This paper presents the first psychoanalytic elaborations concerning the topic of suicide theme, primarily from the records of the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna’s Wednesday meetings. This discussion provides a central point for understanding the self-extermination theme: its intrinsic relationship with the object relations and with unconscious sexuality. There is still an impasse on these elaborations, which we can, retrospectively, attribute to the lack of elaborations that only later would be built in psychoanalytic theory, with the advent of the death drive.
Suicide; death drive; melancholy; object relations