Suicide by Proxy
DESCRIPTION:
Suicide by Proxy in the Early Modern Period: Historian Kathy Stuart on indirect suicide, infanticide and executions between God and the Devil.
Despair, Desolation and Suicide by Proxy: A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Early Modern Period
This article examines a disturbing phenomenon of the early modern period: people who did not wish to commit suicide directly because they feared eternal damnation, but instead committed a capital offence to be executed in accordance with the law.
The historian Kathy Stuart reconstructed this phenomenon in her 2023 book “Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 466 pages). In Central Europe between 1650 and 1750, desperate people deliberately committed capital offences, primarily infanticide, and occasionally arson, blasphemy or bestiality, in order to avoid direct suicide and the associated eternal damnation through their execution.
The focus is on despair, religious desperation, social discipline and the question of how Lacan and Kierkegaard can help us to interpret this historical figure psychologically.
What does despair mean in the early modern period?
In the early modern period, desolation was not merely a concept of affect but was closely intertwined with the theological term desperatio. De-speratio denoted despair regarding salvation: the loss or active rejection of spes, that is, the virtue of hope, and was understood as a sin against the Holy Spirit. Anyone who despaired of God’s mercy and could no longer conceive of themselves as the recipient of forgiveness and a future was considered to be in a state of existential desolation, no longer merely sad, but without consolation in the history of salvation.
From this perspective, desolation is structural. Desperatio describes a relationship with oneself before God in which the future is envisaged exclusively as judgement and no longer as salvation. The semantic context—spes as hope, exspes as hopeless, and desperare as giving up hope—makes it clear that desolation is conceived here as the loss of a specific relationship with the Other, namely with God. In this sense, desolation means: the thread of hope is severed; the subject experiences themselves as definitively outside the realm of comfort offered by grace and salvation.
A second, complementary axis of desolation runs through the Ignatian concept of desolatio, which is systematically contrasted with consolatio. Etymologically, desolatio does not derive from solari in the sense of to console, but from desolare in the sense of to lay waste, to render desolate; Dictionaries therefore cite abandonment, loneliness and desolation, emphasising the character of inner desolation. Ignatius imbues this concept with spiritual meaning: desolatio is the darkening of the soul, the experience of being separated from one’s Creator and Lord, accompanied by restlessness, inner emptiness and a lack of hope and love.
Through the Ignatian opposition, desolatio functionally becomes despair. Consolatio denotes the tangible nearness of God, composure and a growth in hope; desolatio denotes the abandoned, emptied experience in which no comfort is to be found. This gives rise to a terminological stratification: desolatio is the phenomenological aspect, despair as a ‘state of the soul, whilst desperatio marks the normative fixation of this despair as a sin against spes. The early modern experience of despair can be situated between these two concepts: as a lived sense of abandonment operating on the borderline of structurally entrenched hopelessness.
Why did suicide by proxy become a social problem after 1650?
Kathy Stuart demonstrates that suicide by proxy became a serious social problem in German-speaking territories after 1650. Suicidal individuals committed capital offences to be executed by the authorities and, through repentance before execution, to attain salvation after all.
This is precisely what makes this practice so revealing. Direct suicide was regarded across all denominations as a path to damnation, whereas execution by the authorities appointed by God left open a final space for confession, repentance and possible redemption; to the perpetrators, the act appeared as a shortcut to salvation.
What role did denominational social discipline play?
Stuart interprets the emergence of these acts as an unintended consequence of aggressive social discipline in confessional states. The more intensively churches and authorities regulated behaviour, sin, sexuality and piety, the more the regime of fear surrounding guilt, judgement and damnation became entrenched.
This led to a paradoxical outcome. The state sought to foster order, discipline and pious subjects. Yet, under certain conditions, it generated a form of suicidal practice that made use of this very order: death was to be achieved not in defiance of the law, but through the law.
What role did the Thirty Years’ War play in despair and suicide by proxy?
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) left the Holy Roman Empire deeply devastated demographically, economically and psychologically. Entire regions were depopulated, villages destroyed, harvests wiped out; hunger, epidemics and persistent insecurity shaped the daily lives of the civilian population for decades after the Peace of Westphalia. In many regions, the population fell dramatically, whilst violence, loss and existential precariousness became a constant feature of daily life – an environment in which experiences of collective and individual desolation become structurally more likely.
