Durkheim’s Critique of the Alienists and the Invention of Suicide as a Sociological Problem
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The first chapter of Le Suicide, the subject of the Lysis meeting on 9 April 2026, inaugurates the sociology of suicide with an arresting and provocative refusal. Before defining suicide as a social fact, Émile Durkheim dismantles a claim that seemed beyond question in his time. French alienists held that every suicide was, by its very nature, a phenomenon of madness. This opening move is deeply strategic. What is at stake is the right to say what suicide is.
Nineteenth-century mental medicine, represented by figures such as Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol and Étienne-Jean Georget, among many others, had consolidated an interpretation that reduced suicide to a manifestation of mental alienation. Even when these authors admitted “partial” or “momentary” forms of madness, they held to the strong claim that suicide never occurs without pathology. Durkheim enters the debate with the insight that as long as this definition prevails, suicide will remain beyond the reach of sociology. If all suicide is madness, it falls within the domain of medicine, leaving nothing to be explained socially.
Durkheim's critique proceeds from within the alienists' discourse. He examines their classifications, including manic, melancholic, obsessive, and impulsive suicide, and shows their internal weaknesses. These typologies mix different levels of analysis. Sometimes they describe affective states, sometimes supposed causes, and sometimes forms of manifestation. The result is an unstable taxonomy incapable of supplying a unified explanatory principle. By exposing this heterogeneity, Durkheim undermines the alienists' scientific authority and shows that the object “suicide” itself has yet to be properly constituted.
As I see it, the decisive point of his critique is empirical and statistical. Durkheim makes an argument that will become central to the entire work, drawing on the regularity of suicide rates. If suicide were simply an effect of madness, its distribution would track the distribution of mental alienation. It does not. Suicide rates remain relatively stable within a given society and vary substantially between societies. Equivalent fluctuations in the incidence of mental illness cannot explain these variations. Madness and suicide diverge in ways the alienists' theory cannot accommodate.
This shift is fundamental. Durkheim accepts that some suicides are linked to pathology while rejecting the claim that this link is constitutive. He thereby breaks with a long tradition of medical moralization that pathologizes suicide and neutralizes its historical and social dimensions. More than a disagreement about explanation, this is a transformation in the terms that make the phenomenon intelligible. Suicide moves from individual deviance to a collective indicator.
The move creates tensions of its own. By challenging the reduction of suicide to madness, Durkheim makes it a possible object of sociology and introduces a new form of objectification. Once converted into a “rate,” suicide is understood as a statistical reality relatively independent of the individual experiences that constitute it. Where the alienists dissolved the phenomenon into the individual's pathological inner life, Durkheim risks dissolving it into the external regularities of society. In both cases the singular act tends to disappear, whether as symptom or as data.
This ambivalence complicates his critique without diminishing its force. The first chapter of Le Suicide is at once a liberation and a founding act. It breaks with psychiatry's monopoly and refuses the immediate identification of suicide with madness. It also inaugurates a new way of apprehending the phenomenon, placing it within the new body of knowledge taking shape as sociology.
Ultimately, Durkheim redefines the problem. The question shifts from “why does an individual take their own life?” to “why does a society produce a certain propensity for suicide?” This change of scale is also a change of ontology. Suicide goes from being a psychological accident to being a social fact.
This transformation, set in motion by the confrontation with the alienists, is precisely what makes everything that follows possible.
Prof. Alexandre H. Reis