Life Drive, Death Drive: An Interaction That Needs to Be Understood Better in Order to Prevent Adolescent Suicides

The interaction between the life drive and the death drive needs to be better understood in order to prevent adolescent suicides. Suicide attempts by adolescents are a major health problem and this paper focuses on the mental functioning of people at this stage of life. The Freudian contribution to the last theory of instincts and the concept of self-presentation offer a dual theoretical framework for this comparative approach of two groups of 31 adolescents, one comprised of suicidal individuals and the other a control group. The projective tool used is the Rorschach. After employing a classic scoring procedure, the self-presentation grid designed by Nina Rausch de Traubenberg and her team, an interpretation is made that centers on the exploration of a dual movement between life and death at the heart of these protocols. The hypotheses proposed for the suicidal adolescents, particularly the ones concerning a dominant unbonding movement and a weaker expression of the life instinct, are verified empirically. Several examples of responses and two contrasting protocols illustrate these results and reveal the central position of the evaluation of life traces in these adolescents in suicide prevention measures.