Seeking Surrender

I have previously written in this space about Emmanuel Ghent’s mesmerizing paper on submission and surrender.  A text which I consider to be one of the cornerstones of my clinical thinking, Ghent takes some of the thematic concerns of Winnicott’s later writing—namely Fear of Breakdown and The Use of an Object—and reformulates the traditional object relations position on regression and creativity through the mutually corresponding ideas of masochism, submission, and surrender.  I have referenced and recommended this paper repeatedly in the years since I first remember reading it, spurred to do so I believe following a citation of Ghent’s paper Paradox and Process in an article by Stephen Mitchell.  I learned quickly that Ghent’s output was relatively sparse, due to some interesting biographical elements which are easily searchable and I won’t get into here, but the influence of what he wrote and presented was enormous.  He lectured widely and either supervised or analyzed many of the notable New York analysts who would come to shape the relational movement, including Jessica Benjamin, Muriel Dimen, Lewis Aron, and others.  Both the paradox paper and the one on surrender are widely referenced in the relational tradition.

Ghent is credited with bringing a study of eastern philosophy and a fondness for pluralism and nonlinear thinking to his psychoanalytic approach, a discipline already primed to inherit these ideas and, in many ways, already contending with them throughout its history.  Like many of those whom I admire, Ghent was attracted to the William Alanson White institute in the 1950’s and the kind of interpersonal approach already being practiced there.  These interests guided Ghent’s thinking towards a framework that saw working within paradoxes of human existence and relatedness as a constitutive aspect of therapeutic process.  Through this, he demonstrated a keen interest in illuminating the ethical dimensions of relational practice, especially as pertained to the analyst’s understanding of their responsibility in drawing out the analysand’s sense of their own freedom within the analytic encounter.  Prior to this, Ghent’s sense was that more doctrinaire positions demand a false compliance on the part of the analysand comparable to a kind of masochistic submission of their subjective experience.  His word for the optimal facilitation of this relational dynamic was surrender.

To Ghent, “surrender” stands in dialectical tensions with “resistance” (“defensiveness” is another word he offers throughout the text).  Resistance is the maintenance of the status quo.  Surrender is a reflective movement towards growth.  This is not surrender in the sense of “giving up” but surrender in the sense of “giving over”.  Perhaps somewhat akin even to Heidegger’s notion of anticipatory resoluteness, though I think where the notion of resoluteness suggests a kind of chest thumping enthusiasm, there is something appropriately understated about Ghent’s use of the word surrender.  It is meant to suggest something met via receptivity.  Not something created or manufactured, but something one permits themselves to experience.

It is an interesting and unusual concept to play with psychoanalytically.  Ghent is one of the few truly mystical types operating in that arena (Michael Eigen, whom Ghent cites, is another well-known example).  Freud certainly was not immune from wanting to think religiously or spiritually at times, but to read his writing on such topics always carries a degree of skepticism, cynicism, or brutish realism.  He’s often trying to explain away or demonstrate some kind of fit within his more biological materialist organization of the world, rendered through drive-motivated bodies cascading through space.  Conversely, I can see why Ghent sees himself as more of a Winnicottian rinsed through the Interpersonal tradition.  Though not by any stretch more “spiritual” in his writing, Winnicott’s fascination with being as a concept of clinical interest, as well as his involvement in highlighting paradox and the ephemeral nature of transitional spaces, lend his thinking to a kind of transcendence or liminality that feels, if not spiritual, at least metaphysical.

What seems perhaps slightly different for Ghent, and what I would think of as his contribution here, is that his notion of surrender positions ego dissolution as more than just a phenomenon for the consulting room.  The early object relations thinkers saw the pursuit of this state as a necessary condition for ego repair.  But repair assumes that there will be some interest in building it back up again.  Dissolution or regression of ego states to some earlier damaged state is an activity undertaken in analysis to make the analytic process work.  In Ghent’s paper, my sense is that surrender becomes something elevated rather than regressive.  It is the means by which the true self—a true self that can absorb its relationship to its own needs and vulnerabilities—is accessed, tended to, and embraced.  To borrow some Socratic language, Ghent appears to be talking about a kind of maieutic of the soul.  That the responsibility of the analyst/therapist is to allow themselves to be used in such a way that the kind of interpersonal tensions which demand a false self-presentation can break down and remain broken down, allowing the client a kind of freedom to access where and how they might otherwise want to choose to be guarded of their true self, rather than perpetually needing to do so reflexively.

