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244 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits no longer applied. One year later, the institution responsible for Vinzenz’s case has asked for a new diagnosis, since his behavior is in no way remarkable; he lives in the supervised apartment, has a relationship and regularly attends therapy. Vinzenz has begun a project -based vocational education and hopes to complete it in good time. He doubtless will require a long trajectory in attaining the “capabil- ity to love and work”, as Freud defined it. Only after the dissolution of this entanglement with her sons can the patient tend to her own life, instead of deflecting her problems onto them. I meant this case study to demonstrate how important it is to reflect on the child and baby within the mother, instead of assigning her guilt or perhaps describing her as an “icebox mother” (Laing 1964). 6.4 Thoughts of suicide – suicide attempts In this chapter, I discuss fantasies, thoughts and attempts at suicide from a psy- choanalytic perspective, in order to understand not only what is transpiring in adolescents contemplating suicide, but also the situation of people attempting to help them. I do not stir, The frost makes a flower, The dew makes a star, The dead bell, The dead bell, Somebody’s done for. —Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath already heard death chimes in her adolescent years – perhaps even since the painful loss of her father when she was seven. She made her first suicide attempt – a serious one – when she was 16. In her half -autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (2013), she describes secretly hoarding sleeping pills and then leaving a note in her room explaining away her absence so that her mother would not look for her. She hid in a crawl space in their basement behind a woodpile. Then she swallowed 50 sleeping pills and only survived by a miracle, discovered by chance three days later. In her poems, we see the inner struggle between her longing for death as an expression of desperation and depression and the will to live. This will to live can be seen in many suicide attempts through the method they are car- ried out – unconsciously designed so that the attempter will be saved. This need not function as (unconsciously) intended: as Al Alvarez writes in his book about Plath, The Savage God: “In her last attempt, she seemed to be taking care not to succeed. But this time everything conspired to destroy her” (Alvarez 1971, 50). Sylvia Plath went at 6:00 am to her children’s bedroom, placing bread and but- ter as well as two glasses of milk by their beds so that they would have something to eat before the au pair girl arrived. Then she returned to the kitchen, sealed the