The Suicidal Animal: Science and the Nature of Self-Destruction*

In 1897, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim published Suicide, his renowned statistical study that sought to categorize the varying forms of self-destruction as egoistic, fatalistic, anomic or altruistic. Durkheim built upon the work of the English jurist William Wynn Westcott and the Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli, who both perceived suicide as a social phenomenon. Although he did not dispute that the vast majority of suicides (barring neurasthenics) intentionally took their own lives, Durkheim argued their actions should be properly regarded as ‘confirmation of a resolve previously formed for reasons unknown to consciousness’. The stability of suicide rates, he concluded, demonstrated the ‘existence of collective tendencies exterior to the individual’. For the historian Olive Anderson, Suicide is thus emblematic of the fin de siècle view that suicide was a social problem — marking a crucial break from the Romantic belief that it was a supremely individualistic act. Stephen Turner, meanwhile, portrays Durkheim as the ‘prodigal child’ of nineteenthcentury positivism, in that he believed statistics could illuminate