The Intergenerational Transmission of Suicide

The Suicide of a Parent: Moral Injury, Trauma, and Mourning

One of the arguments against suicide put forth by the Scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas is that suicide morally injures the community (Oyebode 1996), widening the scope of suicide’s impact beyond the family. In linking moral injury to suicide I am extending the current thinking about moral injury, a phenomenon currently associated with war. Jonathan Shay (1994, 2002, 2009, 2014), who first described the phenomenon in relation to war veterans, defines moral injury as “what happens when there is a high-stakes violation of ‘what’s right’ by someone holding legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation. The ‘what’s right’ is in the realm of culture. Legitimation and authority are in the social structure” (2009, p. 294).

For centuries the prohibition of suicide in Western culture has constituted the “violation of what’s right” aspect of Shay’s definition. For Shay, moral injury occurs when there is a betrayal by a person holding legitimate authority. I propose that for many children the first experience of legitimate authority and the moral order comes through a parent, such that the death by suicide of a parent can disrupt the moral link to society that the child has internalized. A second line of thought about the cause of moral injury is that it occurs in soldiers who commit acts of violence in war that lead them to experience a type of self-betrayal by having transgressed their moral beliefs (Litz et al. 2009; Sherman 2010). In soldiers and veterans moral injury often co-occurs with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and at times the distinction between the two is difficult to make.

Moral injury differs from narcissistic injury in that it implicates the social order. Where narcissistic injury implies a self that is injured in isolation or as a particularity, moral injury occurs in the context of the transgression of social and cultural values. For the child, the parents serve to transmit the values of the culture, to make legitimate the community of customs and practices that are the contextual surround for the family. Child and adolescent survivors of familial suicide stand as collateral damage incurred through the actions of the parent, who abandons the child in the suicide, as well as his or her moral authority regarding the endurance of love, hope, and the basic value of life. When a loss leaves the mark of moral injury, the trauma and working through aspects of the loss may present particular challenges.

The death of a parent, particularly for children and adolescents, requires the reworking of identifications and object relations, stirring up conflict about the fate of the parental object. As with most deaths of a loved one, an experience of mourning is an expectable part of the process. Bowlby (1980) and others (E. Furman 1994; R. Furman 1994) have found that even young children are capable of mourning. Lerner (1994) writes that “when a child loses a significant object he or she does not lose only the object. In addition, he or she loses a part of the self that had been complementary to the object” (p. 478). Wolfenstein (1966) observed that following the death of a parent, children and adolescents have a defensively driven identification with the lost object that leads not to decathexis, but rather to intensified feelings of loss.

The developmental path of adolescence includes both a regressive pull toward childhood and a moving toward ideals and aspirations that are often in tension with parental authority. In Erikson’s model (1950), adolescent development often involves a conflict between identity and role confusion, and is associated with developing the value of fidelity. The suicide of a parent may expand the concept of fidelity from its usual location of a person or an ideal, to the question of fidelity to life. The parent who dies by suicide has abandoned an allegiance to life and fidelity to the role as parent. When the suicide of a parent occurs during adolescence, just as the adolescent is immersed in ideals and in establishing an identity connected to but differentiated from the parents, a different sort of vulnerability, emphasizing conflicts in identifications, may weigh more heavily on the adolescent or young adult than the developmental challenges of mourning occurring in a younger child.

Parental suicide complicates identification and/or idealization for the child or adolescent, who is now at increased risk for suicide if overidentified with the parent, and at risk of pathological or incomplete mourning if unable to use identification as a step to mourning. Such a profound bind then shapes subsequent developmental tasks. Commenting on the effects of trauma on object relationships, Bohleber (2011) writes that “whether or not an event or a situation has a traumatic effect depends on whether an intensive relationship existed between the child and the traumatogenic object. The object relationship itself thus acquires a traumatic character” (p. 81).

In the context of parental suicide, identification with a traumatized and traumatizing parental object is entwined with both loving and hateful feelings the child harbors toward the object, and with the final act of aggression and despair bequeathed to the child by the parent. Winnicott (1949) writes about the importance of the parent’s surviving the infant’s aggression, and the analyst’s surviving the patient’s. Implied in this is that the parent or analyst is able to work with his or her own aggression, surviving that as well. The suicide of a parent defeats the goal of containing and surviving aggression arising either within the self or from the child. The child’s unconscious fantasies of hate and aggression have become actualized in the murder of the parent, and the ensuing guilt may lead to problems experiencing and expressing anger in ways that feel survivable.

One of the most urgent questions for survivors of familial suicide is what state of mind and what motivation was at work in the hours and moments leading up to the decision to end one’s life. Survivors of parental suicide may develop a fantasy that the parent had wished for the child to die as well, or was indifferent to the child’s ongoing life or death. LaFarge (2004) has stressed the importance of fantasies of the imaginer and the imagined as central to shaping the child’s inner world, noting that when there are disturbances in this process the child’s capacity for representation will be affected. Rey (1988) illustrates how patients may unconsciously bring to analysis their dying, damaged, or deadened internal objects for the purpose of reparation. Imagining the state of mind of the parent who has ended life through suicide often leads survivors and the community to consider the moral order in which family and community life are embedded. The stigma that may be associated with suicide is enduring, complicating the process of mourning and producing feelings of shame, guilt, blame, or other painful emotions for many survivors (Bell et al. 2012). The effects of moral injury, trauma, and the complicated processes of mourning may produce a type of dehiscence of the internalized parental object from both the external and the internal moral order. It is from such an internal scene that what I am calling a mysterious object relation may arise.

