Murder Suicide

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. A murder-suicide is an act in which an individual kills one or more other persons before killing him or herself. Many spree killings have ended in suicide, such as in many school shootings. Some cases of cult suicide may also involve murder. According to the psychiatrist Karl A. Menninger, murder and suicide are interchangeable acts - suicide sometimes forestalling murder, and vice versa. Following Freudian logic, severe repression of natural instincts due to early childhood abuse, may lead the death instinct to emerge in a twisted form. The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose theories on the human notion of death is strongly influenced by Freud, views the fear of death as a universal phenomenon, a fear repressed in the unconscious and of which people are largely unaware. This fear can move individuals toward heroism, but also to scapegoating. Failed attempts to achieve heroism, according to this view, can lead to mental illness and/or antisocial behavior.