Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

American Suicide: A Psycocultural Exploration

by Howard Kushner
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹2,911.00
Original price ₹3,494.00
Original price ₹3,494.00
Original price ₹3,494.00
(-17%)
₹2,911.00
Current price ₹2,911.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9780813516103
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Rutgers University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Rutgers University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 262
  • Original Price: GBP 22.5
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 445 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Psychopathology / General

The predecessors of Durkheim, Freud, and Kraepelin, distrusting explanations based on specific causation, had assumed that suicide like other diseases was a consequence of the interaction of emotional, constitutional, and habitual imbalances. The way a person lived, ate, and felt was viewed as inseparable from the course and outcome of any disorder. For the nineteenth-century physician, the moral issues that suicide raised could not be isolated from its constitutional components. Thus, those who exhibited suicidal tendencies were subjected to an amalgamation of pharmacological, social, and psychological interventions, which practioners labeled the "moral treatment."

By the 1890s, however, the consensus about the causes of suicide became unglued as a bacteriological medicine and the rise of the social sciences jointly served to call into question eclectic diagnoses. The renewed doctrine of specific causation of disease quickly spilled over into a constellation of explanataions for social behavior. The rise of specialization, which followed the bacteriological revolution of the 1880s, made the moral treatment appear scientifically suspect.

The goal of American Suicide is to demonstrate how the apparent contradictions among sociological, psychoanalytic, and neurobiological explanations of the etiology of suicide may be resolved. Only througha reintegration of culture, psychology, and biology can we begin to construct a satisfactory answer to the questions first raised by Durkheim, Freud, and Kraepelin.

Howard I. Kushner is Professor of History and the Director of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Liberal Arts at San Diego State University. He is the author of Conflict on the Northwestern Coast and (with Anne H. Sherrill) John Milton Hay: The Union of Poetry and Politics.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us