Perhaps only in
the cases of death of old age might the termination of life legitimately
sibid., p. 126.
8 George Draper, C. W. Dupertuis, and J. L. Caughley, Human Constitution in
Clinical Medicine (New York: Hoeber, 1944), p. 74.
10 A practical extension of this belief is contained in the "psychological autopsies" that the professional staff of the Suicide Prevention Center conducts in connection with the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office in the certification of equivocal
or possible suicidal deaths. See Theodore J. Curphey, "The Role of the Social
Scientist in the Medicolegal Certification of Death from Suicide," and Edwin S.
Shneidman and Norman L. Farberow, "Sample Investigation of Equivocal
Suicidal Deaths," in The Cry for Help, op. cit., pp. 110-117 and 118-128, respectively.
11 International Classification of Causes of Death.

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be called natural. Let us examine the substance of some of these confusions. If an individual (who wishes to continue living) has his skull
invaded by a lethal object, his death is called accidental; if another individual (who also wishes to continue living) is invaded by a lethal virus,
his death is called natural. An individual who torments an animal into
killing him is said to have died an accidental death, whereas an individual who torments a drunken companion into killing him is called a
homicidal victim. An individual who has an artery burst in his brain
is said to have died with a cerebral-vascular accident, whereas it might
make more sense to call it a cerebral-vascular natural death. What has
been confusing in this traditional approach is that the individual has been
viewed as a kind of biological object (rather than psychological, social,
biological organism), and as a consequence, the role of the individual in
his own demise has been omitted.
The Idol That the Concept "Death" Is Itself Operationally Sound
We come now to what for some may be the most radical and iconoclastic aspect of our presentation so far, specifically the suggestion that
a major portion of the concept of "death" is operationally meaningless
and ought therefore to be eschewed. Let the reader ask the question of
the author: "Do you mean to say that you wish to discuss suicidal phenomena and orientations toward death without the concept of death?"
The author's answer is in the affirmative, based, he believes, on compelling reasons. Essentially, these reasons are epistemological, that is,
they have to do with the process of knowing and the question of what
it is that we can know. Our main source of quotable strengthand we
shall have occasion later to refer to him in a very different contextis
the physicist Percy W. Bridgman. Essentially, his concept is that death
is not experienceable, that if one could experience it, one would not be
dead. One can experience another's dying and another's death and his
own dyingalthough he can never be surebut no man can experience
his own death.
In his book The Intelligent Individual and Society, Bridgman states
this view as follows:
There are certain kinks in our thinking which are of such universal occurrence as to constitute essential limitations. Thus the urge to think of my
own death as some form of my experience is almost irresistible. However, it
requires only to be said for me to admit that my own death cannot be a
form of experience, for if I could still experience, then by definition it
would not be death. Operationally my own death is a fundamentally different thing from the death of another in the same way that my own feelings mean something fundamentally different from the feelings of another.
The death of another I can experience; there are certain methods of recognizing death and certain properties of death that affect my actions in the

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case of others. Again it need not bother us to discover that the concept
of death in another is not sharp, and situations may arise in practice where
it is difficult to say whether the organism is dead or not, particularly if one
sticks to the demand that "death" must be such a thing that when the
organism is once dead it cannot live again. This demand rests on mystical
feelings, and there is no reason why the demand should be honored in framing the definition of death. . . . My own death is such a different thing
that it might well have a different word, and perhaps eventually will. There
is no operation by which I can decide whether I am dead; " I am always
alive."12
This pragmatic view of deathin the strict philosophical sense of
pragmatismis stated most succinctly (in a side remark about death)
by the father of pragmatism. Peirce, in discussing metaphysics, says:
We start then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of
negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the
ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure
zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death,
which also comes second to, or after, everything.13
I n literature this concept of death as nothingness seems to have appeared early and remained.
Two further thoughts on death as experience. Not only, as we have
seen, is death misconceived as an experience, but (a) i t is further misconceived as a bitter or calamitous experience, and (b) it is still further
misconceived as an act, as though dying were something that one had to
do. On the contrary, dying can be a supreme passivity rather than the
supreme act or activity. I t will be done for you; dying is one thing that
no one has to "do."14
I n addition to this philosophical aspect of the situation, there is
also the reflection that one's own death is really psychologically inconceivable. Possibly the most appropriate quotation in this connection is
from the twentieth-century giant of depth psychology. I n his paper on
"Thoughts of War and Death," Freud wrote:
Our own death is indeed unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can conceive that we really survive as spectators.
Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that at
bottom no one believes in his own death, or to put the thing in another
12 Percy W. Bridgman, The Intelligent Individual and Society (New YorkMacmillan, 1938), p. 168. See also pp. 168-173 and Percy W. Bridgman, The
Way Things Are (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 23413 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958), V I , 148.
" I am indebted to Prof. Abraham Kaplan of the Philosophy Department of
U.C.L.A. for this insight and information.

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way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.15

Indeed, the word "death" has become a repository for pervasive
logical and epistemological confusions"Idols of the Dead." The first
order of business might well be to clarify the concepts presently embedded in our current notions of death. For my part, I would wish to
eschew, where possible, the concept of death and, instead, use concepts
and terms which are operationally viable. This is the text of the present
section, the content of the next section, and the burden of this essay.
CESSATION, TERMINATION, INTERRUPTION,
AND CONTINUATION
In the preceding section, I have been critical of some current concepts relating to suicide and death. In this section I wish to propose a
tentative psychological classification of all behaviors involving demise.
Two sets of key concepts are involved: the first is made up of the terms
cessation, termination, interruption, and continuation; the second, of the
terms intentioned, subintentioned, unintentioned, and contraintentioned.
At this point, our first tasks are those of definition.
Cessation
The key concept in this chapter is the idea of "cessation."16 In this
context, cessation has a psychological, specifically introspective referent.
Our definition of "cessation" is that it is the stopping of the potentiality
of any (further) conscious experience. "Death"some form of terminationis the universal and ubiquitous ending of all living things; but only
man, by virtue of his verbally reportable introspective mental life, can
conceptualize, fear, and suffer cessation. Cessation refers to the last line
of the last scene of the last act of the last drama of that actor. It should
be immediately obvious that different individualsand any particular
individual at different timescan have a variety of attitudes and orientations toward their cessations. The next section contains an explication
of possible orientations toward cessation. Cessation is used here not as
a synonym for the word death, but rather as its operationally defined
15 Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts on War and Death," Collected Papers, op. cit.,
IV, 304-305. And Miguel de Unamuno, who is probably as nonpsychoanalytic as
it is possible for a cultivated twentieth-century human to be, says, in his chapter
entitled "The Hunger for Immortality" in The Tragic Sense of Life (p. 38) : "It is
impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves as not existing, and no effort is
capable of enabling consciousness to realize absolute unconsciousness, its own
annihilation."
16 The term "cessation'' is used in this present sense by Bridgman on at least two
occasions, both in The Intelligent Individual and Society (New York: Macmillan,
1938), pp. 169, 225.

