The Psychoanalytic Anatomy of Surrender
VAPS: What led you to write this book? Why now? [I know you have this on your website but I figured this would allow you to speak to the VAPS community more directly.]
Dr. Rickard: I’d like to be so trendy and topical that I could research and write quickly enough to respond to whatever cultural issue happens to be burning at the moment. In truth, surrender is something I have been trying to find the words for over many years. It seems to me a timelessly necessary human phenomenon. But, as it happens, we are living at a moment when our increasingly polarized culture makes the difficulty—and perhaps the necessity—of surrender especially visible.
I have probably felt that most strongly in the United States, where I did all of my professional training, in contrast to Canada, where I was raised. I think surrender is difficult in both cultures, although perhaps for somewhat different reasons. In the United States, autonomy, mastery, achievement, and certainty are prized very strongly. In Canada, there can be different forms of restraint and guardedness. In either case, surrender asks something of us that does not come easily: to loosen our hold on what we know, what we can control, and sometimes even on the ways we have learned to recognize ourselves.
That is part of why I like the word. It is a little uncomfortable. It is even a little controversial. People hear surrender and often think submission, defeat, passivity, or giving up. But the psychological experience I was interested in was quite different. It involved a loosening that could make greater contact with oneself possible.
Surrender is also not a standard psychoanalytic term in the way that resistance, regression, dependency, or containment are. You encounter it much more readily in religious and mystical literature. When I first began researching the phenomenon, I found that psychological writing and psychotherapy transcripts could take me only so far. As I moved toward the deeper end of the surrender spectrum, I kept encountering experiences for which the psychological literature simply did not seem to have sufficient language. I therefore turned to exemplary mystical texts as part of the coding process—not because I was trying to make a religious argument, but because these writers had spent centuries trying to describe very subtle and sometimes extreme changes in inner experience.
Surrender itself exists on a spectrum. Sometimes it is quite subtle: a little less insistence, a little more room for uncertainty, a moment in which a person does not immediately retreat into explanation or control. At other times it asks considerably more of the psyche. Those deeper forms are much less common. What interested me was the whole movement—what makes surrender possible, where it becomes blocked, and what psychological capacities have to be present for a person to tolerate progressively deeper forms of it.
I wanted to create a model that would give psychologists and psychoanalysts a shared language for this process, so that when we speak about surrender, we have some common understanding of what we actually mean. I also wanted to show that surrender is not something we ask only of the patient. Something has to loosen in the therapist as well. Of course, the therapist’s surrender is different and has very clear ethical limits, but we too have to relinquish certainty, the wish to know too quickly, and sometimes the wish to direct what is happening. There are moments in deep therapeutic work when neither person can fully know in advance what will emerge. Both have to be able to remain there long enough for something new to become possible.
VAPS: You have noted, reflecting on the process of writing this book, that the concept of surrender is a “complex, multidimensional process that allows us to relinquish what cannot be controlled and engage more fully with what is.” For readers and clinicians who may be new to thinking of surrender in this way, what led you to this term rather than, say, acceptance?
Dr. Rickard: I actually don’t think of surrender and acceptance as competing terms. Acceptance is part of surrender. In the model, I include the Capacity to Accept Reality as one of the important movements within the larger surrender process. But surrender names something broader.
Acceptance brings us into contact with reality as it is—with limitation, loss, and with what cannot be changed or undone. That is tremendously important. But surrender also asks what has to happen within us for that acceptance to become possible. What has to loosen? What forms of control or certainty have to become less necessary? Can I depend on another person? Can I tolerate frustration or uncertainty? Can I remain with an experience before I fully understand it? Can something emerge without my immediately organizing or defending against it? Those are all parts of the larger movement I mean by surrender.
I think another reason I needed the word surrender is that so much of this process is not voluntary. We can decide intellectually that we ought to accept something and still remain very powerfully organized against it. The psyche does not necessarily follow our instructions. Surrender often occurs when effort and will become less dominant—when something that has been held very tightly begins, sometimes almost imperceptibly, to loosen. In that sense, it is less a decision than a change in our relationship to experience.
