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History of a Suicide: My Sister'sUnfinished LifeJenny Kahn Kaufmann Ph.D.Published online: 16 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Jenny Kahn Kaufmann Ph.D. (2014) History of a Suicide:My Sister's Unfinished Life, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 50:1-2, 284-289, DOI:10.1080/00107530.2014.896607

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2014.896607

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Joseph Newirth, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., is a graduate of the William Alanson WhitePsychoanalytic Institute. He is a professor at the Gordon F. Derner Institute ofAdvanced Psychological Studies at Aldephi University. His book Between Emotionand Cognition: The Generative Unconscious was the recipient of the GradivaAward given by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.

220 East 54th Street, #1CNew York, NY 10022joenewirth@gmail.com

TAMING THE SUICIDE BEAST

A review of History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by JillBialosky, 2011, New York, NY: Atria Books, 252pp.

JENNY KAHN KAUFMANN, Ph.D.

I n History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life, Jill Bialosky cre-ates a narrative perspective that is complex and capacious enough to

consider the multigenerational factors that contribute to suicide as wellas the manifold consequences of this climactic act. Drawing from liter-ature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, Bialosky considers suicide frommany angles, creating a virtual tour de force—by far the most compre-hensive and engaging depiction of a suicide and its myriad ripple effectsthat I have come across in a single book. Not only does Bialosky helpus understand her sister’s suicidal state of mind, she takes us throughher own journey of trying to sort out and come to terms with whathappened.

Bialosky organizes the book in a series of discrete narratives that forman interconnected spiral, feeding into one another and deepening ourcomprehension as we move forward and backward through the differentparts. Initially, she lays out the circumstances of her sister’s suicide, cir-cumstances that make deeper emotional sense as we immerse ourselvesin Bialosky’s own childhood, and the broader circumstances that led toher sister’s birth. Bialosky continuously revisits the same territory, layingout different parts of the story as she moves along, but by the time wehave gotten through all the sections, we know so much more than wedid when we began because aspects of her life history interweave in a

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way that deepens our understanding. The whole truly is greater than thesum of its parts.

The beauty of this book is that it is an in-depth, experience-near nar-rative. Readers will learn more about the multifaceted, chilling realityof living with a death by suicide—and they will learn what it feels liketo inhabit that reality. Bialosky writes, “[b]efore Kim ended her life, Ithought, like most people, that someone who would take his or her ownlife was somehow different from the rest of us. I was wrong” (p. x).To me, this reads like a corollary to Harry Stack Sullivan’s much-quotedmaxim, “[w]e are all more human than otherwise.” It speaks to the wayin which people reflexively distance themselves from trauma.

Bialosky grew up in the upper-middle–class Jewish suburb of ShakerHeights, Ohio, in the 1960s. She’s the middle child of three sisters agedone year apart. Bialosky’s mother—also the mother of her much youngerhalf-sister Kim—lost her own mother when she was nine years old. Itseems that in marrying and having three children in quick successionshe may have been attempting to make up for all that she lost. However,this reparation was short lived, and Mrs. Bialosky may have been retrau-matized when her husband suddenly died of a massive heart attack. Mrs.Bialosky found herself a 24-year-old widow with three small children andno marketable skills. She depended on public assistance, as well as thesupport of her extended family. The family pressured Mrs. Bialosky toremarry, and she succumbed to family pressure and married somewhatimpulsively. Kim was the product of this marriage—an ill-fated unionthat was over by the time Kim was three years old.

Bialosky is masterful in showing us how hidden and depressed hermother became. She spent most of her time in her upstairs bedroom,smoking Pall Malls and watching black-and-white movies into the weehours of the night. She had trouble sleeping and waking, suffered fromdebilitating migraines, and became dependent on medication for basicself-regulation.

Bialosky allows us to empathize with both mother and daughter.Bialosky and her two sisters were able to turn to and help raise oneanother. Kim was 10 years their junior and became even more painfullyisolated after these older sisters left home. Mother-child roles becamereversed, and it seems as if Mrs. Bialosky couldn’t see how reliant shebecame on her daughter or how much her daughter desperately neededher care.

