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The Suicidal Animal: Science and the Nature of Self-Destruction, by Edmund Ramsden and Duncan Wilson
Oxford Journals
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’.1 The stability of suicide rates, he concluded, demonstrated the ‘existence of collective tendencies exterior to the individual’.2 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.3 Stephen Turner, meanwhile, portrays Durkheim as the ‘prodigal child’ of nineteenth-century positivism, in that he believed statistics could illuminate the ‘underlying causal order that determined human actions’.4 And Daryl Lee has shown how Durkheim believed that this approach would elucidate the ‘deep disturbance from which civilized societies are suffering’ and, in so doing, advance sociology as the pre-eminent means of diagnosing the various ills that plagued modernity.5

But for all the justifiable attention Durkheim’s work has received, these historians have overlooked one striking aspect of Suicide. At the book’s outset, Durkheim defined suicide as ‘all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result’.6 He then outlined precisely why this definition ‘excludes from our study everything related to the suicide of animals’.….

http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/224/1/201.full

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