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

ABSTRACT

Alexis Tomarken examines her experience of suicide loss following the suicide of several generations of men in her family, and a clinical vignette of a young woman losing her brother to suicide, to construct a theory of how some women survivors of suicide loss may suffer from damaging and stereotyped projections containing blame and creating shame, anger, and other painful feelings. I characterize Tomarken’s methodology as a form of autotheory, a method emerging from feminist scholarship. In my response to Tomarken’s paper, I will describe autotheory and recognize its importance for understanding and theorizing the multilayered experience of suicide loss survivors. I then examine the projective field of shame, blame, and stigma as they reinforce silence, recognizing Tomarken’s voice emerging from this projective field to speak about the cultural expectations for a particular group of women thereby potentially creating a community of resistance to the shroud of silence surrounding suicide loss.

This article refers to:

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

View responses to this article:

Reply to Tillman and Ferguson: The Personal and the Generalizable

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

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Notes on contributors

Jane G. Tillman

Jane G. Tillman, Ph.D., is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director of the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA. She has been engaged in clinical treatment, research, writing, and professional education on the topic of suicide for over 25 years.