Why do people take their own lives? How can clinicians best plan and carry out intelligent treatment of desperate patients who are giving up on themselves? Suicide, its motivations, characteristics, and psychology are explicated in these papers by the most experienced and renowned experts on the subject. A definitive volume, "Essential Papers on Suicide" features the work of Ernest Jones; Kate Friedlander; George Murphy, R.H. Wilkinson, S. Gassner, and J. Kayes; Joseph C. Sabbath; Robert E. Litman; Milton Rosenbaum; Charles Swearingen; Avery D. Weisman; Mervin Glasser, Egl Laufer, Moses Laufer and Myer Wohl; Donald A. Schwartz, Don E. Flinn and Paul F. Slawson; Aaron T. Beck, Maria Kovacs and Arlene Weissman; Marie sberg, Lil Traskman and Peter Thoren; Stuart Asch; John T. Maltsberger; Alex D. Pokorny; Erna Furman; Cynthia R. Pfeffer, Robert Plutchik, Mark S. Mizruchi and Robert Lipkins; Myrna M. Weissman, Gerald L. Klerman, Jeffrey S. Markowitz and R. Oullette; and, Jan Fawcett, William A. Scheftner, Louis Fogg, David C. Clark, Michael A. Young, Don Hedeker, and Robert Gibbons, among others.