SURRENDER AND SILENCE: THE PROBLEM OF NARRATIVE AND NON-NARRATIVE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Abstract

Emmanuel Ghent’s innovative view of surrender developed out of his Buddhist beliefs and special interest in Eastern philosophies, and has come to be one of the most significant concepts in contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly among relational and intersubjective thinkers. Drawing on my own Japanese cultural background, I attempt to relate Ghent’s surrender to emptiness—as conceived in traditional Eastern philosophies—and narrative in psychoanalysis. Western readers will be asked to put aside responses and assumptions based in standard psychoanalytic literature and practice, in order to encounter a different and unfamiliar conception of emptiness. In return, this paper concludes, the idea of surrender to emptiness can be a useful therapeutic mode for Western analysts, allowing them to go beyond spoken and unspoken narratives or formulated and unformulated experiences. A psychoanalytic case study of a female patient who often fell asleep in sessions or remained silent for long periods, is used to illustrate this conclusion.

Keywords:

• Narrative
• emptiness
• psychoanalytic zero
• therapeutic action
• surrender
• ethics
• aesthetics
• decolonization of psychoanalysis

Acknowledgments

I express my deep gratitude to Dr. Roger Frie for his encouragement and guidance in my writing this article.

Notes

¹ The two words, Tao and Dao, Taoism and Daoism, have been used interchangeably in English. In this paper, I use “Tao” and Taoism.” I am grateful to Ms. Liling Lin, LCSW-R for explaining me the basic difference between them.”