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substitute. Also, in order to have a shorthand term for cessation, I shall

use the term "Psyde," referring, so to speak, to the demise of the psychic
processesthe final stopping of the individual consciousness, as far as
we know.17
Termination
The concept of "termination"which is defined as the stopping of
the physiological functions of the bodyis needed because there can occur the stopping of the potentiality of conscious experience (cessation)
which is not temporally coincident with the stopping of the functions
of the body. Our shorthand word for termination is "Somize," referring to
the demise of the soma. Consider the report of the following incident:
A young man was, while riding as a passenger on a motorcycle, hit by
an automobile and thrown several yards through the air. He landed on
his head at a curbside. At the hospital, this case was regarded as remarkable, because, although his skull was crushed and although he
showed no evidence of any conscious experience and even had a rather
complete absence of reflexes, he was kept alive for many days by means
of intravenous feeding, catheter relief, and many other life-extending
pieces of mechanical apparatus. Eventually he "expired." The conceptual
point to be made in this context is that he suffered cessation the moment
that his head hit the pavement. So, although he had ceased, he had not
terminated, in that he continued to breathe. No one would have thought
to suggest that he be buried or cremated as long as he was still breathing.
A further point can be made: the operational definition (or criterion) for
termination can be put at the stopping of the exchange of gases between
the human organism and his environment, i.e., an individual may be
said to be terminated when, if a mirror is put to his mouth, there is no
frosting on the glassthe subsequent growth of his beard or other activities do not matter.18 If cessation relates to the psychological personality, then termination has to do with the biological organism. I t is useful
to distinguish between cessation and termination. We all know that it is
possible for an individual to put a gun to his head, planning to "blow
his brains out" (termination) and yet believe that he will be at his own
funeral, that he will be able to check whether or not his widow follows
the instructions in his suicide note (without cessation). In order not to
be entrapped by the confusion that exists in many minds concerning
these two concepts, we must clarify them in our own.
17 I am indebted to Prof. James Diggory, of the Psychology Department of the
University of Pennsylvania, for suggesting this term to me.
18 "I know when one is dead and when one lives; She's as dead as earth. Lend
me a looking glass; If her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why, then she
lives." King Lear, Act V, Scene 3.

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Interruption
The third concept of this group is that of interruption, which relates not to termination but to cessation. If cessation has to do with the
stopping of the potentiality of any conscious experience, then interruption is in a sense its opposite, in that "interruption" is defined as the
stopping of consciousness with the actuality, and usually the expectation,
of further conscious experiences. It is a kind of temporary cessation. The
best example of an interruption state is being asleep; others are being
under an anaesthetic, in an alcoholic stupor, in a diabetic coma, in an
epileptic seizure, and, on another level, being in a fugue, amnesic, or dissociative state. The primary purpose of introducing the notion of interruption states is to provide a concept whereby dataespecially those
which could be obtained from experimental situationsmight serve as
paradigms, analogues, models, or patterns for certain cessation conditions. For exampleand more will be said about this laterit might
be possible to devise paradigms having to do with sleep behavior that
will give us fresh leads and new insights into suicidal behaviors, which
a direct approach would not yield.
Continuation
When one works with suicidal people clinically and investigates,
through "psychological autopsies," cases of suicide, one often gets the
impression that individuals who, in point of fact, have killed themselves,
have not necessarily "committed suicide." That is to say, in some cases,
it seems that the person's intention was not to embrace death but rather
to find surcease from external or internalized aspects of life. In the context of this chapter, we shall call the process of living "continuation."
"Continuation" can be defined as experiencing, in the absence of interruption, the stream of temporally contiguous conscious events. From this
point of view, our lives are made up of a series of alternating continuation and interruption states.
One might find a group of nonlethally oriented "suicide attempters"
each of whom wished to postpone cessationwho, individually, might
manifest quite different patterns of orientation toward continuation.
The nuances of these patterns might well include the following: (a) patterns of ambivalence (coexistent wishes to live and to die, including rescue fantasies, gambles with death, and cries for help); (b) the state of
hopefulness or hopelessness, and accompanying feelings of psychological
impotence; (c) patterns of self-righteousness, indignation, inner resourcefulness, defeat, and ennui; (d) orientations toward the next temporal
interval, whether one of blandness, inertia, habit, interest, anticipation,
expectation, or demand; (e) intensity of thought and action in relation
to continuation, ranging from absent (no thought about it), through fleet-

