Self-Destruction in the Promised Land: A Psychocultural Biology of American Suicide.

a growing interdisciplinary suicidology developed its own journals and national association. From the earliest scientific studies of suicide, we have been confronted with the fact that a skein of threads are woven together to produce the final dramatic outcome. It has long been observed that environmental factors, cultural ormentality features, and specific personality or intrapsychic factors are all to be observed as significant and interacting in the outcome. Within the past decade, an additional facet of the individual committing has been elucidated in the form of biological factors manifested in biochemical changes in the central nervous system and genetic patterns. In the present volume Kushner, a historian, has attempted, as his subtitle indicates, a synthesis of these disparate influences to produce a unified theory of the occurrence of in the United States. To dramatize his theory and give it an innovative spin, Kushner has repeatedly argued that a specialization has been at work in the study of suicide, driving apart sociological, psychoana¬ lytic, and biological views and findings in relation to suicide. The atomization of American experts' views on was influenced more profoundly by the requirements of professionalization and specialization than ... by the logic of scientific discovery (p 10). UsingDurkheim, Freud, and Kraepelin as the fig¬ ureheads for his proposition, he argues that they and their followers pursued their insights in a single-minded man¬ (p 93) and rejected eclectic ap¬ proaches to behaviors like suicide (p 53). Presenting few data to support this contention, he offers the opinions of fel¬ low historians David J. Rothman (p 53) and Gerald N. Grob (p 51) in evidence. Kushner argues that since the late 19th century, three fundamentally dif¬ fering explanations of have been advanced: Sociologists have claimed that is a social disease; psychoanalysts have assumed it results from intrapsychic conflicts; while neuropsychiatrists have insisted that is an organic disorder (p 90). Kushner's view is an exaggeration and a distortion of a field that has been fundamentally interdisciplinary since its inception and has wrestledmightily with the problem of integrating the obvious contributing elements of society, historical events, and the individual. Nevertheless, Kush¬ ner makes important contributions in attempting his synthesis. He points out thatmigrants in the United States have been particularly prone to suicide, both foreigners coming to the United States and new settlers arriving in the West.