Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide

At heart, suicide is a subversive act: the assertion of individual will against public authority. How is it, then, that the act of suicide–one with defiant political implications–has come to be viewed as the last refuge of the self-destructive victim? In Leaving You, Lisa Lieberman explores the puzzle of this reigning perception of suicide. Drawing on diverse sources, from biblical stories to Romantic novels, philosophical theories, and psychiatric diagnoses, along with contemporary memoirs of suicidal depression, she shows how the idea of suicide as an act of protest has pervaded Western attitudes toward self-destruction, yet how our contemporary view attempts to deny suicide's disruptive potential by depriving the act of its defiance. Efforts to read meaning out of suicide are not hard to find today, Ms. Lieberman finds. Therapeutic strategies that treat suicide as an illness–medicating the depression while ignoring the underlying motivations that drive people to end their lives– effectively diminish individual responsibility for the decision to die. Sociological explanations that emphasize social causes over individual intentions serve to make suicides passive. Our reluctance to recognize the right to die, to concede this right even to the terminally ill, betrays our uneasiness with the power implied in the act of self-destruction. Ms. Lieberman aims to restore autonomy to the so-called victims by showing how suicide came to function as a vehicle for constructing identity.

About the Author :
Lisa Lieberman teaches modern European cultural and intellectual history at Dickinson College. Her work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in various journals, and she wrote the "Suicide" entry in the Oxford Companion to the Body. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

Review :
Wonderfully lucid and nervy meditation...provides an illuminating sketch of suicide over the centuries...enlightening...absorbing. An intellectually courageous book, Lieberman's arguments challenge conventional views on suicide and deserve serious consideration. Intellectually rich meditation...engaging, erudite...provocative and sometimes heartfelt arguments will make readers reexamine the issue. In this pithy book Lisa Lieberman explores the underlying influence that literature has had on individual human self-destruction throughout history. Slender and elegantly written.... The asperity of Lieberman's wit is particularly welcome in this territory...Lieberman sets the bar pretty high. Leaving You...asks provocative questions about how we in the 21st century respond to suicidal violence. Lieberman…is a spirited...writer…. Her attempt to restore...dignity to "the so-called vistim" is...brave and important… [Lieberman's] enterprise is a noble one: ...to disabuse us of the notion that suicide is meaningless. Lieberman offers a thought-provoking contrast to George Rosen's classic work on the history of suicide. Highly recommended. Offers a richly textured historical narrative. Displays a great facility at synthesizing disparate sources...into a compelling explanation…