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The book begins by laying out the bare facts of Kim’s suicide: where,when, and why facts. These facts, as well as the actuality of her sister’ssuicide, haunted Bialosky for many years, but it wasn’t until her own son’sfast-approaching adolescence that Bialosky felt an urgent imperative todeal with long-standing feelings about her sister’s suicide. Bialosky tookaction by joining a monthly group for the friends and families of thosewho had committed suicide. In the safety of that group, Bialosky began tobroach the painful feelings she’d been holding back for close to 20 years.

Bialosky describes her experience of attempting to communicate theoverwhelming pain and grief surrounding Kim’s death before joining thisgroup. Bialosky notes that even close friends could not understand whyshe couldn’t get over her sister’s death. In writing this book, Bialoskyconsiders the intractability of a loss by suicide. Even within the group,Bialosky observed two classifications of mourners: those who were reel-ing from relatively recent losses due to suicide, and others who had beenliving with the silent, festering pain of these suicides for decades.

In researching the topic of suicide, Bialosky consulted with Dr. EdwinSchneidman, founder of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS).Schneidman suggested Bialosky read Herman Melville, who writes aboutthe “damp, drizzly November of the soul” in his opening chapter ofMoby Dick. Bialosky draws many links between overwhelming personalloss and its relationship to unbearable loneliness and suffering. Manywriters and poets who have struggled with suicide suffered from earlyparental loss, including William Styron, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath.Bialosky became a voracious reader of writers who have wrestled withsuicide, and discovered that 52 of Shakespeare’s characters kill them-selves. She also considers writers who have engaged with the topic ofsuicide in scholarly ways, including George Howe Colt, A. L. Alvarez, andEmile Durkheim. Durkheim focuses on loneliness and isolation, notingthat “[t]he greater the density of the family the greater the immunity ofindividuals to suicide” (1897/1997).

Bialosky makes a direct link between childhood loss and suicide. Inone compelling passage, she writes about the trouble her sister had inhigh school. When Kim began to exhibit serious academic and behavioralproblems her parents came together for the first time since her father hadwalked out on the family many years earlier. During a school meeting,Kim’s father looked at his daughter and exclaimed, “[y]ou’ll never amountto anything.” Bialosky imagines just how devastating those words musthave been for Kim, and invites us to consider how differently things

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might have gone if Kim’s father had been able to open his heart andsee her difficulties as a wake-up call. He appears to have been in ahypomanic state for years, and we are left wondering what sort of traumashe experienced in his own history that led him to act in such inhuman,unfeeling ways.

Kim’s father did come to her funeral. He arrived by himself and satalone in one of the back rows. Bialosky noticed tears in his eyes as helistened to the ceremony. Even though so many people get in touchwith their sadness and grief when they are confronted with the reality ofdeath, it seems to me that these feelings tend to recede relatively quickly.

One of the complicating factors in mourning a death by suicide isthat so few people know what to do or say—not even clergy or health-care professionals. The rabbi that Bialosky’s family turned to remindedBialosky and her family that suicide was considered a sin in the Jew-ish religion—leaving them feeling even more alone with their sense ofshame and guilt. After the fact, Bialosky learned that the rabbi was nostranger to suicide himself, as his stepson had thrown himself under atrain three years earlier. This was a double betrayal—the rabbi had apersonal experience with suicide, but hid the fact rather than sharingwhat he had been through. One of the problems in getting help with aloss by suicide is that there is so much stigma attached to the loss thateven our helpers have not been able to confront their traumas, leavingeven the people we turn to for aid feeling hollow and unavailable.

The feelings of loneliness and emptiness that plagued Kim throughouther short life began long before she was born, perhaps originating withKim’s mother, who became a motherless child at the age of nine. We caninfer that Kim’s mother was left in a pathological state of grief, whichthen affected her ability to mother Kim. Even though a strong case ismade for Kim growing up as an only child who had been abandonedby her father, Bialosky also implies that Kim merged with her mother’ssense of abandonment and emptiness. Although a rejection by Kim’sboyfriend was the catalyst for her suicide, her deeper sense of lonelinessand aloneness came from her mother, who seemed so unable to be amother to Kim.

