Emile Durkheim: The Suicide

Emile Durkheim: The Suicide

Hello my friends! In this moment I going talk about one of the founding fathers of sociology, called Emile Durkheim :) 

Emile was a French sociologist who set the boundaries of the discipline for firts time. He is the first to talk about "Social Fact", Durkheim explain that "a social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations".

The main topics of Durkheim are : the suicide, social division of work, school discipline, and religious rituals .

This time I will focus in his study of suicide, that was the first study of a "social fact" (and not only individual psychological fact) measured quantitatively.

Durkheim identified four types of suicide, egoistic suicide,altruistic suicide, anomic suicide and fatalistic suicide.

-Egoistic suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being integrated in a community, where social ties are weak, because they fail to commit their lives to society. Generally, is a individualistic decision, where the expectations are more than the reality

-Altruistic suicide is characterized by a sense of being overwhelmed by a group's goals and beliefs. So that if the person think that himself is not unfit to serve, he decides to commit suicide.

- Anomic suicide reflects an individual's moral confusion and lack of social direction, which is related to dramatic social and economic upheaval. Absence of rules and moral cause suicide


- Fatalistic suicide occurs when a person is excessively regulated, when their futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline, so the only method to release for the person is suicide