Unassailable on the battlefield of the Trojan War, the hero Ajax met his untimely end at his own hands.
He and Odysseus both claimed the armor of the fallen Achilles, and the dispute was settled in favor of Odysseus. In retaliation, Ajax plotted a raid on his comrades, but Athena thwarted it by driving him mad so that he killed a flock of sheep instead.
The embarrassment and remorse was too much, and Ajax committed suicide by falling on his sword.
Let's uncover the psychological significance of this huge taboo: Suicide.
The suicide of Ajax
While taking one's own life might seem like a private matter, it often has shattering ramifications for the other people in the person's life.
The economics, politics, and morality of suicide has plagued the arenas of law, philosophy, medicine, religion, and government since ancient time.
The Roman Stoics saw suicide as an acceptable and dignified way to deal with unbearable misfortunes in life.
Christians have condemned it as an appropriation of an act that belongs only to God.
Japanese hara-kiri, ritual suicide, is practiced in response to failure, loss in love, and as a way to show loyalty to a dead superior.
In a culture where the value of one's life is found in the service of a mission or societal goal, it was only natural to see devastating failure in fulfilling that goal to be reason enough to no longer live. When Japan mobilized for their conquest of East Asia in the 20th century, there are accounts of mothers telling their sons, effectively: if you don't return as victor, don't return at all. Many of these mothers even gave their sons a knife specially designated for their suicides in the event of a military failure.
There are actually different types of Japanese suicides
Buddhism formally rejects suicide, but certain monks have killed themselves in a public display of political protest.
Whether it is an issue of honor, loneliness, defiance or despair, suicide is most often associated with the sense of an irredeemable past or a hopeless future that offers no possibility.
But the opposite case can also be true for some unique instances. For the Islamist extremist, for example, the act is full of meaning.
When experienced as an act of eros, suicide can take on the power of a sacred image.
Like Romeo and Juliet, a lover can be seduced into suicide as an act of consummation in death.
A less obvious form of suicide, found often in mythology, is the image of a father or mother devouring their child. The Titan Chronos ate his children after learning that he was destined to be overthrown by one of them.
In Freudian psychology, the oedipal mother is the chaotic feminine figure that suffocates and devours a child out of a corrupted desire to preserve.
This is a type of suicide because the parent is effectively killing the propagation of their future. Consuming one's child is reflective of killing one's own body—an act of self-consumption.
Chronos devouring one of his sons
Suicide as transformation
The implicit goal of suicide is either to escape from life or to fulfill a compelling meaning in life. What does this mean?
Carl Jung believed that suicide can be understood as an unconscious effort at compensating what is "hopelessly inefficient in the personality." Meaning, it is produced by the unconscious desire to shed off the insufficient, undeveloped, corrupted, or morally failing parts of oneself.
Christians call this "refining fire," or "pruning," or "sanctification." The old things have to die so that the new things can develop and transform who you are.
However, suicide is the misplacement of this transformative energy. Rather than killing the old parts of the self psychologically, the individual is overcome to the point of killing themselves entirely.
In the depiction of Chronos devouring his children, or the idea of the oedipal mother suffocating her child, we see the tyranny and corruption of what is old and in need of renewal. This is the dark side of Tradition. When members of an older generation attempt to stifle the exploration and vitality of the young—due to the threat of change—that is the tyranny of the old.
A famous instance of suicide in the Bible is that of Saul. The life of the first king of Israel was marked by a sudden rise to power, and a gradual corruption that took his allegiance away from God. This decay came with disturbances of evil spirits and a sort of obsession and paranoia. In the final moments of his life, in the midst of battle against the Philistines, he chose to fall on his own sword rather than to fall into the hands of his enemies.
The kingdom of Israel needed a renewal, for its king had devolved into a tyrant. It seems poetic for his end to be self-destruction.
The path of growth is marked by periods of the dying of the self. When one senses an irredeemable past or hopeless future, that may be a sign that something within them needs to die and be reborn.
Suicide is an act of consuming oneself. Either out of self-hatred or as self-sacrifice. If it is self-sacrifice, it reflects the desire for transformation. If it is self-hatred, it is the evasion of the burdens and responsibilities of life.
Like the ouroboros, suicide is both passive and active—the self feeding upon the self. At one level, both resemble each other as a means of renewal and transformation.
It's concerning to see the rise in suicides around the world. I think this is representative of the fact that our society is killing itself psychologically and spiritually. Not to mention the declining birth rates as a sign of societal suicide as well.
The lack of meaning, hope, and love is driving us into collective insanity.
When committed as an act of hopelessness, suicide is the direct opposite of the call of faith: a striving for goodness in the face of suffering.
In this case, suicide is the ultimate dereliction of responsibility. So let us not be individuals and a society that abdicates our duties to one another, and to ourselves.
In the end, the act of suicide reflects an innate tension within the psyche between 1) the striving for conscious life, and 2) the force that pulls toward an oblivious letting go.
This is the last essay in this series on archetypal symbols. Thanks so much for reading!
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