The Shroud of Suicide: Misogyny, Abjection, and Transgenerational Trauma

ABSTRACT

This paper weaves my own personal and clinical experience with psychoanalytic and gender theory to contribute an understanding of the prevalence and risk of suicide transmission within long-term bereaved families. Integrating personal and theoretical, I propose a theory of how suicide transforms into a “mysterious object” within some families, haunting subsequent generations. Specifically, the view of women as dangerous and subservient to men interpellates grief – silencing, abjecting, and shrouding women where they have “failed” as caregivers and mothers. Gender ideology is tracked to demonstrate how this abjection carries an active absence, resulting in radioactivity and a dead third through family lines. The intersections of gender and suicide highlight the need to acknowledge culturally silenced and ungrievable trauma as buried truths in the cultural landscape of the individual’s life story.

This article is referred to by:

Using Autotheory to Examine the Projective Field of Blame and Shame Following Suicide: Discussion of Alexis Tomarken’s “The Shroud of Suicide”

Standing in the Breach: Discussion of Alexis Tomarken’s “The Shroud of Suicide”

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Virginia Goldner, Avgi Saketopoulo, and Velleda Ceccoli for their commitment to this project at its early stages and Adrienne Harris for her tireless editing of this project. Lauren Levine, Galit Atlas, Ken Corbett, Rachel Schneider, Nadia Colburn, Jason Tomarken, and Ed Tomarken all shared their unique voices and added different perspectives to such a shunned topic of suicide while making sure I didn’t silence my own voice in this endeavor. Lastly, I thank my brave daughter, Hannah, for letting me share her part of this story with the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Elevated rates of suicide have been observed in gay communities, particularly in men who have sex with men, as well as black youth and Asian or Pacific Islander youth. These demographics and their surviving loved ones have also been under-researched and poorly understood.

² This paper explores heteronormative gender roles.

³ Toxic masculinity is also an area of exploration for men’s suicide rates, but that is beyond the scope of this paper.

⁴ Males also self-harm but not at the rate of females.

⁵ Medina (2011) reconceptualizes women’s self-mutilation as an effort to create personal agency in the face of physical or psychic imprisonment.

⁶ Identifying information has been disguised to include an amalgam of clinical material rather than one patient.

⁷ Persephone’s parents continued to deny their son’s suicide at the time of this paper.

⁸ Hannah, now 11, has agreed to have this part of her story published.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Muriel Dimen Grant [Muriel Dimen Grant 2021].

Notes on contributors

Alexis Tomarken

Alexis Tomarken, Dr. holds a MSW from New York University and a Clinical Psychology PhD from Long Island University. She is in private practice in New York City, is an advanced psychoanalytic candidate at NYU’s Postdoctoral Program, supervises Clinical Psychology PhD candidates at Long Island University, and serves on the advisory committee of the American Mental Health Foundation. Dr. Tomarken has published multiple articles on psycho-oncology and grief and is the recipient of the 2018 Rozsika Parker Student Path Essay Prize from the British Journal of Psychotherapy and the 2021 Muriel Dimen Grant from NYU’s Postdoctoral Program. She has also published shorter essays on the COVID pandemic, sexual assault and politics in online magazines. Dr. Tomarken is a suicide loss survivor and uses this experience to write essays on this subject for general and psychoanalytic audiences.