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ing fantasy, concern, obsession, and rash behavior outburst, to deliberate

performance. Continuation is the converse of cessation. It would be important to know, in any particular case, how an individual's attitudes
toward continuation interacted with his orientations toward cessation.
In addition to this, we could say that a comprehensive study of suicidal
phenomena should include concern for nonsuicidal phenomena and such
perverse questions as what a specific individual has to live for or why a
specific individual does not commit suicide.
BASIC ORIENTATIONS TOWARD CESSATION
The operation which gives meaning to the phrase "basic orientation
toward cessation" has to do with the role of the individual in his own
demise. By "role of the individual" is meant his overt and covert behaviors and nonbehaviors which reflect conscious and unconscious attributes relevant to his cessation. These include at least the following:
his attitudes and beliefs about death, cessation, hereafter, and rebirth;
his ways of thinking; his need systems, including his needs for achievement, affiliation, autonomy, and dominance; his dyadic relationships,
especially the subtleties of dependencies and hostilities in relation to the
significant people in his life; the hopefulness and hopelessness in the responses of these people to his cries for help; the constellation and balance
of ego activity and ego passivity; his orientations toward continuation
states. To know these facts about a person would well require a comprehensive psychological understanding of his personality.
Four subcategories relating to the role of the individual in his own
demise are suggested: intentioned, subintentioned, unintentioned, and
contraintentioned.
Intentioned
By intentioned, I refer to those cases in which the individual plays
a direct and conscious role in his own demise. These cases do not refer
to persons who wish for "death" or termination, but rather to those who
actively precipitate their cessation. (Of course, cessation cannot be
avoided by anyone. The entire issue is one of timing and involves postponing and hastening.) In terms of the traditional categories of death,
no presently labeled accidental or natural deaths would be called intentioned, some homicidal deaths might be called intentioned, and most
(but, importantly, not all) suicidal deaths would be called intentioned.
In relation to the term "suicide," intentioned cases may be said to have
committed suicide. Using the word "Psyde" to represent cessation, we can
list a number of subcategories: (1) Psyde-seekers; (2) Psyde-initiators;
(3) Psyde-ignorers; and (4) Psyde-darers.
1. Psyde-seeker. A Psyde-seeker is one who, during the time that he

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can be so labeled, has consciously verbalized to himself his wish for an

ending to all conscious experience and behaves in order to achieve this
end. The operational criteria for a Psyde-seeker lie not primarily in the
method he usesrazor, barbiturate, carbon monoxidebut in the fact
that the method in his mind is calculated to bring him cessation; and,
whatever his rescue fantasies or cries for help may be, he does the act
in such a manner and site that rescue (or intervention) is realistically unlikely or impossible. In all, he has a predominantly unambivalent intention
or orientation toward cessation during that period. The phrase "during
that period" is meant to convey the notion that individuals' orientations
toward cessation shift and change over time.19 A person who was a
Psyde-seeker yesterday and made a most serious suicidal act then, could
not today be forced to participate in activities that might cost him his life.
It is known clinicallyas supported by our experience at the Suicide
Prevention Centerthat many individuals are "suicidal" for only a relatively brief period of time; so that if they can be given appropriate
sanctuary, they will no longer seek Psyde and will wish to continue to live
as long as possible.
2. Psyde-initiator.20 A Psyde-initiator is a Psyde-seeker, but sufficiently
different to warrant a separate label. A Psyde-initiator believes that he will
suffer cessation in the fairly near futurea matter of days or weeksor
he believes that he is failing and, not wishing to accommodate himself
to a new (and less effective and less virile) image of himself, does not
wish to let "it" happen to him. Rather, he wants to play a role in its
occurrence. Thus he will do it for himself, at his own time, and on his
own terms. In our investigations at the Veterans Administration Central
Research Unit for the Study of Unpredicted Death we find, on occasion,
a case in which an older person, hospitalized in a general medical hospital, in the terminal stages of a fatal disease will, with remarkable and
totally unexpected energy and strength, take the tubes and needles out
of himself, climb over the bed rails, lift a heavy window, and throw himself to the ground several stories below. What is most prototypical about
such an individual is that, when one looks at his previous occupational
19 The Psyde-states described herein are meant to describe only the current
status (vis-a-vis cessation) of the individual. Thus, one would, in any complete description of an individual, need also a biphasic taxonomy which describes the
relatively chronic, pervasive, characterological, "presuicidal" aspects of his psychological make-up.
20 This concept of the initiator was developed primarily by Mrs. Calista V.
Leonard of the staff of the V. A. Central Research Unit and is described in her
article, "A Theory of Suicide: The Implementor" (unpublished paper, Veterans
Administration Central Research Unit, Los Angeles, 1962). See also the section on
the unaccepting patient in E. S. Shneidman, N. L. Farberow, and Calista V.
Leonard, "Suicide-Evaluation and Treatment of Suicidal Risk Among Schizophrenic Patients in Psychiatric Hospitals," Medical Bulletin MB-8 (Washington,
D.C.: Veterans Administration, Department of Medicine and Surgery, 1962).

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EDWIN S. SHNEIDMAN

history, one sees that he has never been firedhe has always quit. In
either case, the person ends up unemployed, but the role he has played
in the process is different.21
3. Psyde-ignorer. Consider the following suicide note: "Good-by,
kid. You couldn't help it. Tell that brother of yours, when he gets to
where I'm going, I hope I'm a foreman down there; I might be able to
do something for him." Although it is true that suicide notes which
contain any reference to a hereafter, a continued existence, or a reunion
with dead loved ones are relatively very rare (see Appendix to Clues to
Suicide), it is also true that some people who kill themselves believe, as
part of their total system of beliefs, that one can effect termination without involving cessation. They seem to ignore the fact that, so far as we
know, termination always involves cessation. One can note that even
those in our contemporary society who espouse belief in a hereafter as
part of their religious tenets, still label a person who has shot himself
to death as suicidal. This is probably so primarily because, whatever
really happens after termination, the survivors are still left to live (and
usually to mourn) in the undeniable physical absence of the person who
killed himself. Thus, this subcategory of Psyde-ignorer, or, perhaps better, Psyde-transcender, contains those persons who, from our point of
view, effect their own termination and cessation but who, from their
point of view, effect only their termination and continue to exist in some
manner or another.
This paragraph is not meant to necessarily deny a (logical) possibility of continuation after cessation (life after death), but the concept
of Psyde-ignoring (or something similar to it) is a firm necessity in any
systematic classification of this type; otherwise we will put ourselves in
the untenable position of making exactly comparable (a) a man's shooting his head off in the belief and hope that he will soon meet his dead
wife in heaven and (b) a man's taking a trip from one city to another
with the purpose and expectation of being reunited with his spouse.
Obviously, these two acts are so vastly different in their effects (on the
person concerned and on others who know him) that they cannot be
equated. Therefore, independent of the individual's convictions that killing oneself does not result in cessation but is simply a transition to an21 Three very different examples of Psyde-initiatorsall eminent menare
contained in the following: Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, Death of a Man (New
York: Random House, 1957), pp. 174-81; Leicester Hemingway, My Brother,
Ernest Hemingway (New York: World, 1962), p. 283; and Gerald Holton, "Percy
Williams Bridgman," reprinted in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, XVII, No.
2 (February, 1962), 22-23. It is interesting to contrast Hemingway's attitude
toward his failing body with that of Dr. Hans Zinsser: As I Remember Him
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1940), pp. 200-201.

