The Flight of Events

The Flight of Events, the second book of a Psychopathology of Melancholia Series, after Manie, mélancolie et facteurs blancs (Beauchesne, Paris, 2009), is a work on altruistic anguishes in manic-depressive suicides.In this book, German Arce Ross has chosen to focus on the psychological processes that occur prior to the act of suicide, rather than on the act itself. We can detect these processes in a subject during the period between the decision to commit suicide and the passage to the act.In the consideration of certain moments preceding a suicidal or criminal act, in the case of critical episodes that are non-delusional, non-hallucinated and non-acted but sometimes assimilated to psychotic or twilight moments — where we locate in particular a discontinuity or a radical rupture, albeit momentary, with the Other —, we can observe that there are things, facts, or events, that happen to the subject without any form of control over them whatsoever.In these uncontrolled intersubjective events, what the subject suffers from is a tendency to undergo the acts that he himself makes others perform. During this flight of events, it is not entirely true that the subject flees the events of his life; it is rather the events that flee.