Self Inflicted Destruction PDF Download

Excerpt from Self-Destruction: A Study of the Suicidal Impulse Each year in the United States about 17,000 people kill themselves. This is an average figure since the turn of the century; it has varied from the highest rate in 1932 to the lowest in 1944. These 17,000 annual suicides are tragic enough. But they represent only the surface of the problem of self-destructiveness like the small visible fraction of a huge iceberg. For every person who succeeds in killing himself, there are many more who have tried unsuccessfully to do so, and many, many more whose impulses to die have been controlled only by their social and religious loyalties or by their fears. But all this still is only the surface of the problem. Even more important from the standpoint of individual and national health is the fact that self-destruction does not usually lead directly to suicide but expresses itself in partial or substitutive ways. Chronic physical illness and disability, neurosis in its manifold forms, drug and alcohol additions, "martyrdom," life patterns of repetitious failure, accident proneness, are all, to variable degrees, motivated by this tendency of the human being to turn his aggressive drives upon himself, to act in more or less overt ways as his own executioner. Sigmund Freud writes "Whoever believes in the occurrence of semi-intentional self-inflicted injury... will become prepared to accept through it the fact that aside from conscious, intentional suicide, there also exists semi-intentional annihilation - with unconscious intention - which is capable of aptly utilizing a threat against life and masking it as a casual mishap. The tendency to self-destruction exists to a certain degree in many more people than in those who bring it to completion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.