Born of Lack: Surviving Children of Suiciders

Philosophical discourse on suicide largely deals with questions of the ontological status of suicide (What is suicide?) or the moral status of suicide (Can suicide be morally justified?). Little philosophical attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which a person’s (attempt/s to) suicide impacts on the individuals surrounding her. Given the integral place parents play in their children’s development of identity, I am interested in looking at children who survive the suicide (attempts) of their parents. Drawing on relevant psychological literature on children of suiciders, as well as my own experience as the child of a suicider, I propose to use Claudia Card’s discussion of survival of atrocity and its impact on identity formation as the theoretical framework for this exploration. Card understands survival of an agent in terms of both the capabilities an agent develops in order to survive atrocity and as that which remains unchanged in the agent at the conclusion of the experienced atrocity. It is my contention that these two forms of survival are uniquely related in the experiences of children of suiciders. Survivors lose one of the primary, early constituents of identity formation. When a child survives the suicide of a parent, the agentic powers she has developed are based on ‘lacks’ in her world. That which remains is insecurity (ontological, physical, and otherwise). What does it mean to say a child has ‘survived’ the voluntary death of a parent? Can we say that a child of a suicider ‘survives’ in a robust sense?.