The Mysterious Object

Preoccupation with both fantasy (cs) and phantasy (ucs) about the state of mind of the parent leading up to the suicide may complicate the process of mourning and the reworking of object relations that normatively occurs following death. I propose a potential shift in the object relations of the survivor of parental suicide that includes the emergence of a mysterious object, potentially both alluring and terrifying. Some survivors may be in the quiet, dreadful, and at times exciting thrall of such a mysterious object, which emerges untethered from the symbolic and moral order, or the Third as conceptualized by Muller (1996, 1999, 2011; Muller and Brent 2000).

Following the suicide of a parent, the parental introject may be modified and take on attributes beyond the usual categories of good object, bad object, and ambivalently held object; these attributes are less clearly comprehended. This modified object representation may be described as what I am calling a mysterious object, which is not so easily recognizable or knowable, that hovers over the psychic landscape. The introject of the murdering parent may be in conflict with other parental object representations experienced as giving life and hope to the child. The libidinal internal object and the bad internal object now exist alongside the representation of the violently dead and mysterious object. The mysterious object becomes embedded not only in death, but also in a deeply private experience of the murdering and murdered parent, no longer confined to oedipal fantasies but actualized in reality. In the act of suicide the parent may instantiate a split fantasy in the child that the child is either omnipotent or perhaps a co-conspirator in the parent’s suicide and simultaneously a helpless bystander, mysteriously active and passive. Survivors may come to fear that they are morally implicated in the decisions of family members who die by suicide, a painful fantasy that can take on many different expressions.

In delineating the characteristics of the mysterious object, I draw on the work of Rudolf Otto, who described states of mind experienced when a subject finds herself in the grip of the “wholly other.” Describing the quality of mysterium, Otto (1923) writes that “the truly ‘mysterious’ object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something ‘wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb. . . . The ghost’s real attraction rather consists in this, that . . . it entices the imagination, awakening strong interest and curiosity; it is the weird thing itself that allures the fancy” (pp. 28–29).

The character of the “wholly other” mysterious object confounds the task of mourning because it is dangerous and even life-threatening to identify with it; thus it often remains a split-off aspect of the object world, haunting and resisting efforts at comprehension.

The mysterious object, like Otto’s “wholly other,” is characterized by both tremendum, a quality of dread and trembling, along with fascinans, an attraction or compelling allure (Otto 1923). Part of what makes the object mysterious is its delinkage from the moral order in the very act of suicide. The object is no longer moored in a world governed by an overarching structure of the shared value of life or even the instinct to survive. This damage to the moral order leaves the object on the edge of the incomprehensible. Such an object may haunt the ego as a kind of ghost, never fully able to rest, looking for expression through destruction, creativity, or a paralyzing captivity by the object, or in analysis through the unconscious dimensions of the transference and countertransference. It is this mysterious object, which may unconsciously send the patient on a driven errand to bring back news to the self and subsequent generations about the state of mind of the parent at the time of the suicide. The nature of the errand exposes the patient to a risk factor when the suicidal state of mind is created, and if sufficiently understood, the errand may become a protective factor against suicide in a working through process. More likely, as in the case of Walker Percy, there is a revisiting and working through cycle that repeats over the course of a lifetime.

In the face of an emerging mysterious object, certainly in suicide, but also possibly in incest, analysts should not underestimate the adaptive importance of the “moral defense” of Fairbairn. The “moral defense” occurs when the child opts for a compromise that protects the child from absolute identification with the parental object as unconditionally bad, and instead the child, via guilt, construes the self as morally but conditionally bad (Fairbairn1944, p. 75). In Fairbairn’s theory the activation of the moral defense is the moment at which the superego is established. Analysts are accustomed to thinking of the moral defense as an obstacle to the unfolding analysis and deepening exploration of the inner world. However, in survivors of suicide the moral defense may ultimately be an attempt to restore the social link to society and the moral order, which prohibits the subject from responding with suicidal action to the press of the mysterious object.

The mysterious object may become the locus of trouble in adulthood, when the now grown child approaches the age of the parent at the time of the suicide. A reawakened search then emerges, sometimes a desperate search, for understanding the mysterious object that encases the scene of murder and death. When a parent dies by suicide, the child is confronted with potential alterations in previously introjected parental objects that may be good, bad, or ambivalently held, but that as progenitors of the child have been embedded in the promise of life. My clinical experience tells me that for child survivors of parental suicide a mysterious object may emerge in the transference, and this portends a time of heightened danger for the patient, who is now on an urgent errand called forth by the parent’s traumatic death.

Intergenerational Transmission of Suicide and the Urgent Errand

An enduring concern about the loss of a parent to suicide, particularly in childhood or adolescence, has recently been documented in several memoirs written by survivors of parental suicide (Brockman 2012; Rappaport 2009; Sexton 2012; Wickersham 2009). These memoirs all seek to address the question “Why?” and what the implications are for the survivors. There are numerous examples of the familial transmission of suicide. Ernest Hemingway’s father Clarence committed suicide, as did Ernest and two of his siblings, Ursula and Leicester, and also his granddaughter, the actor Margaux Hemingway. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein shares a similar family history, with three of his four brothers committing suicide, as well as a brother-in-law. Wittgenstein himself struggled with intense suicidal despair in 1919 when he was unable to find a publisher for the Tractatus (Monk 1990).

