Suicide and Durkheim
Suicide is perhaps the most personal action an individual can take upon oneself and yet it has a profound social impact. Perhaps this is because social relationships play such an important role in its causation. It is also, perhaps the least understood crime, or act, due to the fact that obviously, the dead can't speak. Emile Durkheim was instrumental in bringing a new understanding of suicide, when in a sociological study he conceived his theory of suicide, and it's relationship with society. Perhaps put more accurately, his theory was about society, and its relationship with suicide. For Durkheim, suicide was a symptom of a wider social disease (Stengel, 1964). To cure it, society had to be reformed. Emile Durkheim was first and foremost a sociologist, so his studies are sociological in nature. His main principle was that social facts such as suicide must be studied as realities external to the individual. Suicide, although apparently a highly personal act, was explicable only by the state of the society to which the individual belonged (Stengel, 1964:48). He argued that every society has a "public conscience" that constrains and impresses certain ideas that exist independent of the individual, but is "endowed with coercive
The problem that lies with Durkheim's theory of suicide is that while it helps understand the problem of suicide as whole, it provides no explanation for why certain individuals commit suicide, and other don't. If, as he argues, suicide occurs because the society is not well integrated, then why is it that an individual in the same society as one who has committed suicide, chooses not to do the same? What is it about the individual that increases his immunity to the social inclination to suicide, when it has decreased another's? because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is, disturbances of the collective order (Durkheim, 1971:109). Durkheim distinguished three types or suicide according to the type of disturbance in the relationship between society and the individual. The first type of suicide that he distinguishes is egoistic suicide. This is where abnormal individualism resulted in a weakening of society's control through the "social force" and reduced the person's immunity against the collective suicidal inclination (Stengel, 1964). Abnormal individualism happens when the society is not integrated well and the individual is forced to rely on his own resources (Hassan, 1995). This type of suicide was the effect of the individual's lack of concern for the community and inadequate involvement with it. Egoism, then, is a "social condition in which society is weak, while personality and individuality are highly developed, [albeit abnormally], and individual interests are expressed at the expense of social interests" (Pope, 1976:17).
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Approximate Word count = 1947
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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