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Suicide and the Soul
Suicide and the Soul
Suicide and the Soul (Harper & Row, 1964) was Hillman’s first major book, written during his years as Director of Studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. The book is the analyst’s confrontation with suicide as a psychological rather than medical event.
The preface states the method directly: the book “examines the death experience; it approaches the suicide problem not from the viewpoints of life, society, and ‘mental health’, but in relation to death and the soul. It regards suicide not only as an exit from life but also as an entrance to death. To turn matters about in this way disrupts official attitudes, especially those of medicine” (Hillman 1964). Suicide appears here not as a problem to be prevented but as a phenomenon to be read — the soul’s demand for death-experience, the analyst’s obligation to stand at its threshold without flight.
The book marked out the register that would persist across Hillman’s career: the analyst speaks of soul, not of mental health; psychology attends to the phenomenon, not to the social prevention of it. Suicide and the Soul provoked medicine and supported lay analysis “from a fresh perspective of psychology.” It was, as the later Spring Publications catalogue put it, “a classic introduction to the experience of depth psychology — for analyst, patient, and anyone having to meet questions of suicide … it opens into the profound differences between the medical model of therapy and one that engages soul.”