Suicide has been commonly understood as an attack intended to destroy an inner presence. While this is usually so, suicide may often serve the purposes of revenge, punishment, flight from a persecutor, reunion with the mother of early infancy, & is often accompanied by fantasies of escape & rebirth. The inter-relationships of such fantasies with common religious and mythical ideas is discussed, as well as the fragmentation of the self representation and the psychotic merging of its parts.