The Mimetic Power of Suicide. A Study About the Characteristics of Experiencing Suicide of Others

This paper addresses the experience of another person’s suicide. Clinical & sociological observations attest to the fact that witnessing another person’s suicide as an imminent or completed event may influence one’s own suicide ideation. The authors’ thesis is that prereflective, intersubjective experience of another person’s suicide raises explicit retrospective questions about the meaning of suicide for the other & explicit questions about the potential meaning of suicide for the self. In the first part of the article the experiences of another’s suicide are described as immediate, short-term, long-term, & other. Then, drawing on a phenomenological description of intersubjectivity & on the theory of mimesis, the experience of another’s suicide is characterized in terms of the mimetic power of suicide. (51 refs.) JA