The clinical and theoretical sides of this concept are endlessly fascinating to me and are helpful when applied to my practice and the variety of folks I work with.  There’s a universality to this kind of thinking that I don’t think is the result of sloppy overgeneralization but is tied to the fact that it describes something basically true about the nature of existing in relationships, as we all do.  Though, I am writing about it now because its truths extend to clinicians as well, and candidly, I think I find this paper to be particularly appealing because of the constant reminders in my own life of how much I struggle with the process of surrender.

What seems utterly necessary to me is the fact that one cannot surrender before someone who has not already learned how to surrender themselves.  Or at least the process for doing so would be much more challenging.  False selves in our own organization reinforce false selves in others.  Those who come to see us whom we might be able to categorize in this position of having an overdetermined false self (Ghent might say this is an organization that is true of all of our patients, which is why they find their way to us to begin with) are coming to us in need of someone who already knows the terrain for escaping these binds.  They want assurance of the fact that doing so in the right context will not immediately lead to one or the other party being annihilated.  The true self becomes hidden because of a developmental failure that is then assumed to be true of all human relationships.  Something out there means something has to happen with what is in here.  Doing otherwise becomes an impossible experience to negotiate, and despair, anxiety, anger, shame, guilt, and other perverted dimensions of otherwise normal human emotions fortify us against the world of emotional, interpersonal, and existential threats.

I have the reputation (I think rightly so) even amongst those who know me best of being a bit enigmatic and difficult to pierce.  To put it in the language of someone who cares about me very much “I refuse to let others impact me”.  I think this is what this phenomenon of surrender is actually about—a willingness to be impacted.  My sense is within the safety of the therapeutic container and as a reaction to the meaningfulness of this work this is somewhat different to how I show up with clients.  I have certainly been deeply moved by folks and have felt willing to show or express that variously in the course of the time I shared with them.  Similarly, you cannot operate in the relational dimensions of this work and sort out the sometimes complex transferential conditions which arise if you are not willing to allow yourself to be impacted by and have a genuine reciprocal reaction to what is happening in the room.

But in the context of relationships where I do not have that authority or am not being tasked with carrying the burden of having to be the one to witness and do some kind of sorting out, that witnessing and sorting out can be an effective defense against feeling and living through.  In fact, my sense would be that the appeal of a kind of pseudo-surrender that could then be enacted both in the room and in one’s life is one of the appeals to becoming a therapist for some folks.  I also suspect that most come to the realization, at some point, that this pseudo-surrender—itself a kind of masochistic submission—simply will not do…in life or in our work.  It yields a feeling I can feel quite sensitive to.  A dearth of genuine connection.  A sense that some part of myself is being left undiscovered.  And a realization that no matter how diligently I try to mine the experience internally, there is something in there that refuses the vulnerability of genuine expression.  Often, I don’t even know what I am holding back.  Whatever is so resistant to being held has become so conditioned that the dependency no longer even knows what is being desired and unspoken.  Or what previously, not merely went unsatisfied, but was left disfigured.

I often quote an idea to my clients, though I cannot quite remember where I heard it.  Fittingly, I actually think it came out of some readings I was doing in the Zen tradition and the work of David Loy, whom I have not talked much about in this space but was a real object of fascination for me for a while.  The idea embraces one of the paradoxes of existence which I consider to be particularly resonant, which is that true independence can only become possible when we can fully embody the freedom of our inescapable dependence.  To live this way requires a real act of faith.  I think that is why I have such an appreciation for the false selves that show up in my consulting room, and why I have been so unlikely to push away those who have previously struggled to gain any traction in therapy.  I have such a profound appreciation for false selves, because I know their importance.  We must be willing to get to know them and why they arose before we can be too quick to shoo them away.

Surrendering ourselves was never meant to be easy.  In a way, what Ghent is trying to tell us through his writing, is that it has to be earned.  Or maybe that language isn’t quite right.  Perhaps better to say it demands we find something to let go, in order that we may have the space to receive it.  I have been lucky to have had and to continue to have many guides on this path, both in terms of people whom I have met and the many theorists and thinkers who have illuminated modes of being that had heretofore felt covered over or concealed.  But it is primarily through authentic relationship, with those who have loved and cared for me, and those who have given me permission to love and care for them, where I have been able to inch towards this experience of surrender and experience the beauty of true, loving relatedness.