Schneidman performed a “psychological autopsy” on Kim, and reas-sured Bialosky that there was nothing she could have done to save Kimbecause she wasn’t Kim’s mother. As her sister, she didn’t have the au-thority to prove to her sister that she mattered. Schneidman points toher father, and believes that by leaving her, Kim’s father was telling her

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daughter that she didn’t deserve to live. Even more pointedly, Kim’s sui-cide was a complicated drama that “dares the mother.” By asphyxiatingherself in her mother’s car in the garage, right under her mother’s bed-room window, Kim seemed to be saying to her mother, “I know you areunconscious and sleeping it off. And I will do this right under your nose.But I wish you were awake and alert and would come out and save me. . .” (p. 230).

When Bialosky asked Schneidman why her sister had lost the willto live on that particular night, Schneidman explained that often thesuicidal mind becomes truncated and narrow. Life seems to consist oftwo possibilities: either suicide or some grand solution that isn’t goingto happen. The person who takes her life feels enormously powerfuloften experiencing the grandiose feeling that the world will end withtheir death. And they’re right, because their world will end. But Bialoskywonders, “[b]ut did she know it would stop forever?” I’ve heard othersuicide survivors ask similar questions. “Did my sister, mother, father,etc. really understand that they would be dead forever? Did they reallymean to die?” Here, I think she is asking, “[d]id my sister understandwhat it would be like for me to have to live in a world punctuated byher absence?”

Suicide survivors inhabit a lonely, isolated place where they oftenfeel different and disenfranchised. As a result, group work is often aninvaluable supplement to individual psychotherapy. It was Bialosky’sgroup experience that finally enabled her to mourn the terrible loss thathad occurred decades earlier.

Recently, mental health workers have focused on the centrality ofwitnessing as an essential aspect in the recovery from trauma. Althoughit is important to focus on suicide prevention, it is also important tolook at the complex interpersonal factors that contribute to a suicide,as well as to acknowledge what happens to the loved ones left behind.Jill Bialosky has dared to venture into a territory that most people arefearful of entering. This is a thoughtful, well-researched, and personallycourageous book that will touch many people who have previously feltalone in their suffering.

REFERENCE

Durkheim, E. (1997). Suicide: A study in sociology. (J. A. Spaulding, Trans.; G.Simpson, Ed.). New York, NY: Free Press. (Originally published 1897.)

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Jenny Kahn Kaufmann, Ph.D., is a member of the faculty and a supervisinganalyst at the William Alanson White Institute. Her interests range from early lossand trauma to accommodative tendencies and psychoanalytic impasses. She is infull-time private practice and is adjunct faculty at the Psychological Center at CityCollege of New York (CUNY) and Beth Israel Medical Center.

1133 Broadway, Suite 828New York, NY 10010-8063j.kaufmann@wawhite.org

CAN A PSYCHOANALYSIS FOUNDED ON DIALOGUE DO WITHOUT ATHEORY OF MIND?

A review of The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday ClinicalPractice by Donna M. Orange. New York: Routledge, 2011, 279pp.

MICHAEL E. SHULMAN, Ph.D.

Analysts are students of trauma, the destructive influence of the past,and fantasies about the self based in a life’s challenges and cata-

clysms. They are also students of the potential of moments in a two-person process to give birth to something new in their patients. Suchmoments only exist, paradoxically, in the context of the past: there is nopresent moment of emergence without its being “backgrounded” by thepast and by the self’s fantasies, informed by them.

Currently, some of the discourse of relationality reads as “in love” withthe present moment and the possibility of novel emergence. In its mostradical form (e.g., Benjamin, 2004; Nahum, 2005; Boston Change ProcessStudy Group, 2010), the present moment of emergence has gained somuch power that it now appears independent of the past and of all theformations of the patient’s mind that are the inheritance of this past. If allmoments in an analysis are “co-constructed” by patient and analyst, thepast can seem to vanish as can these matters: What are the organizingprinciples of this mind, or its contents?

Donna Orange’s The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for EverydayClinical Practice is an effort to assert a “hermeneutics of trust” as thefoundation of the psychoanalytic process, and to propose a new philo-sophical basis for psychoanalysis. Here, the basis of the psychoanalytic

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