Apprey (2014) describes the transgenerational transmission of destructive aggression that takes place through the conscious and unconscious recruitment of the subject to undertake a voluntary “errand” in order to manage unconscious “toxic intrusions” from preceding generations. In the case of the suicide of a parent it is not the act that is unconscious for the surviving child. What is unknown is the state of mind of the parent at the time of the suicide, which remains a mystery and often a source of phantasy for survivors. Under the press of moral injury and the mysterious object, the survivor may feel called to undertake an “urgent errand” to research the imagined state of the parent’s mind and enters a traumatic scene that originally belonged to the parent and now has become the mandate of the offspring to resolve (Davoine and Gaudillière 2004). Such an errand may lead survivors into dangerous territory fraught with the risk of acting on suicidal thoughts and impulses. Conversely, this errand, successfully made conscious and understood as originating in the parental object, may allow for a working through of the traumatic event and eventually become a protective factor against suicide. This process bears some similarity to what Faimberg (2005) has called the “telescoping of generations,” which she defines as a condensation of the history of three generations. Faimberg describes an “alienated identification” consisting of an historical condensation that does not entirely belong to the patient’s generation (p. 9).

Walker Percy carried the weight of five generations, four of which had at least one adult male who committed suicide. He was aware of the danger of psychological condensation of this legacy and made it his life’s work not to succumb to what he often worried was his fate. Percy’s writings demonstrate the enduring return of the moral and traumatic residues of familial suicide, and represent a lifelong effort to explore and master the family legacy. In what follows I will outline a five-generation family history of suicide in the Percy family, followed by a detailed life history of Percy himself, and then examine the theme of suicide in his writings, with special attention to his early novel The Last Gentleman. Through this exposition I will show how the resonance of moral injury and the mysterious object may be inferred as at work in Percy’s persistent grappling with the issue of suicide, and the lifelong errand he takes in an effort to simultaneously understand and resist his family history.

The Long History of Suicide in the Percy Family

The first Percy on North American shores was Charles Percy, an Englishman who in 1776 arrived with a boatload of slaves in the Spanish territory south of what is now Natchez, Mississippi (W.A. Percy 1997; Samway 1997; Tolson 1992; Wyatt-Brown 1994, 1999). Leaving behind two wives, one in England and one in Barbados, Charles Percy married a third time and had six more children. Despite economic success as a plantation owner, the death of two of his three sons in infancy, along with a predisposition to melancholia, led Charles to despair. On January 31, 1794, at the age of fifty-four Charles Percy made out his will. Ten days later, in the middle of the night, he made his way to Percy Creek, tied a sugar kettle to his neck, jumped into the creek and drowned. Thus begins the legacy of suicide in the Percy family in this country. Leroy Pope Percy, the grandson of Charles Percy, ended his life at the age of fifty-eight by taking an overdose of laudanum in 1882. His nephew, Walker Percy, born in 1864, was the grandfather of another Walker Percy, the novelist who was his namesake and is my principal subject here.

The elder Walker Percy, a lawyer, had two children; his son LeRoy was the father of Walker Percy the novelist. Both the elder Walker Percy and his son LeRoy committed suicide by shooting themselves in their Birmingham, Alabama, homes. The elder Walker Percy took his life when the novelist Walker Percy was a year old. Though generally prone to depressive episodes, around the time he died the elder Walker Percy was noted to be in good spirits and had planned to go hunting with his son LeRoy. The elder Walker went upstairs to pack at 3:00 p.m. on February 8, 1917. Remaining downstairs, LeRoy heard a muffled sound but did not think much of it. About an hour later he went upstairs, where he discovered that his father had shot himself in the heart with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Over the course of young Walker’s childhood he watched his father, an attorney, become erratic, depressed, volatile, brooding, and perhaps develop a drinking problem. LeRoy Percy traveled to Johns Hopkins to consult experts on depression in 1925, and in 1928 he made his first suicide attempt by cutting his wrists. On July 9, 1929, while the young Percy children were at summer camp, LeRoy Percy went to the attic and shot himself with a twenty-gauge. The suicide of father and then son, both using shotguns to inflict a fatal injury, may be thought of as an errand in which complete identification seems to have occurred, the past (the suicide of a father) being transmitted in toto to the next generation.

Following the death of her husband, Mattie Sue Percy, Walker’s mother, was noted to suffer from depression (Harwell 2006; Tolson 1992). About a year after her husband’s death, she moved with her three sons to Greenville, Mississippi, to live with her husband’s cousin, William Alexander Percy, a poet and novelist. During this time Walker and his younger brother Roy were noted to be constantly fighting, and on one occasion their mother was reported to have yelled at them, “If you don’t stop your fighting you will kill me!” (Wise 2012, p. 233). In this instance the parent is invoking a reverse causal sequence: it is the children who might provoke the suicidal impulse in the parent, as if they are already carriers capable of transmitting suicide within the family.

