Oblative, oblada life goes on... ha?: A short film on oblative suicide

• Main Authors: Ramos, Edrea, Tintiangko, Jeremy
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2011
• Subjects: Suicide; Communication
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/5260
• Institution: De La Salle University

In his 1938 writing entitled Man Against Himself, Karl A. Menninger, a famous American psychologist, say that “Suicide must thus be regarded as a peculiar kind of death which entails three basic internal elements and many modifying ones. There is a the element of dying, the element of killing, and the element of being killed. Each is a condensation for which there exist complexes of motive, conscious and unconscious. What we call a suicide is for the individual himself an attempt to burst into life or to save his life. It may be to avoid something far more dreadful, to avoid committing murder or going mad (Menninger 92). However, the causes of suicide cannot simply be dismissed as a self-destructed act that is driven by psychological disturbances.With this, expert offer different kinds of suicide. Jean Baechler, a French student of revolutions has been "studying suicide as though it were an individual revolution of some sort and producing one of the most insightful analytic volumes on suicide that exists" (Shneidman, 103). Baechler defined the different kinds of suicide and has categorized it into four kinds of suicidal acts: "(a) escapist suicides, either of flight or grief of punishment; (b) aggressive suicides, either of crime and vengeance or of blackmail and appeal; (c) oblative suicides of sacrifice and transfiguration; and, (d) ludic suicides involving the ordeal or the game" (Shneidman) 104). Suicide as backed up by the data gathered is no merely confined to the typical situations portrayed by prominent institutions in society.