And the word itself has a certain emotional weight that I find useful. Acceptance can sound rather calm and settled. Surrender is not always calm. It can involve uncertainty, helplessness, grief, dependency, even a temporary loss of the familiar ways we organize ourselves. That is precisely why people resist it. At the same time, I am very careful to distinguish surrender from submission or defeat. What is being relinquished is not agency, but some of the defensive control that can keep us from fuller contact with ourselves and with other people.
That may also be why the language of surrender appeared so much more vividly in the mystical texts I encountered in my original research. Those writers were trying to describe experiences in which will, certainty, and familiar forms of self-organization begin to give way. Psychoanalysis gives us extraordinarily rich language for many of the capacities involved in that process, but surrender gave me a way to hold the whole movement together.
VAPS: You have commented that “Therapy is not simply about reducing symptoms. It is about developing a richer relationship with oneself.” How do you see the concept of surrender playing a role in this therapeutic pursuit?
Dr. Rickard: I certainly don’t mean to minimize symptom relief. People come to therapy because they are suffering, and of course we want that suffering to become more bearable. But I think therapy can offer something larger than becoming less symptomatic. It can change the quality of the relationship a person has with his or her own inner life.
For me, surrender is very much a part of that. Many of us become remarkably skilled at managing ourselves. We explain what we feel, correct it, suppress it, turn it into something more acceptable, or move away from it before it has had much chance to tell us anything. Those capacities often developed for very good reasons. They may once have protected something quite vulnerable. But over time, a person can become so well defended against certain parts of experience that the relationship with oneself becomes rather narrow.
Surrender begins to make a little more room. It might mean allowing a feeling to arrive before deciding what it means, tolerating an impulse without immediately disowning it, or discovering that an experience one has always located in other people also belongs, in some way, to oneself. In the book I describe this in part through subjective appropriation—the movement from being able to speak about one’s experience to beginning to feel it as one’s own. That distinction is very important to me. Insight can be genuine and still remain somewhat outside the self.
I also think this is where aliveness enters. By aliveness, I don’t mean simply feeling more intensely or feeling good. I mean being more available to one’s own internal signals—feelings, sensations, intuitions, longings—and allowing them to register without immediately rearranging them to fit what we think we ought to be. The richer relationship with oneself develops partly through becoming able to receive more of oneself.
Of course, that kind of surrender cannot simply be demanded. Some experiences are defended against because they have genuinely felt unbearable, and a person may need a great deal of safety, containment, and trust before greater contact with them becomes possible. So I don’t think the therapeutic task is to persuade someone to “let go.” It is to help create the conditions in which they no longer have to hold themselves quite so tightly.
And sometimes symptoms do change as a result. But I think the deeper change is that the person has more internal room: more of their own experience can be felt, thought about, lived with, and eventually integrated. They become not simply better at managing themselves, but more able to be with themselves.
VAPS: I noticed that one of your clinical areas of focus is burnout and imposter syndrome. I’m curious how you understand the concept of surrender in relation to these areas of therapeutic work.
Dr. Rickard: I think both burnout and imposter syndrome can involve a very painful relationship to control, although in somewhat different ways.
With burnout, I also think we have to be a little careful about the term itself. In clinical practice, what people call burnout can sometimes sit very close to depression—the exhaustion, loss of vitality, diminished pleasure, hopelessness, or sense that there is simply nothing left to give. So I would always want to be curious about what “burnout” is naming for that particular person rather than assuming it is merely occupational stress.
At the same time, I don’t want to psychologize something that may be quite real in the environment. Sometimes people are exhausted because what is being asked of them is genuinely unreasonable. No amount of psychological surrender should teach someone to accommodate an exploitative workplace or an impossible set of demands.