In 1932, just short of thirty-three months after her husband’s death, Walker’s mother, described as “distraught” (Samway 1997), drove her car off a bridge in the middle of the day, with her youngest child, ten-year-old Phin, in the car with her. Phin, who survived, recalled that his mother had seemed distracted and irritable and would not tell him where they were going. By Phin’s account, when the car plunged off the bridge into the water, his mother grabbed his wrist and would not let him escape, tightening her grip as he attempted to pull her free and escape the submerged car. He was able to wrestle free from her and from the car, noting that she made no attempt to get out of the vehicle (Wise 2012). While the coroner’s official cause of death was “accident,” Phin’s account and Walker’s experience that his mother had been unwell in the months before her death left both convinced that she too had died by suicide. The urge of a suicidal parent to simultaneously murder a child is a profound moral transgression and creates additional conditions for moral injury to surviving children.

The Life of Walker Percy

Born in 1916, the oldest of three boys, Walker Percy was an infant when his paternal grandfather shot himself, thirteen when his father shot himself, and fifteen when his mother drove off the bridge the Saturday after Easter 1932 and drowned. After his mother’s death, Percy’s cousin William Alexander Percy, whom the children referred to as Uncle Will, adopted the three boys. Uncle Will, forty-seven at the time, was a storied figure in Greenville. His first order of business was to introduce Walker to Shelby Foote, a neighborhood boy a year younger than Walker. In Foote, Walker had what Harry Stack Sullivan, a friend of the family, called a “chum,” and the bond may have been strengthened by the fact that when Foote was five years old his father had died. This abiding adolescent chumship lasted until Walker Percy drew his final breath, with Foote at his side. His other close friend after moving to Greenville was Charles Bell, who like Walker became a novelist, as well as a professor of humanities. In 1937, Charles’s sixteen-year-old brother committed suicide by taking cyanide he obtained from the chemistry laboratory at Sewanee, where he was a student. Later, Charles’s father, Judge Percy Bell, committed suicide by shooting himself following a diagnosis of cancer (Wyatt-Brown 1994). Suicide seemed ever present in the intimate circle of Walker’s adolescence and young adulthood. This pattern may be related to the finding that following the Civil War there was an increase in suicide among white southerners while a decrease in was observed for African Americans, suggesting a shift in the moral order of southern culture (Silkenat 2011). In the social context of Walker Percy’s childhood and adolescence, the white culture seems to bear the mark of a twofold moral injury, as descendants both of the perpetrators of the crime of slavery and of those traumatized by the devastation of war and social defeat. Walker Percy seemed embedded in a culture of family and community suicide, likely creating moral upheaval about the value of life.

Uncle Will was an intellectual, a poet, author of the novel Lanterns on the Levee, a lawyer, and gay—though Walker Percy denied this last for the rest of his life, in fact developing a dislike and contempt for homosexuals (Harwell 2006; W.A. Percy 1997; Wyatt-Brown 1994). In an essay about his Uncle Will, Walker Percy describes living with him: “I never met anyone remotely like him. [Living with Uncle Will] was to encounter a complete, articulated view of the world as tragic as it was noble. It was to be introduced to Shakespeare, to Keats, to Brahms, to Beethoven . . .” (Percy 1991, p. 55).

Calling Uncle Will’s large house his home from ages fourteen to twenty-six, Walker Percy describes a place that was a sort of Southern intellectual salon, with frequent guests including Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, David Cohn, Leon Koury, Hodding Carter, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Vachel Lindsay (who himself committed suicide by drinking lye) (Percy 1991; Wise 2012).

Despite the excitement of Uncle Will and a house full of interesting guests, Wise (2012) describes how the children were traumatized, especially young Phin, who was reported to awaken in the night screaming with terror, suffering nightmares about the end of life. During this time Uncle Will often sat in the night with Phin, encouraging him to talk about whatever was troubling him, and if he could not talk or return to sleep Uncle Will would read to him. Phin reportedly carried the trauma of his mother’s death with him for the rest of his life (Wise 2012, pp. 233–234). Perhaps for Phin, having actually been in the car and having a near death encounter while watching his mother die marked him with a greater sense of trauma than his brother Walker, who seemed mostly preoccupied with the explanatory possibilities offered by the precision and clarity of science.

Graduating from high school in Greenville, Walker Percy left to attend the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Shelby Foote followed Walker to Chapel Hill a year later. Walker devoted himself to studying science, certain that it would provide reliable answers to most questions. Graduating in 1937 with a major in chemistry, he went on to medical school at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, from which he graduated in 1941. In a 1974 interview Percy remarked “having been brought up scientifically, I had a great respect for scientific rigor, rigor and precision of language. I certainly didn’t want to say, well besides science we have emotion and art” (Dewey 1974, p. 281). It is possible to infer, though impossible to prove, that Walker was hoping to move beyond the mysterious encounter that art and emotion stir, and was hoping for a fully rational search for meaning he thought science could provide. To speculate further, it is possible that a strong pull toward the rational discipline of science was also a flight from the forces of the irrational, which often mark states of mind associated with suicide.

In medical school Walker found himself drawn to the field of pathology, where a diagnosis at the cellular level as to the underlying problem could be made. Much later, in a study of Chekhov (himself a physician/writer), Walker recalled his draw to pathology and a parallel to being a writer: “Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if not to isolate the bacillus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable” (Percy 1991, p. 206). Was this Walker’s errand—to find words and a rational explanation to protect him from the fate of his forebears? Walker Percy describes trying to rationally approach questions of scientific, spiritual, and psychological mysteries that seemed to leave him paralyzed for substantial periods.

