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The term suicidal behavior is understood to mean both suicidal equivalents not recognized as such (accidents, repeated risk-taking) and repeated suicide attempts whose chronic and unsuccessful nature certainly constitutes a real risk, but which are also acts of essentially relational significance.

The idea that accidents can be interpreted as unconscious suicide attempts appeared in Sigmund Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b): "[I]n addition to consciously intentional suicide there is such a thing as a half-intention self-destruction [sic] (self-destruction with an unconscious intention), capable of making skillful use of a threat to life and of disguising it as a chance mishap. There is no need to think such self-destruction rare. For the trend to self-destruction is present to a certain degree in very many more human beings than those in whom it is carried out" (pp. 180-181). This essentially involves the person waiting for the occasion that will divert the forces of personal preservation, and there is thus a "meeting" between the event and the unconscious intention. Involuntary mutilations, which constitute a compromise between the self-destructive tendency and self-preservation, are also included within the framework of accidental suicidal behaviors.

Similarly, with regard to accidents that happen to babies, Melanie Klein spoke of suicide attempts with inadequate means, as if the infant did not yet have the ability to fantasize and premeditate its own death, and that it could only realize by unconsciously putting itself in danger.

In a letter to Freud dated 1 June 1911, Ernest Jones proposed a comparison between accidental suicide and "with the way in which the unconscious seizes on unassociated indifferent material in dream making" (1993 [1908-39], p. 105).

Systematic risk-taking requires a different psychic disposition. The idea of the possibility of death is present and even hypercathected, but at the same time denied in a megalomaniacal narcissistic affirmation. Death is thus "provoked" in the sense of a challenge that is also a relational challenge to those whose fantasized omnipotence cannot effectively protect the subject, the idealized parents. These situations are very common, especially during adolescence, and can involve the risk of accidents, but also toxic risks or even anorexia. Such risk-taking has a function similar to that of the ordalia, or trial by ordeal, in the sense that the subject expects to get from it an affirmation, if not of their own innocence, at least of their invulnerability. In the face of this excessiveness, the accident imposes a limit and brings the person into contact with reality, including that of the body's fragility.

Authors such as Philippe Jeammet and Elisabeth Birot who have studied suicide attempts in adolescents have emphasized the fact that the idea of death has an organizing function during adolescence. It can be noted that the idea of death is unavoidable at this age in conjunction with the obligation to renounce childhood, to which there is no possible return. The idea of death is linked to a sense of the ephemeral—hence the ease during this period of identifying with romantic heroes (as seen in Freud's Manuscript N., 31 May 1897, regarding Goethe's hero Werther).

Beyond gambling with the idea of death, a suicide attempt can represent a way of trying to restore a lost identity (the prepubescent body of the anorexic) or a delusional identity. Similarly, the integration of the drives during adolescence, notably with respect to homosexuality, is a factor that can be conducive to suicidal behavior. Such behavior then appears in its relational significance, whether in the form of a threat, or even blackmail against those close to the subject, or a call for help when communication has broken down. Chronic suicidal behavior can have various etiologies; it remains the case that it cannot be dissociated from suicide proper, the potential for which is inherent in it.

SOPHIE DE MIJOLLA-MELLOR

See also: Suicide.