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215

other life, we must superimpose our belief that cessation is necessarily

final as far as the human personality which we can know is concerned.
4. Psyde-darer. A Psyde-darer is an individual who, to use gamblers'
terms, bets his continuation (i.e., his life) on the objective probability
of as few as five out of six chances that he will survive. Regardless of
the outcome, an individual who plays Russian Roulette is a Psyde-darer
at that time. In addition to the objective probabilities that exist, the
concept of a Psyde-darer also involves subjective probabilities of the
same order of magnitude. Thus, a person with little skill as a pilot who
attempts to fly an airplane or one with unpracticed co-ordination who
attempts to walk along the ledge of a roof of a tall building may be classified as a Psyde-darer. The rule of thumb is that it is not what he
does, but the background (of skill, prowess, and evaluation of his own
abilities) against which he does it, that matters. In a sense the Psydedarer is only a partial, or fractional, cessation-seeker; but since each
lethal fraction contained within the gambling situation is completely
lethal, it seems most meaningful to classify such an act within the intention category.
Subintentioned
Subintentioned cessation behaviors relate to those instances in which
the individual plays an indirect, covert, partial, or unconscious role in
his own demise. That individuals may play an unconscious role in their
own failures and act inimically to their own best welfare seem to be facts
too well documented from psychoanalytic and general clinical practice
to ignore. Often cessation is hastened by the individual's seeming carelessness, imprudence, foolhardiness, forgetfulness, amnesia, lack of judgment, or other psychological mechanisms. This concept of subintentioned
demise is similar, in some ways, to Karl Menninger's concepts of chronic,
focal, and organic suicides, except that Menninger's ideas have to do
with self-defeating ways of continuing to live, whereas the notion of subintentioned cessation is a description of a way of stopping the process
of living. Included in this subintention category would be many patterns
of mismanagement and brink-of-death living which result in cessation.
In terms of the traditional classification of modes of death (natural, accident, homicide, and suicide), some instances of all four types can be
subsumed under this category, depending on the particular details of
each case. In relation to the term suicide, subintentioned cases may be
said to have permitted suicide.
Subintentioned cessation involves what might be called the psychosomatics of death: that is, cases in which essentially psychological processes (like fear, anxiety, derring-do, hate, etc.) seem to play some role in

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EDWIN S. SHNEIDMAN

exacerbating the catabolic or physiological processes that bring on termination22 (and necessarily cessation), as well as those cases in which the
individual seems to play an indirect, largely unconscious role in inviting
or hastening cessation itself.28 The Psyde groups for the subintentioned
category are, tentatively, as follows: (1) Psyde-chancer; (2) Psydehastener; (3) Psyde-capitulator; and (4) Psyde-experimenter.
1. Psyde-chancer. The Psyde-darer, Psyde-chancer, and Psyde-experimenter are all on a continuum of chance expectation and chance
possibility of cessation. The difference lies in the combination of objective and subjective probabilities. If a Psyde-darer has only five chances
out of six of continuing, then a Psyde-chancer would have chances significantly greater than that, but still involving a realistic risk of cessation.
It should be pointed out that these categories are largely independent of
the method used, in that most methods (like the use of razor blades or
barbiturates) can, depending on the exact place of the cut, the depth
of the cut, and the realistic and calculated expectations for intervention
and rescue by others, legitimately be thought of as intentioned, subintentioned, unintentioned, or contraintentioneddepending on these
circumstances. Individuals who "leave it up to chance," who "gamble
with death,"24 who "half-intend to do it" are the subintentioned Psydechancers.
2. Psyde-hastener. The basic assumption is that in all cessation activities the critical question (on the assumption that cessation will occur
to everyone) is when, so that, in a sense, all intentioned and subintentioned activities are hastening. The Psyde-hastener refers to the individual who unconsciously exacerbates a physiological disequilibrium so that
his cessation (which would, in ordinary terms, be called a natural death)
is expedited. This can be done either in terms of the "style" in which
he lives (the abuse of his body, usually through alcohol, drugs, exposure,
or malnutrition) or, in cases where there is a specific physiological imbalance, through the mismanagement of prescribed remedial procedures.
Examples of the latter would be the diabetic who "mismanages" his
diet or his insulin, the individual with cirrhosis who "mismanages" his
alcoholic intake, the Berger's disease patient who "mismanages" his
nicotine intake. Very closely allied to the Psyde-hastener is the Psydefacilitator, who, while he is ill and his psychic energies are low, is
somehow more-than-passively unresisting to cessation, and "makes it
22 See for example, J. A. Gengerelli and F. J. Kirkner, eds. Psychological Factors in Human Cancer (Berkeley: University of California Press 1953)
See M E . Wolfgang "Suicide by Means of Victim-Precipitated Homicide "
s ^ ^ ^ x ^ T o r s ? ;