Confessional states responded to this war-induced instability with intensified programmes of social discipline: church and police regulations increasingly tightly controlled piety, sexual morality, work discipline and family life to secure order and ‘good policy’ in the wake of the chaos. Kathy Stuart demonstrates that, in this post-war context, ‘Suicide by Proxy’ emerged as an unintended consequence of these disciplinary regimes: suicidal individuals utilised the penal system itself as a mechanism for salvation by committing capital offences in order to find a path to death accompanied by final repentance through legally sanctioned execution.
The connection, however, is not linear in the sense of a simple “war causes Suicide by Proxy” but rather mediated. War generates a deep structure of desolation – material devastation, social fragmentation, religiously interpreted suffering – within which confessional orders of salvation and punishment are drawn tighter. Within this condensed order, new suicidal practices emerge in which individual desolatio (abandonment, weariness of life) and structural desperatio (normatively fixed hopelessness) overlap: Suicide by Proxy becomes the extreme response of a subject driven to despair by war to an order that bundles consolation and judgement within the same instance.
Why were children murdered so frequently?
According to Stuart’s findings, young children were killed most frequently. The perpetrators assumed that innocent children would enter heaven without further ado, whilst they themselves could hope for a final salvation through arrest, confession and execution.
This logic is cruel, but not irrational in the strict historical sense. It follows a religious economy of innocence, in which the child appears assured of salvation and the perpetrator’s own act is imagined not primarily as a murder fantasy, but as a means to an end and, at the same time, as not causing eschatological harm to the victim.
Despair and Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard describes despair as a disturbed relationship with the self: the self does not wish to be itself, or desperately wishes only to be itself. In both cases, the relationship that the self maintains with itself, with its potential, and ultimately with God, fails.
Kierkegaard’s despair can be precisely situated between desolatio and desperatio. Despair is the failed relationship with the self, in which the self either flees from the task of being itself or presumptuously clings to a particular self-definition. In early modern terminology, the existential despair experienced would initially be understood as desolatio, an experience of abandonment and inner desolation, whilst the moral-theological category of desperatio marks the threshold at which this failed relationship with the self becomes permanently entrenched in hopelessness. Suicide by proxy can then be read as a paradoxical attempt to break through the despair of one’s own life through a final, legally staged hope for salvation: the self perishes in order to remain, just barely, in a small remnant of spes.
Lacan and Suicide by Proxy
Lacan shifts the question from the individual's interior to the symbolic structure of the Other. The subject is entangled in language, law and desire; it suffers not only from affects, but from the position it occupies within the field of the Other.
Lacan’s distinction between the symbolic order, imaginary identification and the real fissure allows us to reinterpret desolatio and desperatio. Desolatio appears as the affective signature of a subject who can no longer find a reliable signifier capable of integrating their experience into an order that can be narrated in a ’’; the Big Other remains silent or appears inconsistent. Desperatio would then be the structural consequence in which the subject not only no longer expects any signifiers of consolation, but also renounces the Other itself as a locus of hope: it no longer expects that any Other—be it God, the state or the family—can provide an answer that would make the inner rupture symbolisable.
Suicide by proxy can therefore be read as a highly symbolised act. The subject does not simply kill in order to die, but addresses the Other in its strongest form: the court, the authorities, the church and execution are to authorise the death, so that it appears not as forbidden suicide, but as a legitimate transition under the sign of the law.
Is suicide by proxy a message to the Big Other? From a Lacanian perspective, there is much to suggest so. The act is a message that fulfils its purpose only if the Big Other acknowledges it: the crime calls for arrest, judgment, pastoral care, and execution; without this chain, it loses its function.
This is precisely where the structure of the stand-in lies. One’s own death is not carried out directly, but delegated to the authority that is permitted to kill; the subject makes itself the object of the law to be killed by the law, thereby attempting to symbolically bridge the gap between guilt, desire and the longing for redemption.
What does this story say about guilt, desire and femininity?
The cases examined by Stuart frequently concern women described as weary of life, desperate or socially overwhelmed. This points to gender-specific entanglement in early modern orders of motherhood, sexual morality, domestic service and religious surveillance.
