The Urge To Jump

Have you ever stood near the edge of a cliff, with only a short fence separating you from the chasm below? As you held on tightly to that fence, did you feel a sudden urge to throw yourself off the cliff? Have you ever been driving and imagined what it would be like to drive straight across a bridge and into the ocean below? Or maybe you were walking and caught yourself thinking, "What would happen if you suddenly jumped in front of a moving vehicle?"

Shortly after we experience these urges, a fear begins to sink in. We're not afraid that we'll fall into the chasm or accidentally walk in front of a bus; we're afraid we'll do it willingly. We're even more worried about what this says about us and our desire to live. This feeling, the sudden urge to jump, is known as the high place phenomenon, and many of us experience it multiple times throughout our lives.

But why do we have these seemingly suicidal impulses, and should we be worried about what this experience says about our state of mind? Philosophers and psychologists have attempted to explain this phenomenon with differing interpretations. In 1943, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre described the urge to jump in his magnum opus, "Being and Nothingness." In the book, he referred to this urge as vertigo. Sartre's vertigo is described as an intense anguish over our nature as free beings.

To the best of our understanding, we humans have free will, at least to some extent. We have agency over our own thoughts and have the ability to choose between multiple different possibilities that are available to us. Nothing binds us to one possibility over the other. In the face of this realization, we get vertigo when we realize that nothing prevents us from choosing something we fear intensely, such as throwing ourselves over our precipice.

If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss. In the current moment, you're in control of yourself, but you're also responsible for yourself in the next moment. While existing in this one, you're standing in front of the chasm. You desire certainty that you won't throw yourself off in the moments to come, but because we are free to choose between all possibilities, there is no certainty over the action we'll take next. And that's what worries us.

While Sartre insists that we are absolutely free, there are other theories from philosophers and scientists that would argue otherwise. I made a video about the illusion of free will that goes in depth into this topic, so feel free to check that out if you'd like to learn more. But if that is the case and we aren't fundamentally free beings, then the urge to jump shouldn't come from an awareness of our freedom, right? It should come from something beyond our Direct Control, like our unconscious mind.

This is why Freudian psychologists hypothesized that the urge to jump is simply a repressed death wish. They describe humans as having both a life and death drive. Our survival instincts come from the life drive, and on the other hand, our desire for death and destruction comes from the death drive. In Freud's concept, the urge to jump is an impulsive instinct that stems from the unconscious desire to die, seeking to end the tension of life. This is expressed through the impulse to throw ourselves over the edge.

In this interpretation, the urge to jump is a suicidal instinct. When we are standing near the chasm, our unconscious mind is urging us to destroy ourselves. There is an imbalance between our survival and self-destructive instincts, and the scales are tipping towards the latter. But then, if it is true that our urge to jump is driven by an unconscious desire towards death, then those who experience the feeling are having suicidal impulses.

If that's the case, these people may need help or intervention to prevent these impulses from becoming full-fledged thoughts that occur even when they're not near a cliff. Before we jump to that conclusion, though, we have to ask: is this really the case? Are people who have the urge to jump more suicidal than others? To answer this question, in 2011, a team of researchers at ...