^ $ f o l o s y and Quaneriy Review f

,AL45:xJxTi957)wife;'The Gambie with Death in AttemPted suicide>- * >

Orientations toward Death

217

easy" for termination (and accompanying cessation) to occur. Some unexpected deaths in hospitals may be of this nature. The excellent recent
paper of Weisman and Hackett explores this area.25
3. Psyde-capitulator. A Psyde-capitulator is a person who, by virtue
of some strong emotion, usually his fear of death, plays a psychological
role in effecting his termination. In a sense, he gives in to death or he
scares himself to death. This type of death includes voodoo deaths; the
type of death reported among Indians and Mexicans from southwestern
U. S. railroad hospitals, where the patients thought that people who went
to hospitals went there to die, and being hospitalized was thus cause in
itself for great alarm; and some of the cases reported from Boston by
Weisman and Hackett. All these individuals play a psychological role in
the psychosomatics of their termination and cessation.
4. Psy'de-experimenter. A Psyde-experimenter is a person who often
lives "on the brink of death," who consciously wishes neither interruption
nor cessation, butusually by use of (or addiction to) alcohol and/or
barbituratesseems to wish a chronically altered, usually befogged continuation state. Psyde-experimenters seem to wish to remain conscious
but to be benumbed or drugged. They will often "experiment" with their
self-prescribed dosages (always in the direction of increasing the effect
of the dosage), taking some chances of extending the benumbed conscious states into interruption (coma) states and even taking some
chances (usually without much concern, in a kind of lackadaisical way)
of running some minimal but real risk of extending the interruption
states into cessation. When this type of death occurs, it is traditionally
thought of as accidental.
Unintentioned
Unintentioned cessation describes those occurrences in which, for
all intents and purposes, the person psychologically plays no significant
role in his own demise. He is, at the time of his cessation, "going about
his business" (even though he may be lying in a hospital), with no
conscious intention of effecting or hastening cessation and no strong
conscious drive in this direction. What happens is that "something
from the outside"the outside of his mindoccurs. This "something"
might be a cerebral-vascular accident, a myocardial infarction, a neoplastic growth, some malfunction, some catabolism, some invasion
whether by bullet or by viruswhich, for him, has lethal consequences.
" I t " happens to "him." Inasmuch as all that anyone can do in regard
to cessation is to attempt some manipulation along a temporal dimension
25 Avery D. Weisman and Thomas P. Hackett in "Predilection to Death: Death
and Dying as a Psychiatric Problem," Psychosomatic Medicine, XXIII, No. 3
(May 1961), 232-256.

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EDWIN S. SHNEIDMAN

(i.e., to hasten or to postpone it), one might suppose that unintentioned

is synonymous only with "postponer," but it appears that there are other
possible attitudeswelcoming, accepting, resisting, disdaining, etc.all
within the unintentioned category.
In terms of the traditional categories of death, most natural, accidental, and homicidal deaths would be called unintentioned, and no
presently labeled suicidal deaths would be so called. In relation to the
term ''suicidal," unintentioned cases may be said to have omitted suicide.
The Psyde categories for unintentioned cessation are: (1) Psydewelcomer; (2) Psyde-acceptor; (3) Psyde-postponer; (4) Psyde-disdainer; and (5) Psyde-fearer.
1. Psyde-welcomer. A Psyde-welcomer is one who, although playing
no discernible (conscious or unconscious) role in either hastening or
facilitating his own cessation, could honestly report an introspective position of welcoming the end to his life. Very old people, especially after
a long, painful, debilitating illness, report that they would welcome "the
end."
2. Psyde-acceptor. The slight difference between a Psyde-welcomer
and a Psyde-acceptor lies in the nuance of activity and passivity that
distinguishes them. The Psyde-acceptor is one who has accepted the imminence of his cessation and "is resigned to his own fate." In this, he
may be relatively passive, philosophical, resigned, heroic, realistic, or
mature, depending on "the spirit" in which this enormous acceptance is
made.
3. Psyde-postponer. Most of the time most of us are acute Psydepostponers. Psyde-postponing is the habitual, indeed the unthinking,
orientation of most humans toward cessation. The Psyde-postponer is
one who, to the extent that he is oriented toward or concerned with
cessation at all, wishes that it would not occur in anything like the foreseeable future and further wishes that it would not occur for as long
as possible. (This Psyde-postponing orientation should not be confused
with the ubiquitous human fantasies of immortality.)
4. Psyde-disdainer. Some individuals, during those moments when
they consciously contemplate cessation, are disdainful of the concept and
feel that they are above being involved in the cessation of the vital processes that it implies. They are, in a sense, supercilious toward death. It
may well be that most young people in our culture, independent of their
fears about death, are habitually Psyde-disdainers, as well they might
befor a while.26
5. Psyde-fearer. A Psyde-fearer is one who is fearful of death
and of the topics relating to death. He may literally be phobic about this
2<> See P. Schilder and D. Wechsler, "The Attitudes of Children toward Death,"
Journal of Genetic Psychology, XLV (1934), 406-451, and Maria Nagy, "The
Child's View of Death," in H. Feifel, ed., op. cit., pp. 79-98.

