"Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide"
About this Quote
Menninger lobs this like a rhetorical grenade: two sentences that flip the moral furniture and force the reader to stop pretending our categories are clean. The opening question is a trap. He anticipates the recoil - suicide as prevention of murder sounds melodramatic, even perverse - then answers himself with brisk certainty. That cadence is doing clinical work: it mimics the psychiatrist who has heard too many tidy stories and is no longer impressed by what “normal people” find believable.
The intent isn’t to shock for sport; it’s to insist on a shared psychological circuitry behind acts we like to quarantine from each other. In Menninger’s frame, suicide and murder aren’t opposites but alternate outlets for the same pressure: aggression, despair, the wish to end an intolerable situation by ending a life. Sometimes the threatened life is one’s own; sometimes it’s someone else’s. The subtext is grimly anti-romantic. Suicide is not automatically selfless or inward; murder is not always cold-blooded or purely predatory. Each can be a desperate attempt at control, a crude form of “harm reduction” when the mind is cornered.
Context matters: Menninger helped shape midcentury psychiatry’s push to treat self-destruction as intelligible behavior rather than sin or scandal. His phrasing reads like a corrective to moral bookkeeping, where suicide earns pity and murder earns pure condemnation. He’s saying the ledger is messier: the same person may be oscillating between targets. The quote works because it denies the reader an easy place to stand, making discomfort the point - an ethical jolt in service of psychological realism.
The intent isn’t to shock for sport; it’s to insist on a shared psychological circuitry behind acts we like to quarantine from each other. In Menninger’s frame, suicide and murder aren’t opposites but alternate outlets for the same pressure: aggression, despair, the wish to end an intolerable situation by ending a life. Sometimes the threatened life is one’s own; sometimes it’s someone else’s. The subtext is grimly anti-romantic. Suicide is not automatically selfless or inward; murder is not always cold-blooded or purely predatory. Each can be a desperate attempt at control, a crude form of “harm reduction” when the mind is cornered.
Context matters: Menninger helped shape midcentury psychiatry’s push to treat self-destruction as intelligible behavior rather than sin or scandal. His phrasing reads like a corrective to moral bookkeeping, where suicide earns pity and murder earns pure condemnation. He’s saying the ledger is messier: the same person may be oscillating between targets. The quote works because it denies the reader an easy place to stand, making discomfort the point - an ethical jolt in service of psychological realism.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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