necessarily be studied as a guide to the behaviour of successful suicides.
DURKHEIM's analysis of suicide has been highly influential within sociology. His argument was that rates of suicide are related to the type and level of SOCIAL INTEGRATION within a society. Thus an explanation of these different rates required a distinctively sociological explanation. Using available published statistics, Durkheim first eliminated various environmental and psychological variables previously proposed as explaining suicide, before proposing that four distinctive types of suicide can be identified: EGOISTIC SUICIDE, ALTRUISTIC SUICIDE, ANOMIC SUICIDE, and FATALISTIC SUICIDE, each of these corresponding to a particular condition of society.
One central problem in Durkheim's account is that OFFICIAL STATISTICS undoubtedly distort and understate the overall incidence of suicide. It is also likely they do so more for some groups than others (e.g. Durkheim found Catholics less likely than Protestants to commit suicide, but Catholics may have greater reason to conceal suicide). Some sociologists (e.g. J. Douglas, The Social Meaning of Suicide, 1967) suggest that social research on suicide must first establish empirically how suicides are designated, e.g. by police, coroners, etc., before such social statistics can be used with any confidence, and that Durkheim failed to do this.
Despite reservations about Durkheim's work, aspects of his account have been confirmed by other theorists, e.g. Sainsbury (1955) who found that suicide rates in London boroughs were highest where levels of'social disorganization’ – e.g. levels of divorce, illegitimacy, etc. - were also highest. Sainsbury and Baraclough (1968) have also suggested that the rank order of suicide rates for immigrant groups to the US correlated closely with the rank order of suicide rates for their countries of origin, despite the fact that a different set of labellers were involved. Thus they suggest that, though official suicide statistics must be used with caution, they may be less unreliable than sometimes suggested. This view might be seen as gaining further support from regularities in the incidence of suicide which tend to recur across cultures, for example, higher rates among men than women, among the widowed and the divorced, among the unmarried and the childless, among the old compared with the young. Most of these findings are consistent with what Durkheim found.
Suicide was one of the acts universally associated with vampirism. In cultures as varied as in Russia, Romania, West Africa, and China, suicide was considered an individual’s pathway into vampirism. In the West in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures, suicide has traditionally been considered a sin. In most other cultures suicide was frowned upon in an equivalent manner. Japan has generally been considered unique in its designation of a form of suicide called hari-kari, as a means of reversing the dishonor that initially led to the suicide.
Suicide was among the anti-social actions a person could commit that caused vampirism. In Eastern Europe, those actions included being a quarrelsome person, a drunkard, or associated with heresy or sorcery/witchcraft. In each society, there were activities considered a threat to the community’s well-being that branded a person as different. While these varied considerably from culture to culture, suicide was most ubiquitous in its condemnation.
Suicide signaled the existence of extreme unresolved tension in the social fabric of a community. It was viewed as evidence of the family’s and the community’s inability to socialize an individual, as well as a statement by the individual of complete disregard for the community’s existence and its prescribed rituals. The community, in turn, showed its disapproval in its treatment of the suicide’s corpse. In the West, it was often denied Christian burial and its soul considered outside of the realm of salvation (the subject had committed mortal sin without benefit of confession and forgiveness prior to death). Those who committed suicide were buried at a crossroads or at a distance from the village. The corpse might even be thrown in a river to be carried away by the current.
Those who committed suicide died leaving unfinished business with relatives and close acquaintances. They left people with unresolved grief, which became a factor, sometimes unspoken, in the survivors’ personalities for the rest of their lives. Their corpses often returned to the living in dreams and as apparitions. They were the subjects of nightmares, and families and friends occasionally felt under attack from the presence of them. The deceased became a vampire, and actions had to be taken to break the connection that allowed the dead to disturb the living. The various actions taken against a corpse could be viewed as a means of emotional release for the survivors. The break in the connection was first attempted with harmless actions of protection, but, if ineffective, those efforts moved to a more serious level with mutilation (with a stake) or complete destruction (by fire) of the corpse.
Novelists and screenwriters have utilized suicide in their consideration of the problems faced by vampires who have found themselves bored with their long life, displaced in time, or have concluded that their vampire state is immoral.
Immediately after becoming a vampire, for example, Lestat de Lioncourt (the continuing character in Anne Rice‘s vampire novels) had to witness the suicide (by fire) of the vampire who had made him. Eventually, Armand, the leader of the Parisian community eventually committed suicide by basking in the sunlight. Placing oneself in the open as the dawn approaches is the suicide method of choice for vampires, as recently exemplified by Boya (in the 1996 movie Blood and Donuts) and Countess Maria Viroslav in Kathryn Reines’s The Kiss (1996). Toward the end of Memnoch the Devil, the fifth of the “Vampire Chronicles” of Anne Rice, Armand walks into the sunlight out of his intense religious feelings after seeing Veronica’s veil that Lestat had returned with after his adventure in heaven and hell.
Both the Cevaillier Futaine (the vampire in Henry Kuttner’s 1937 pulp short story, “I, the Vampire” and Batman (in the alternative universe Batman story Batman: Bloodstorm) committed suicide by leaving their sleeping place open for someone they knew would come in to kill them, Possibly the most ingeneous suicide device was devised for Yaksha, the original vampire in Christopher Pike‘s The Last Vampire series. Yaksha had made a deal to redeem himself by killing all of the vampires and then himself. He saved his former lover for last. She rigged a set of explosives in a room that would kill both of them but then cleverly concealed a shield that would protect her at the crucial moment. Yaksha was killed but she survived.
In the second season of True Blood (the television series drawing on the novels of Charlaine Harris), Godric, the sheriff of Dallas, commited suicide by standing in the open on a building to greet the morning sun as Sookie Stackhouse watches.
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A dream about suicide may suggest that conditions in the dreamer’s life are so frustrating that the dreamer is no longer willing or able to cope with a business or personal relationship in the same way as in the past.