In his second year of medical school, during the Christmas break of 1938, Walker returned to Greenville for the holidays. Harry Stack Sullivan was there as a guest of Uncle Will’s during this time, in part to conduct an observational study of race relations and, according to Samway (1997), to observe Phin, now in high school but continuing to struggle with post-traumatic symptoms related to his mother’s death. Returning to New York after the break, Walker resumed classes; after Sullivan returned to New York in February, Samway contends, Walker met with him on several occasions as a patient. After consulting with Clara Thompson, Walker eventually entered analysis with Janet Rioch, meeting five times weekly for two to three years.

During this time Walker read the Modern Library Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (1938) and A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Freud 1920), apparently eager to learn about the science of the mind. Of Walker’s analysis with Rioch, Samway reports that “the problems Walker talked about were his unresolved feelings about the suicide of his father and what he considered to be the suicide of his mother. In an interview with John C. Carr, he would recall a quote from Kierkegaard that was important to him: ‘Every man has to stand in front of the house of his childhood in order to recover himself’” (Samway 1997, p. 104).

Tolson’s account of Walker’s psychoanalysis (1992) differs from Samway’s in dating the analysis with Rioch starting in 1937. Tolson reports: “Not only did he want to understand why his father came to the end that he came to but, as he had resolved shortly after the suicide in 1929, he wanted to make ‘damn sure’ that he didn’t come to the same end himself. Percy’s fiction is in itself the strongest proof of how well [Rioch] taught her patient to explore his predicament, both his past and his present” (Tolson 1992, p. 139).

Janet Rioch published a single professional paper, on transference, in 1943, and Tolson speculates that the clinical example she gives is from the analysis of Walker Percy. In her published clinical example, a male patient after a year in analysis develops a negative maternal transference to her that is full of mistrust. It is not clear what the fate of this transference is, though Tolson reports that after ending his analysis with Rioch, Walker pursued a one-year analysis with Gotthard Booth. Of this analysis Walker told Shelby Foote that with Booth he was never able to establish a transference (Tolson 1992, p. 151).

Percy’s attempts at psychoanalysis, which he acknowledged were not entirely successful, provided a space for him to begin to put the trauma of parental suicide into words. The use of language enabled him to become a writer and to remember, repeat, and make efforts to work through what he could of his traumatic loss, moral injury, and complex identifications. Psychoanalysis for Percy was the middle space between science and philosophy, and though an imperfect space in his view, it was adequate in that psychoanalysis supports the search of the individual and acknowledges the uncanny aspects of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis stands at the crossroads of science and art and emotion, a place of conflict for Percy that he gradually worked to integrate.

Graduating from medical school in 1941, Walker was undecided about whether to specialize in psychiatry or pathology, finally electing to start a pathology residency at Bellevue Hospital. Five months later, Uncle Will died of a stroke, and three months after that Walker was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, presumably from performing autopsies on cadavers with the disease. He left his internship as a young doctor to become a patient at the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York.

Percy’s young adult devotion to science was an avenue he hoped would provide him the diagnostic tools to understand the underlying pathology of the human condition, which at that time he construed to be medical and biological. Conflicted about choosing to specialize in either psychiatry or pathology, his choice to study pathology was likely overdetermined. It placed him with the dead, handling corpses, and having the image of death impressed upon him in an effort to master the trauma of his young life. Ironically, by contracting tuberculosis, which at the time was not fully treatable, his choice to be with the dead could literally have killed him.

Like many suffering from tuberculosis, Walker was troubled by the “moral taint” the diagnosis carried. The stigma associated with tuberculosis was pervasive, adding another layer to his sense of moral compromise. Describing the sanatorium experience, Rothman (1994) observes it is “a waiting room for death: the possibility of escape (through cure) is ever present, but the dread of failure is pervasive” (p. 227). Here failure is not only the failure of medicine but also the psychological and moral weakness of the patient.

Describing his years in Saranac, Walker remembered being depressed, isolated, and lonely, yet also relieved to be able to read and rethink what he wanted to do with his life if he survived. For Walker “the rest cure” involved reading novels and beginning to master the existentialist writing of Sartre, Kafka, Camus, Dostoyevsky, and finally Kierkegaard and later Aquinas (Dewey 1974; Samway 1997; Tolson 1992). He found that he did not miss the practice of medicine. Reflecting on his time there, he likened it to what Erikson refers to as a moratorium (Wyatt-Brown 1994, p. 304). During the latter part of his time at the sanatorium, Walker came to believe that his physical illness was somehow related to his spiritual condition. Tolson notes that Percy “couldn’t completely escape the old belief that his consumption was only an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible corruption, a disease of the soul” (p. 177). In many ways this description suggests the elaboration of the moral defense proposed by Fairbairn, a sense of the self as conditionally bad and with superego concerns about the moral status of the self.

Walker left the sanatorium in late 1944 with a plan to teach pathology in the medical school at Columbia. After only a few months, his tuberculosis returned and he went to Gaylord Sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he was assigned to the bed that Eugene O’Neill had occupied in 1912, the same year the playwright had made a serious suicide attempt. Percy said being confined to that room left him “with a strange, strange feeling” (Tolson 1992, p. 182). Was that strange feeling a haunting reminder of his family legacy and the now conscious awareness of a mysterious internal object? Leaving Gaylord after several months, and fast approaching his thirtieth birthday, Walker worried that because of his tuberculosis no woman would ever want to marry him. He now carried a twin stigma: survivor of parental suicide and tuberculosis patient. His career gone, with no prospects for work, and afraid he would not find a woman to marry, Walker returned to Greenville depressed and somewhat desperate. Back home, Walker purchased, for the sum of one dollar, the Luger his brother Roy had brought back from the war in Europe. There is speculation by Tolson (1992) and others that Walker was contemplating suicide at the time.