Orientations toward Death

219

topic.27 He fights the notion of cessation, seeing reified death as a feared

and hated enemy. This position may be related to conscious wishes for
omnipotence and to great cathexis to one's social and physical potency.
Hypochondriacs, fearing illnesses and assault, are perhaps also Psydefearers. (A person who, when physically well, is a Psyde-fearer might,
when physically ill, become a Psyde-facilitator.)
Imagine five people, all older men on the same ward of a hospital,
all dying of cancer, none playing an active or unconscious role in his
own cessation. Yet it is still possible to distinguish among them different
orientations toward cessation: One wishes not to die and is exerting his
"will to live" (Psyde-postponer); another is resigned to his cessation
(Psyde-acceptor); the third is disdainful of what is occurring to him and
will not believe that death can "take him" (Psyde-disdainer); still another, although not taking any steps in the direction of hastening his
end, does at this point in his illness welcome it (Psyde-welcomer); and
the fifth is most fearful about the topic of death and the implication of
cessation and forbids anyone to speak of it in his presence (Psydefearer).
Contraintentioned
It is, of course, possible to shout "Fire!" in the absence of a conflagration, or "Stop thief!" in the absence of a crime. It is also possible,
figuratively or literally, to shout or to murmurthe intensity of the cry
does not seem to matter in some cases"Suicide!" in the clear absence
of any lethal intention. ( I shall, of course, eschew the words "suicide
attempt" and "suicide threat," having already indicated that either of
these can range from great lethal intent, through ambivalent lethal intent, to no lethal intent.) One common result of shouting "Fire!" or
"Stop thief!" is that these calls mobilize others; indeed, they put society
(or certain members of society) in a position where it has no choice
but to act in certain directions. An individual who uses the semantic
blanket of "suicide!" with a conscious absence of any lethal intention,
I shall term as one who has employed contraintentionedadvertently noncessationbehavior. From a strictly logical point of view, it might be
argued that contraintentioned behaviors belong within the unintentioned
category. I believe, however, that there are sufficient reasons to warrant
a separate category, if only to point up the fact that individuals can
usurp the labels and the semantic trappings of death, especially of suicide and, at the same time, have a clear, conscious intention not to commit suicide and not to run any risk of cessation.
Among the contraintentioned individuals there are, by definition,
27 For example, W. A. Swanberg in Citizen Hearst (New York: Scribners, 1961,
p. 455) says: "Hearst . . . had a violent aversion for mortality, and there was an
unwritten law never to mention death in his presence."

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EDWIN S. SHNEIDMAN

no cessation or related post-mortem states and hence no comparable traditional modes of death. In relation to the term suicide, contraintention cases may be said to have remitted (in the sense of having
"refrained from") suicide.
The Psyde subcategories that we distinguish among the contraintentioned cases are (1) Psyde-feigner and (2) Psyde-threatened
1. Psyde-feigner. A Psyde-feigner is one who feigns or simulates what
appears to be a self-directed advertent movement toward cessation. Examples are the ingesting of water from a previously emptied iodine bottle
or using a razor blade with no lethal or near-lethal possibility or intent.
Psyde-feigning involves some overt behavior on the part of the individual.
2. Psyde-threatener. A Psyde-threatener is a person who, with the
conscious intention of avoiding cessation, uses the threat of his cessation
(and the other's respect for that threat) with the aim of achieving some
of the secondary gains which go with cessation-oriented behavior. These
gains usually have to do with activating other personsusually the
"significant other" person in the neurotic dyadic relationship in which
the individual is involved.
Two additional comments, both obvious, should be made about
contraintentioned behavior. The first is that what are ordinarily called
"suicide attempts" may range in their potential lethality from absent to
severe.28 I do not wish to imply for a moment that all so-called suicide
attempts should be thought of as contraintentioned; quite the contrary.
Thus, each case of barbiturate ingestion or wrist cutting, or even of the
use of carbon monoxide in an auto, must be evaluated in terms of the
details of that case, so that it can be assessed accuratelyas of that time
in terms of its intentioned, subintentioned, unintentioned, and contraintentioned components. The second comment is that those who work
with people who have "attempted suicide," especially those people seen
as having manifested contraintentioned behavior, must guard against
their own tendencies to assume a pejorative attitude toward these behaviors. It is all too easy to say that an individual only attempted suicide
or to dismiss the case as beneath the need for human compassion, if one
assesses the act as contraintentioned. It should be obvious that no act
which involves, even merely semantically, cessation behavior is other
than a genuine psychiatric crisis. Too often we confuse treatment of
suicidal individuals with attending to the physical trauma, forgetting
that meaningful treatment has to be essentially in terms of the person's
personality and the frustrations, duress, fears, and threats which he ex28 At the (Los Angeles) Suicide Prevention Center, the staff has evolved procedures for assessing "suicidal potentiality." See Robert E. Litman and N L
Farberow, "Emergency Evaluation of Self-Destructive Potentiality," and Norman
D. Tabachnick and N. L. Farberow, "The Assessment of Self-Destructive Potentiality," in The Cry for Help, op. cit.

Orientations toward Death

221

periences in his living relationships. An unquestioned contraintentioned

act merits fully as much professional attention as any other maladaptive
behavior; a cry for help should never be disregarded, not only for humanitarian reasons, but also because we know that the unattended cries
tend to become more shrill, and the movement on the lethality scale
from cry to cry is, unfortunately, in the lethal direction.
It might be protested, inasmuch as the assessments of these intentioned states and Psyde categories involve the appraisal of unconscious
factors, that some workers (especially lay coroners) cannot legitimately
be expected to make the kinds of psychological judgments required for
this type of classification. To this, one answer would be that coroners
throughout the country are making judgments of precisely this nature
every day of the week. In the situation of evaluating a possible suicide,
the coroner often acts (sometimes without realizing it) as psychiatrist
and psychologist and as both judge and jury in a quasijudicial way. This
is because certification of death as suicide does, willy-nilly, imply some
judgments or reconstruction of the victim's motivation or intention.
Making these judgmentsperhaps more coroners ought to use the category of "undetermined"-is an inexorable part of a coroner's function.
My position is that it is much better for these psychological dimensions
to be made explicit and an attempt, albeit crude, be made to use them,
than to have these psychological dimensions employed on an implicit
and unverbalized level. The dilemma is between the polarities of a usable,
oversimplified classification, on the one hand, and a complex, but more
meaningful classification, on the other. The goal would be to try to combine greatest usefulness with maximum meaningfulness.
AN EXAMPLE OF AN EQUIVOCAL DEATH
It might be most appropriate to conclude this chapter by presenting,
by way of example, some excerpts from a singularly interesting case.
The study I have chosen is taken from a uniquely comprehensive study
of death and lives by Herman Melville. It is the case of the equivocal
deathwas it accident, suicide, or what?of Melville's tortured, obsessively possessed, fury-driven, cetusized man: Captain Ahab of the
"Pequod."29
The procedure called the "psychological autopsy" (used at the
29 The reader is referred to Henry A. Murray's masterful psychological studies
of Melville: "In Nomine Diaboli," in Moby-Dick Centennial Essays (Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1953), pp. 3-29, originally published in New
England Quarterly, XXIV (1951), 435-452; Milton R. Stern, ed., Discussions of
Moby Dick (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1960), pp. 25-34; and Richard
Chase, ed., Melville: "A Collection of Critical Essays" (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), pp. 62-74; and his "Introduction" to Melville's Pierre,
or The Ambiguities (New York: Hendricks House, 1949), pp. xiii-ciii.

