Doctor-Assisted Suicide: Psychoanalysis of Mass Anxiety

At bottom, the controversy surrounding Dr Jack Kevorkian's advocacy and performance of such suicides involves a struggle over how to respond to the Other's deficiency. His program offers opposing fantasies to his supporters and his opponents concerning the individual subject's positions vis-a-vis the Real Other and the Symbolic Other. Both sides of the dispute employ Kevorkian's proposals as materials for constructing a myth. It will be difficult to achieve a solution to this controversy without addressing these fantasies. Considers 2 practices that offer real potential for instituting psychoanalytic solutions to this and other problems at a collective level. (Original abstract-amended)