A psychoanalytic reading should remain cautious here. What is decisive is not so much an essentialisation of femininity as the question of how guilt, care, aggression and self-destruction are intertwined within an order that, on the one hand, morally overburdens women and, on the other, leaves only limited symbolic outlets open; infanticide then appears as a monstrous act of impulsive desperation within a closed realm of guilt.
What does Suicide by Proxy reveal about the limits of state power?
Stuart emphasises that Suicide by Proxy was so disturbing precisely because it laid bare the limits of early modern governance. The authorities attempted to suppress this practice but failed repeatedly because the entire penal system offered the perpetrators exactly what they sought: a regulated path to death with an opportunity for repentance.
That is the political punchline of the issue. Social discipline produces not only obedience, but also pathological appropriations of its rituals; where the law promises salvation, or at least does not rule it out, it can unwittingly become a medium for the fulfilment of suicidal desires.
What does this mean for a social-psychological theory of desolation?
From this dual perspective, desolation appears as the intersection of affective abandonment—that is, desolatio—and normatively fixed hopelessness—that is, desperatio. It is neither merely an expression of inner mood nor a pure attribution from without, but a structure in which subjectively experienced emptiness and the interpretation provided by theology, law and pastoral care intertwine. It becomes relevant in social-psychological terms where people can only describe their situation in terms of hopelessness, whilst at the same time, cultural interpretations are available that frame this experience as sin, vice or a borderline case of salvation.
In the constellations of suicide by proxy, the actors moved precisely within this space of tension. Their inner desolation—that is, exhaustion, weariness of life, social overload and religious anxiety—finds no symbolic outlet that might have a stabilising effect within the order of marriage, motherhood, service and piety; instead, it is translated into an act that the outside world can read as desperation. Those who commit a capital offence to be executed respond to their desolation with an act that places their own lives in the hands of the law whilst simultaneously touching the boundary of hopeless despair: death becomes the final place where a trace of hope—namely, repentance before execution—can still be imagined.
Why is this topic relevant today for psychotherapy and cultural criticism?
The religious coordinates of the early modern period are a thing of the past, yet the structure has by no means disappeared. Even today, we find suicidal fantasies in which the subject does not simply wish to die, but seeks, through their own demise, to atone for a guilt, to remove a burden, or to finally satisfy an imagined other.
This is precisely why historical analysis is productive from both clinical and cultural-critical perspectives. It shows that despair should not be understood merely as an individual symptom, but as a structure comprising hopelessness, an appeal to the other, and the search for a fixed meaning to suffering; Kierkegaard and Lacan provide two complementary interpretations of this.
Conclusion
The early modern history of suicide by proxy leads into a zone where theology, law, affect and unconscious dynamics become inseparable. Anyone who reads these cases merely as aberrations or acts of cruelty misses their true significance: they reveal how a culture organises consolation, guilt, hope and annihilation.
Despair is then not merely an inner feeling, but a historical structure of the relationship to the self. Between desperatio, desolatio, Kierkegaard’s despair and Lacan’s Big Other, it becomes apparent that the subject is most at risk precisely where death remains the only symbolically legible way out.
Summary
In the early modern period, desolation often meant desperatio: the loss of hope for grace and salvation.
Desolatio, by contrast, denoted the experience of abandonment, inner emptiness and spiritual desolation.
Suicide by proxy increased sharply after 1650 and became a serious social problem in German-speaking territories.
Perpetrators committed capital offences to be lawfully executed and to have the chance to repent before death.
Children were killed particularly frequently because their innocence was regarded as a guarantee of salvation.
Confessional social discipline inadvertently contributed to the emergence of this pattern.
Kierkegaard helps us to interpret this dynamic as a form of existential despair and a disturbed relationship with the self.
Lacan reveals that the act is addressed to the Big Other: to law, the court and authority.
The phenomenon reveals the limits of state power, because punitive rituals themselves became a medium for suicidal wish fulfilment.
From a social-psychological perspective, desolation links inner suffering with culturally pre-determined forms of guilt, salvation and sacrifice.
Historical analysis sharpens our understanding of contemporary suicidal fantasies, in which self-destruction is imagined as a relief for others.
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