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EDWIN S. SHNEIDMAN

Suicide Prevention Center) involves obtaining psychological data about

the behaviors and statements of the deceased in the days before his
death, from which information an extrapolation of intention is made
over the moments of, and the moments directly preceding, his cessation.
In the case of Captain Ahab, I shall proceed as though I were preparing
a report for an imaginary Nantucket coroner, including some sort of
recommendation as to what labelings would be the most appropriate on
his imaginary death certificate. The focus will be an attempt to come
to some kind of resolution concerning Ahab's intention types and Psyde
categories. But first, some facts: specifically how did the end of his life
occur ?
Facts
For Ahab's death, we have the following account (from Chapter
135) of his last actions: "The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale
flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;
ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn
caught him round the neck, and noiselessly as Turkish mutes bowstring
their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was
gone. . . ." On first thought, it might sound as though Ahab's death
were pure accident, an unintentioned death, the cessation of a Psydepostponer; but let us see where our second thoughts lead us. Perhaps
there is more.
Background
It is possible to view Moby Dick as a great, sonorous Mahlerlike
symphonyDas Lied von der Seenot primarily about the joy of life
nor the pessimism engendered by a crushing fate, but rather as a dramatic
and poetic explication of the psychodynamics of death. And, within the
context of this thought, is it not possible that Moby Dick, the great
white whale, represents the punishment of death itself? In Chapter 28,
when Ahab makes his first appearance on the "Pequod" at sea, the word
"white" is used three times in one paragraph to describe Ahab: a headto-toe scar on Ahab's body, "lividly whitish"; an allusion to a "white
sailor," in the context of Captain Ahab's being laid out for burial; and
"the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood." Everywhere, reference to the pallor of death; and if there is still any question, the case for
"white death" is made explicit in the discussion of the whiteness of the
whale (Chapter 42), in which we are told: " I t cannot well be doubted,
that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals
the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor
were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of
mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow

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223

the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in
our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantel round our
phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fogYea, while these terrors
seize us, let us add that even the king of terrors, when personified by the
evangelist, rides on his pallid horse."
And if the great white whale is death, then is not the sea itself the
vessel of death? Melville sets this tone for his entire heroic narrative in
his stunning opening passage:
Call me Ishmael. Some years agonever mind how long preciselyhaving little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me
on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the
world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever
it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of
every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper
hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from
deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's
hats offthen, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This
is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato
throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. . . .
And again, much later, in the description of the blacksmith (Chapter 112), we read:
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death
is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first
salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery,
the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still
have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the allcontributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain
of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and
from the hearts of infinite Pacifies, the thousand mermaids sing to them
"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of
intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.
Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred
and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither!
put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till
we marry thee!"
I f any case is to be made for subintentionPsyde-chancing, Psydehastening, Psyde-capitulating, Psyde-experimenting behavior patterns
then, at the least, two further background issues need to be involved:
the concept of unconscious motivation and the concept of ambivalence.
Ahab's chronicler would not have, in principle, resisted the concept of
subintention, on the grounds of its involving unconscious motivation, for
(in Chapter 41) he says:

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Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some

infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that
they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ireby what evil magic
their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the
White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to
bewhat the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the
gliding great demon of the seas of lifeall this to explain, would be to
dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in
us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled
sound of his pick?
That which is most sharply and most accurately characteristic of
the subintentioned personnamely, the ubiquitous ambivalence, the pervasive psychological coexistence of logical incompatiblesis seen vividly
in the following internal dialogue of life and death, of flesh and fixture,
(as reported in Chapter 51) within Ahab:
Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man
in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the
piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting
tendency of the taff-rail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made
the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she
rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in herone
to mount directly to heaven, the other to drive yawningly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have
thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one
live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb
sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.
And within Ahab, toward Moby Dick, there were deep ambiguities.
Method
In any psychological autopsy it is important to examine the method
or the instrument of death and, especially, the victim's understandings
and subjective estimations of its lethal works. Ahab was garroted by a
free-swinging whale-line. We are warned (in Chapter 60) that ". . . the
least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take
somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off . . ."; we are forewarned
". . . of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line,
and lost"; and we are warned again, "All men live enveloped in whalelines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when
caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent,
subtle, ever-present perils of life." Ahab knew all this; nor was he a
careless, accident-prone man. The apothecary knows his deadly drugs;
the sportsman knows the danger of his weapons; the whaler captainthat very whaler captain who, instead of remaining on his quarter-deck,

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jumped to "the active perils of the chase" in a whale-boat manned by

