Synopses & Reviews
At heart, suicide is a subversive act: the assertion of individual will against public authority. How is it, then, that the act of suicide one with defiant political implications has come to be viewed as the last refuge of the self-destructive victim? In
Leaving You, Lisa Lieberman explores the puzzle of our reigning perception of suicide.
Drawing on diverse sources, from biblical stories to Romantic novels, philosophical theories, and psychiatric diagnoses, along with contemporary memoirs of suicidal depression, she shows how the idea of suicide as an act of protest has pervaded Western attitudes toward self-destruction, yet how our contemporary view attempts to deny suicides disruptive potential by depriving the act of its defiance. Efforts to read meaning out of suicide are everywhere today, Ms. Lieberman finds. Therapeutic strategies that treat suicide as an illness medicating the depression while ignoring the underlying motivations that drive people to end their lives effectively diminish individual responsibility for the decision to die. Sociological explanations that emphasize social causes over individual intentions serve to make suicides passive.
Our reluctance to recognize the right to die, to concede this right even to the terminally ill, betrays our uneasiness with the power implied in the act of self-destruction. Ms. Lieberman aims to restore autonomy to the so-called victims by showing how suicide came to function as a vehicle for constructing ones identity.
Synopsis
Lieberman looks at the cultural meaning of suicide and how it has gone from being seen as subversive to self-destructive.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-165) and index.
Synopsis
At heart, suicide is a subversive act. How is it, then, that the act of suicide has come to be viewed as the last refuge of the self-destructive victim? The author explores the puzzle of this reigning perception of suicide.
About the Author
Lisa Lieberman teaches modern European cultural and intellectual history at Dickinson College. Her work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in various journals, and she wrote the Suicide entry in the Oxford Companion to the Body. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.