In the midst of his ongoing identity and life crisis, Walker somehow resolved that marriage was something he wanted to pursue, and he reconnected with a woman he had dated on and off for five years, Mary Bernice “Bunt” Townsend, marrying her in 1946. Just after they married he had another relapse of tuberculosis, but this time convalesced at home, now in Sewanee, with his new wife tending to him. After long thought, in the summer of 1947 Walker and Bunt converted to Roman Catholicism. They were confirmed in 1948. While Percy was undoubtedly drawn to Roman Catholicism for complex reasons of faith and intellectual rigor, his was not the storied sudden experience of conversion. Like his decision to marry, becoming Roman Catholic followed long thought and intellectual deliberation. Both consciously and unconsciously, this decision may have indicated his acknowledgment of a need for a durable moral prohibition of suicide. In the 1940s the Roman Catholic Church may have been his best hope for a firm moral order, with a stable patriarchal presence and a centuries-old, unwavering theology very clearly prohibiting suicide.

During this time Percy also made a commitment to pursue a career as a writer. Walker and Bunt moved to Covington, Louisiana, where he would live and work as a writer for the rest of his life. Struggling with repeated bouts of depression, drinking, hepatitis, and religious doubt, he continued to write, both fiction and nonfiction. At the age of fifty-seven, in an off-the-cuff remark to his student Wyatt Prunty, Percy said, “I guess the central mystery of my life will always be why my father killed himself ” (Tolson 1992, p. 396). Walker Percy died of prostate cancer on May 10, 1990, at the age of seventy-two.

In an interview after his death, his good friend, the local bookstore owner Rhoda Faust, spoke of Percy’s ongoing battle with drinking and chronic depression: “Alcohol would lift that depression for a certain period, but he’d have to limit it. He was also really proud of being the oldest living Percy, that he’d fought off his depression enough not to commit suicide. That was important to him, that progress, but it was still a constant struggle. I gathered later that suicide was no longer an issue, that Catholicism took that off the table for him. That was something of a relief and another reason that he valued his beliefs” (Harwell 2006, p. 96).

Until the very end of his life, Walker Percy struggled with profound alienation and the question “Why not?” regarding suicide, which in the year before his death from cancer he answered: it is “not permitted” (Percy 1989, p. 303). This unconditional statement suggests that Percy had yielded to the moral teaching of the Church, which at the time served as a viable Third, restoring a moral prohibition against suicide and serving as a protective factor in the face of his doubts. Lifelong friendship, family support, psychoanalysis, and an ongoing self-analysis through writing helped Percy eventually establish an identity as a writer and to avoid joining the ranks of the Percy men before him who had committed suicide.

There Is but One Question: Suicide in the Writings of Walker Percy

Walker Percy began publishing essays in various journals starting in 1954 and wrote two unpublished novels. A recurrent theme in his writing is of a debased, confused, fragmented culture and the people (most often men) trying to make sense of themselves in such a world. Percy repeatedly explores how the individual is in danger of succumbing to the alienation produced by a world with misplaced hope in technology and science. His characters often are psychologically impaired by perversions, mysterious neurological ailments, foolish grandiosity aimed at proving obscure theories to save the world, and the comical use of science to better the human condition while failing to recognize that the problem is beyond the reach of scientific understanding.

At the age of forty-five, in 1961 Percy published his first novel, The Moviegoer. Much to his surprise, in 1962 it won the National Book Award. He would go on to publish a total of six novels and three books of nonfiction. The theme of suicide is present in all of his writing, from beginning to end. The physician turned religious man and novelist sought over and over to “diagnose the modern malaise” (Percy 1991, p. 204). Knowing Percy’s family and life history, one sees the physician attempting to heal himself, a work that lasted all his life. His writing about suicide and despair in a shifting cultural context provides some evidence of the transgenerational errand he had embarked on, one that involved exploring through writing states of mind associated with suicidality and alienation and also helping him enact a solution involving sublimation and creativity, rather than complete identification with parental objects and suicide.

Percy’s preoccupation with exploring the topic of suicide in his characters can be demonstrated in part by a simple computer tabulation of the number of times the word suicide appears in each of his books. They appear in chronological order, with the number of uses in parentheses: The Moviegoer (5), The Last Gentleman (13), Love in the Ruins (5), The Message in the Bottle (12), Lancelot (1), The Second Coming (12), Lost in the Cosmos (26), The Thanatos Syndrome (12), Signposts in a Strange Land (20).

This cursory list provides rather concrete evidence that revisiting the theme of suicide was a primary task for Percy, and while his characters seem fully capable of folly and despair, they are not often in the throes of conscious mourning. Percy’s writings were devoted to putting the moral confusion and dislocation of modern man into words. The search for meaning and understanding was his way of both repeating and working through the moral injury of suicide and exploring the allure and horror of the mysterious object.

