Psychoanalytic understanding of the request for assisted suicide

Abstract

The legalisation of assisted dying, including euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, is increasing in countries across the world and constitutes a key contemporary debate, reflecting social changes, in which two views of suicide conflict; that (1) rational reasons justify assisted suicide, providing dignity and control of terminal illness and (2) suicidal wishes are driven by unconscious and disturbing internal conflicts. In this paper we explore the unconscious motives and meanings of requests for assisted suicide. Although there is a paucity of psychoanalytic literature on the subject, and an absence of practice examples, we make two links, firstly, with the literature of palliative and end of life care, and, secondly, with psychoanalytic understanding of suicide, in order to develop the view that unconscious factors are crucial to understanding requests for assisted suicide. We provide an illustrative case example of psychodynamic psychotherapy with a 94-year-old woman, drawing out theoretical and practice implications. We show that unconscious factors and motives lie behind apparently rational requests for assisted suicide, and attention to these through psychoanalytically informed treatment can bring about therapeutic change.

Keywords: Assisted suicide; depression; euthanasia; palliative care; suicide; terminal illness.