his "smuggled on board" crewought to know his whale-lines.
Questions
Having described the precise circumstances of Ahab's death, and
having mentioned some background issues deemed to be relevant, I
would now pose some questions concerning his demise: Was Ahab's
death more than simple accident? Was there more intention than unintention? Was Ahab's orientation in relation to death entirely that of
Psyde-postponing ? Are there discernible subsurface psychological currents that can be fathomed and charted, and is there related information
that can be dredged and brought to the surface? Specifically, can Ahab's
death be described as victim-precipitated homicide; that is, is this an
instance in which the victim stands up to subjectively calculated overwhelming odds, inviting destruction by the other? Let us see.
Extracts
Ahab led a fairly well-documented existence, especially insofar as
the dark side of his life was concerned. Moby Dick abounds witii references to various funereal topics: sleep, coffins, burials, soul, life-afterdeath, suicide, cemeteries, death, and rebirth.
Butas in a psychological autopsywe are primarily interested in
interview data from everyone who had known the deceased, especially
in what our informants can tell us about Ahab's personality, insofar as
his orientations toward death are known. It should be recognized that
in some important ways Captain Ahab's psychological autopsy will be a
truncated and atypical one, especially with respect to the range of informants; there is no information from spouse, parents, progeny, siblings,
collaterals, neighbors; there are only mates, some of the more articulate
shipboard subordinates, captains of ships met at sea, and, with terrifying
biblical certitude, Elijah.
As we know, all the possible informants, listed below, save Ishmael,
perished with Captain Ahab and are technically not available for interview. Only Ishmael's observations are direct; all else is secondhand
through Ishmael, colored by Ishmael, and perhaps with no more veridicality than Plato's reports of Socrates. We shall have to trust Ishmael
to be an accurate and perceptive reporter.
Our primary informant, Ishmael, reflected about Captain Ahab in
twenty-five separate chapters (specifically chapters 16, 22, 27, 28, 30, 33,
34, 36, 41, 44, 46, 50, 51, 52, 73, 100, 106, 115, 116, 123, 126, 128, 130,
132, and 133). Starbuck, the chief mate of the "Pequod," is next: there
are nine separate encounters with, or reports about, his captain (in chapters 36, 38, 51, 118, 119, 123, 132, 134, and 135). Next is Stubb, the

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second mate, with seven separate anecdotes (to be found in chapters 28,
31, 36, 73, 121, 134, and 135). All the others are represented by one or
two bits of information apiece: Elijah (in chapters 19 and 21); Gabriel
of the "Jeroboam" (Chapter 71); Bunger, the ship's surgeon of the
"Samuel Enderby" (100); the blacksmith (113); the Captain of the
"Bachelor" (115); Flask, the third mate (121); the Manxman (125);
and the carpenter (127).
Knowing that the limitations of space simply do not permit me to
document the essence of each informant's remarks, either with appropriate quotations or abbreviated resumes, how can I summarize all the
data? Perhaps my best course would be to concentrate on the general
features that one would look for in any psychological autopsy. Thus, the
information distilled from interviews with Ishmael, Starbuck, Stubb, and
all the others, might, in a dialogue of questions and answers, take the
following form.
(1) Hidden psychosis? Not at the beginning of the voyage, but
certainly at the end (and indeed from Chapter 36 on"the chick that's
in him picks the shell. 'Twill soon be out."), the madness in Ahab was
blatant, open, known. His monomania was the official creed of his ship.
Along with his other symptoms, his psychiatric syndrome was crowned
with a paranoid fixation. But what matters in Ahab is not so much the
bizarrely shaped psychological iceberg which many saw above the surface, but rather the hugeness of the gyroscopically immovable subsurface
mass of other-destruction and self-destruction. We know the poems about
fire and ice. Ahab is a torrid, burning, fiery iceberg. (2) Disguised depression? Ahab was openly morbid and downcast. His was not exactly
psychotic depression, nor can we call it reactive depression for it transcended the bounds of that definition. Perhaps best it might be called a
"character depression," in that it infused his brain like the let-go blood
from a series of small strokes in the hemisphere. (3) Talk of death? The
morbid talk of death and killing runs through reports about Ahab like
an idee fixe. (4) Previous suicide attempts? None is reported. (5) Disposition of belongings? Ahab, after forty solitary years at sea, had little
in the way of self-possessions or interpersonal belongings. His wife, he
said, was already a widow; his interest in the possible profits from the
voyage was nil; his withdrawal from meaningful material possessions (and
his loss of joy with them) is perhaps best indicated by his flinging his
"still lighted pipe into the sea" and dashing his quadrant to the deck
-both rash acts for a sailor-captain.
In Ahab's conscious mind, he wanted to killbut have we not said
that self-destruction can be other-destruction in the 180th degree? Figuratively speaking, the barb of the harpoon was pointed toward him; his
brain thought a thrust, but his arm executed a retroflex. Was his death
"accident"? If he had survived his psychodynamically freighted voyage

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227

and had returned unharmed to Nantucket's pier, that would have been
true accident. Men can die for nothingmost men do; but some few
big-jointed men can give their lives for an internalized something: Ahab
would not have missed this opportunity for the world.
What further evidence can be cited bearing on the issue of subin ten tioned cessation? With his three harpooners before him, with their
harpoons turned up like goblets, Ahab (in Chapter 36) commands them,
in this maritime immolation scene, as follows: " 'Drink, ye harpooneers!
drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bowDeath
to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his
death!'" Kill or be killed; punish or be retributed; murder or suicide
how the two are intertwined.
In Ahab's case, we have no suicide note or other holograph of
death, but, mirabile dictu, we do have (in Chapter 135) Ahab's last
thoughts:
I turn my body from the sun. . . . Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh,
now I feel my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furtherest bounds, pour
ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one
piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but
unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I
stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins
and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let
me now tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou
damned whale! Thus, I give up my spear!
What is to be particularly noted in this is the prescience of Ahab.
" I spit my last breath at thee," he says. How does he know that it is to
be his last breath? Where are the sources of his premonitions? What are
the contents of his subintentions? Does this not remind us of Radney, the
chief mate of the "Town-Ho" (Chapter 54) who behaved as if he
"sought to run more than half way to meet his doom"? Is this not
exactly what the tantalizer says to his "all-destroying but unconquering"
executioner in cases of victim-precipitated homicide?
Recommendation
It is suggested that Captain Ahab's demise was goal-seeking behavior that made obsessed life or subintentioned death relatively unimportant to him, compared with the great press for the discharge of his
monomania of hate. He dared, and made, that murderous death-white
whale kill him. He could not rest until he was so taken. (Did Satan
provoke God into banishing him?) Ahab invited cessation by the risks
that he ran; he was a Psyde-chancer. He permitted suicide. Consider
Ahab's psychological position: what could he have done, to what purpose
would any further voyages have been, if he had killed the symbol of his
search? It was, from Ahab's point of view, the time; and in his unconscious wish, it was the "appropriate death." In nomine ceti albini!