But there are also people for whom stopping, needing help, disappointing someone, or acknowledging a limit can feel almost intolerable. They may be extraordinarily competent and yet organized around the feeling that they must keep going, must remain useful, must not need too much from anyone else. In that situation, surrender may begin very modestly. It may mean allowing the body’s exhaustion to count as information rather than as an obstacle to overcome. It may mean recognizing, “I cannot do all of this,” and discovering that this recognition does not amount to failure.
That can be much harder than it sounds. Our defenses are often tied to identities we value: being dependable, accomplished, self-sufficient, the person who can manage. So relinquishing a little of that control may feel as though we are relinquishing something essential about who we are. This is where surrender becomes quite tender, I think. We are not simply asking someone to rest. We may be asking them to encounter what they fear would happen if they were no longer able to earn their place through constant functioning.
Imposter syndrome has a related but somewhat different quality. There is often a painful vigilance about being exposed: the sense that one must know enough, perform well enough, or appear certain enough that nobody discovers some imagined inadequacy underneath. It can create an enormous amount of internal surveillance.
Here, surrender might involve relinquishing the impossible task of controlling how one is seen. It can mean tolerating not knowing, allowing oneself to have limits, and accepting that competence does not require omniscience. There is something freeing in being able to say, internally or sometimes aloud, “I don’t know,” without experiencing that as a collapse of the self.
And I would distinguish that very carefully from surrendering to the imposter voice. The aim is not to accept its verdict that one is fraudulent. It is to surrender some of the defensive labor required to prove, over and over again, that one is not.
In both burnout and imposter syndrome, I think the deeper therapeutic movement is toward a self that does not have to be managed quite so relentlessly. There can be more room for dependence, limitation, uncertainty, and ordinary human incompleteness. And paradoxically, when people no longer have to devote so much psychic energy to maintaining a particular version of themselves, they often become more available to their actual capacities, desires, and relationships.
VAPS: Our upcoming Scientific Conference in November is entitled “THE BODY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS ACROSS THE LIFESPAN” with Dr. Christine Anzieu-Premmereur. How do you see the concept of surrender operating across the lifespan?
Dr. Rickard: One thing Christine Anzieu-Premmereur’s presentation has made me think about more deeply is that surrender itself has a developmental history. It cannot mean exactly the same thing at every point in the lifespan, because the psychological structures available to support it are different.
At the very beginning of life, I think we are talking less about surrender itself than about the conditions that will eventually make surrender possible. The infant begins in bodily experience—hunger, warmth, tension, pleasure, discomfort—before those experiences can really be thought about. They gradually become psychological through another person who receives them, regulates them, gives them some form, and returns them in a way the infant can begin to take in. Something that initially has to happen between two people can eventually become an internal capacity: I can hold myself together; I can survive absence; I can retain an experience; eventually, I can think. That developmental movement is very close to the foundation of the surrender model.
As development continues, the possibilities for surrender become more complex. A child who once had to discharge something through the body may gradually become able to play it, symbolize it, dream it, or bring it into relationship. That is already a profound change. Experience no longer has to be acted or evacuated quite so immediately; it can be held long enough to acquire meaning.
In adulthood, surrender often involves loosening structures that are by then quite well established. We have accumulated ways of protecting ourselves—through self-sufficiency, certainty, control, intellectualization, or distance. Those structures may have been enormously important to us. So surrender is not simply a matter of becoming more open. It asks whether we have enough internal stability to tolerate becoming a little less defended: to depend, to remain uncertain, to allow an experience to develop before we know what it means, or to discover something about ourselves that does not fit comfortably with the person we thought we were.
And I think the body remains involved throughout. One of the phrases that stayed with me while writing my response to Anzieu-Premmereur was inhabiting the body. We can possess a body anatomically without fully experiencing it as a secure psychic place from which to live. To inhabit it requires continuity, boundaries, investment, and enough capacity to experience bodily aliveness without immediately finding it dangerous. Surrender, then, is not simply something the mind does. It depends partly upon whether we can remain present to what the body is communicating without either becoming overwhelmed by it or moving away from it.