Percy’s second published novel, The Last Gentleman (1966) is generally thought to be his most autobiographical (Pridgen 2000), and the protagonist, the twenty-five-year-old Will Barrett (perhaps an amalgam of Walker Percy and Uncle Will) provides a vivid example of the persistence of a mysterious state of mind following the suicide of a parent. Percy opens the novel by quoting from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: “If a man cannot forget he will never amount to much.” Percy fashions a character with the symptom of amnesia, which produces a profound internal dislocation, suggesting that forgetting the past is no more useful than remembering it. Will Barrett is a young man from the South living in New York after dropping out of Princeton. He works the night shift in the furnace room at Macy’s and has been given the nickname “the engineer,” which is how he is referred to by the narrator of the novel. He is troubled in many ways and is trying to answer the question “Who am I and why am I here?” Will is a mystery to himself. When he was nineteen his father committed suicide, marking his son and saddling him with further confusion about his identity, family legacy, and cultural heritage. Will’s mind is presented by Percy as fragmented, his main symptom involving a mental fog that affects every sphere of his functioning: work, relationships, periods of literal unconsciousness, identity disturbance, nihilistic thinking, and states of confusion that bind him to a family legacy he can neither comprehend nor fully leave behind. He seems paralyzed in his development and is on a haphazard search, struggling to claim his life as one with any meaning or direction. Will is a character inhabited by the mystery of why he continues to survive given the wreckage he finds within himself and in the world.

The novel opens with Will’s abruptly spending the last of his inheritance on an elegant telescope that will allow him to observe the happenings in Central Park from his apartment window. This expenditure also precipitously ends his psychoanalysis with Dr. Gamow, someone he has been in psychoanalysis with for several years. The presenting symptoms were alienation, fugue states, and experiences of déjà vu. Here is how Percy introduces his main character: “To be specific, he had now a nervous condition and suffered spells of amnesia and even between times did not quite know what was what. Much of the time he was like a man who has just crawled out of a bombed building. Everything looked strange. . . . There were times when he was as normal as anyone. . . . Most of this young man’s life was a gap. The summer before, he had fallen into a fugue state and had wandered around northern Virginia for three weeks, where he sat sunk in thought on old battlegrounds, hardly aware of his own name” (Percy 1966, pp. 19–20).

Will has suffered from a sense of alienation since childhood, but with his father’s death by suicide he begins a search for meaning, first looking inward (psychoanalysis) and then outward toward the world and the cosmos (the telescope). In the novel it becomes clear that young Will feels that his father has violated the very code of honor he professed, and in the deed of suicide has not left his son an adequate moral framework from which to go forward in his life with a sense of himself or others as capable of acting in good faith. Percy succeeds in creating a character with a mysterious symptom and the presence of the uncanny embedded in the mundane.

Will uses the newly purchased telescope to observe Central Park from his room at the YMCA. Suddenly he discovers a young woman sitting on a park bench and develops a romantic curiosity about her, eventually following her, hoping to meet her seemingly by chance. Succeeding, he learns her name is Kitty and then meets her family, the Vaughts, who are from Alabama and are in New York pursuing treatment for their sixteen-year-old son Jamie, who is terminally ill with leukemia. Jamie is first introduced lying in a hospital bed reading from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Eventually Will joins the family, which includes Jamie’s siblings and parents, and returns with them to the South, ostensibly to serve as a tutor and companion to Jamie during his final months. The backdrop of this story is Will’s search for some alternative to suicide—what case can the world make to him, to anyone, for living? And yet the looming alternative of Jamie’s death does not bring the prospect of relief either.

Percy was not finished with the character of Will Barrett; fourteen years later a middle-aged Will is the center of Percy’s 1980 novel The Second Coming. Here the reader finds Will having had a successful Wall Street career, living the cynically depicted American dream of playing golf all day and socializing at the country club. This supposed good life is again hollow and so full of alienation that a version of the original symptom reemerges, as Will develops visions and “petty-mal seizures.” Will takes these to be both the voice of God and voices long repressed from his past. Reflecting on his father’s suicide, Will realizes that “his father’s suicide was wasted. It availed nothing, proved nothing, solved nothing, posed no questions let alone answered questions, did nobody good. It was no more than an exit, a getting up and going out, a closing of the door” (Percy 1980, p. 211).

Through the character of Will Barrett, Percy recapitulates his own wandering and questioning. He parodies white southern aristocracy, knowing that it solves nothing to live in the past, although the present is so alienating that Percy and his characters struggle to find a way just to survive their despair. What he offers is an often comical take on the heroic-tragic character.

Suicide is ever present in Percy’s novels; it is here, through his writing, that he shows through the displaced telling the profound trauma of his life and his efforts to reconstruct the narrative of survivors as they imagine various identifications with a deadened and mysterious internal and external landscape. There is no solution to this mysterious despair but wry humor, a layer of bitterness relieved by small moments of contact with other damaged souls, and a commitment not to succumb to the ultimate self-destruction that beckons Percy’s protagonists. A visit to the Walker Percy archive in Chapel Hill ¹ allowed me to examine the handwritten notes in which he sketched the scenes of The Last Gentleman and wrote longhand drafts of his other books (often in pencil on notebook paper). His penmanship is poor, nearly illegible in many places, but there are several instances of very clear, printed handwriting of the word suicide, heavily lined and traced, and drawings of a skull and crossbones, a gun, and numerous other symbols or doodles scattered throughout his character sketches and plot summaries. These words and markings convey to me a sense of a man very hard at work, searching for words, for plots, for a story line that captures the central concerns of suicide, sexuality, relationships, nihilism, humor, and the quest for meaning in the midst of the absurd. The themes of moral injury and the mysterious inner landscape of uncanny or unmoored objects repeat throughout Percy’s life of writing, suggesting that his writing was a way to undertake an urgent errand without the compulsion to act on suicidal thoughts.

