Unconscious psychodynamic forces have been frequently observed in suicide notes. This article marks an attempt to study the phenomenon systematically. Independent professional judges who had a year earlier scored two samples of suicide notes were asked to rescore these same notes for the presence or absence of unconscious implications. Significant test-retest reliability was observed; however, no agreement about “what these latent forces might be” was noted. This major problem indicates the strong need to develop valid, empirical methods for this area of investigation.
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