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Emile Durkheim: Suicides
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In critically reviewing the existing suicide literature, which largely viewed acts of self-destruction as having physiological or psychological origins, Durkheim wondered why people from similar genetic origins did not have similar rates of suicide. Why did rates vary within one region over time? If it was related to weakness of character, why was it unrelated to levels of alcoholism? Utilizing logic and statistics, Durkheim challenged both popular and academic explanations. In doing so, he indicated that the tentative sociological approach he had begun to develop in the book's introduction offered greater explanatory power. The majority of the book lays out what became a classic sociological explanation for suicide.
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Durkheim's program of study, the overriding problems in all his work, concerns the sources of social order and disorder, the forces that make for regulation or de-regulation in the body social. His work on suicide, of which the discussion and analysis of anomie forms a part, must be read in this light. Once he discovered that certain types of suicide could be accounted for by anomie, he could then use anomic suicide as an index for the otherwise unmeasurable degree of social integration. This was not circular reasoning, as could be argued, but a further application of his method of analysis. He reasoned as follows: There are no societies in which suicide does not occur, and many societies show roughly the same rates of suicide over long periods of time. This indicates that suicides may be considered a "normal," that is, a regular, occurrence.
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Durkheim developed the concept of anomie later in Suicide, published in 1897. In it, he explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, explaining that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to their groups, which he calls social integration. Abnormally high or low levels of social integration may result in increased suicide rates; low levels have this effect because low social integration results in disorganized society, alienation and loneliness in the individual, causing people to turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to avoid becoming burdens on society, or because the social pressure becomes too great and oppressive. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. This work has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study.
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Durkheim rules out that suicide varies with psychopathic states.It cannot be that people have only one specific type of mental illness that would lead them to commit suicide. People cannot be temporarily insane because they lack a motive to commit suicide. There is no correlation between insanity (as measured, for instance, by the number of people in an asylum) and the suicide rate. Finally, there is no correlation between alcoholism and suicide.
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In order to explain regular differential rates of suicide in various religious or occupational groupings, Durkheim studied the character of these groups, their characteristic ways of bringing about cohesion and solidarity among their members. He did not concern himself with the psychological traits or motives of the component individuals, for these vary. In contrast, the structures that have high suicide rates all have in common a relative lack of cohesion, or a condition of relative normlessness.
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Some of the subjects addressed include: Just how significant was Durkheim's work? Has it stood the test of time? What major faults have been identified in Durkheim's theory? How has Durkheim influenced the study of and present-day thinking on suicide? Also included in this volume is the first complete English translation of Durkheim's essay "Suicide et natalite," together with ground-breaking commentary on this important early work. An unparalleled bibliography accompanies this soon-to-be classic.
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