Discussion

In a deep and intensive treatment, the allure of the mysterious object in both its good and bad aspects may be played out in transference fantasies, and at times in reality, where the stakes can be very high. The temptation for the patient to extend the exploration of fantasy into the realm of reality, actualizing a deadly scene as the parent has done, often involves a split in the patient, who presents for treatment out of a conscious desire to live, but is unconsciously drawn to researching the imagined state of the dead parent. This type of research into the parent’s state of mind may involve a temptation toward action in an effort to understand or master the mysterious object, to make a final identification with the dead parent, or to punish oneself for angry feelings and fantasies toward a current love object who disappoints or fails to sustain the split-off good object tie. In a sense, there are several outcomes of the errand the patient is on; one involves knowing what the patient can reasonably come to learn about what is imagined about the parental state of mind preceding the suicide and the alterations this may have produced in object relations—and to do this without re-creating the act of suicide. In other cases, symbolic play in the transference may become concretized and the patient repeats in action rather than imagining and containing the exploratory errand in the analytic space.

One clinical path includes an idealizing transference that emerges in an effort to reclaim the good aspects of the dyadic parental relationship, the imagined time before depression, anger, despair, and calamity took hold. Here the analyst may observe a type of euphoric unreality in the patient, whose distortion of the scene seems even more pitched than in idealizing transference experiences with other patients. Then, at some point, often when the fantasized, longed-for dyadic bliss with the analyst becomes strained, a bad/mysterious object transference emerges—perhaps a transference most akin to what LaFarge (2011) has identified as occurring along the deceiver/deceived axis. The patient becomes convinced that the analyst is not the idealized figure he or she has imagined, and instead the transference rapidly tilts so that the therapist is now experienced as a deceiver who wishes to deprive the patient of consensual reality through misunderstanding, misinterpretation, mishearing, and misattunement. The analyst is seen as having seduced the patient only to abandon him or her, an experience that repeats the seduction/abandonment experience with the dead parent. Here the activation and identification of an “amoral internal persecutor” (Fairbairn 1944), where the experience of self and other is unconditionally bad, may potentiate a suicide attempt.

At this point the transference intensifies, with the patient feeling that the analyst has acted in bad faith, which may be experienced as a transgression of a moral commitment, which is now experienced as having been abandoned by the analyst. The world is shattered, all is lost; often, immersed in this painful enactment, it may seem as if the analysis or even the patient will not survive. This is a critical moment in the analysis, one in which the risk of suicide is increased. The patient’s intense double identification, with the despairing/angry parental object and the despairing/angry abandoned child, may lead him or her to conclude that there is nothing left to live for, and that the one person he or she most counted on no longer exists as a usable figure, either in the transference or in reality, a traumatic repetition of object loss and the fragmentation of the organizing moral sphere. Here the “high stakes” situation referred to by Shay (2009) is in play, and the risk of suicidal escalation can be high. More complicated is the emergence of the mysterious object with a potential for a twin identification: with the parental object that both evokes a terror of identification and action and also lures the survivor into joining the dead parent in the despairing state of mind that precipitated the parental suicide, and with the imagined relief of reunion with the dead parent.

The life history and work of Walker Percy, even as an extreme example, allows an exploration of the psychological processes that may occur in the children of parents who commit suicide. Similar to his character Will Barrett, entering young adulthood Percy was carrying the moral injury of parental suicide and the insistent questions “Why suicide?” and “Why not suicide?” Added to this were two other situations associated with moral conflict: loving and admiring his Uncle Will, who lived in the shadow of moral prohibition (at that time in history) for being gay, and the experience of the moral taint of tuberculosis. An apparent split in Percy allowed him to disavow Uncle Will’s sexuality while preserving a space for ongoing love and respect. Such a capacity for denial and splitting may have made it possible for Percy to recover the capacity for attachment and idealization of an adult figure, particularly a male figure. His primary interest in his novels was in the dilemmas of male characters, and how men with existential despair endure without killing themselves.

The suicide of a family member, particularly a parent, often inflicts a moral injury on surviving family members, and for children and adolescents this may have a profound effect on the task of mourning and reestablishing a stable link to the moral order, a protective factor against suicide. Object relations must be reworked, and the emergence of a mysterious object may become problematic for the child given the strong pull toward identifying with the dead parent and the excitement and horror of the consequences of doing so. This split presents serious challenges for treating patients with a family history of suicide and may explain some of the increased risk that survivors of familial suicide incur. The life and work of Walker Percy shows how one person attempted to work with the intergenerational transmission of suicide and its associated psychological conflicts.

No psychoanalytic theory can achieve universality, and there are many intrapsychic pathways to the act of suicide, as well as many responses a survivor may have to the suicide of a close friend or family member. Not all survivors will experience the intensity of moral injury and its component of betrayal, nor will the emergence of an altered object relation be present for many survivors of parental suicide. Research shows that a family history of suicide is a risk factor for suicide in offspring, yet to date there is no psychoanalytic theory of the intergenerational transmission of suicide. My theory emerges from reading accounts of survivors of parental and familial suicide and from treating a small number of patients who seem to offer clinical evidence for the relationship between moral injury and the errand to understand a mysterious internal object relation.