Later in life, some of these questions can return with particular force. Aging, illness, loss, and changes in bodily capacity can confront us with dependency and limitation in ways that may be especially difficult if we have organized ourselves around mastery or self-sufficiency. Surrender here does not mean passively accepting diminishment. It may mean finding a way to remain psychologically alive while our relationship to control, independence, and even the body itself is changing.
So perhaps what changes across the lifespan is not our need for surrender, but what we are capable of surrendering and what psychic resources we have available to survive it. Early on, another person helps us create the capacities that make experience thinkable. Later, those capacities may allow us to loosen what once protected us without losing ourselves in the process. And throughout life, we may have to build and rebuild that capacity as new experiences ask something different of us.
VAPS: What do you hope clinicians take from this book?
Dr. Rickard: What I most hope clinicians take from the book is a deeper appreciation of just how complex surrender is. It is not a single act of “letting go,” and it is certainly not a simple movement from resistance to openness. It involves a whole range of capacities—dependency, containment, tolerance of uncertainty and frustration, symbolization, the ability to take up one’s own experience—and these do not unfold neatly or linearly. Different aspects of surrender may be available in one part of a person’s life and fiercely defended against in another.
Along with that, I hope clinicians develop a greater sensitivity to the conditions under which psychological movement becomes possible—and perhaps a little less urgency to make it happen.
Even with considerable clinical experience, I think there can be a subtle pressure to make use of what we understand: to formulate it, interpret it, or help the treatment move. Sometimes that pressure is very difficult to distinguish from good analytic work. But there are moments when our own need for coherence, progress, or usefulness can become part of what organizes the field.
One of the things the surrender model has taught me is to become more curious about what a patient cannot yet permit. Resistance, intellectualization, silence, withdrawal, even an insistence on certainty are not simply things standing between the patient and the “real work.” They tell us something about the psychic organization that is making continued contact possible at all. Before asking why someone will not let go, I think we have to ask what the holding on is doing for them.
That changes the clinical stance. Sometimes the analytic task is to tolerate a period in which what is emerging cannot yet be usefully organized—not because interpretation is contraindicated in some simple sense, but because the patient may not yet have the psychic structure to make use of it. What looks like avoidance may be preserving coherence. What looks like rigidity may be protecting against something genuinely disorganizing. The work then becomes less about getting past the defense and more about understanding the conditions under which it may no longer be needed in quite the same way.
I also hope clinicians come away more attentive to the very small movements that can easily be missed. Surrender does not usually announce itself dramatically. It may be a pause where there would normally have been an explanation, a feeling that remains present a little longer before it is reorganized, a patient saying something and not immediately retracting it, or a moment in which neither person rushes to resolve what is happening. These shifts can be easy to overlook precisely because they are not dramatic, yet they may represent a considerable change in how experience is being held.
And, of course, the complexity of surrender also includes the therapist. We have our own relationship to uncertainty, helplessness, and the wish to be useful. We can become attached to being the one who understands, who contains, who knows where the work is going. Our surrender has to be different from the patient’s—it is bounded by the frame and by our ethical responsibility—but I think we do have to relinquish some certainty and some control. We have to remain open enough to be affected by what is happening without losing the capacity to think about what is happening.
So I suppose my hope is not that clinicians finish the book with another technique. In fact, surrender is very much not a technique. I hope they come away with both a more complex understanding of the phenomenon and another way of listening: listening not only for what the patient is saying or defending against, but for what can be borne, what cannot yet be borne, what is beginning to loosen, and how our own presence may either support or foreclose that movement.
VAPS: Anything else you’d like noted in this interview?
Dr. Rickard: One thing I would add is that I hope surrender does not become another ideal that we ask people to live up to. I would be very uncomfortable if the book were read as dividing people into those who are psychologically evolved enough to surrender and those who are not.
Defenses deserve much more respect than that. They developed for reasons, and sometimes they have done extraordinary work in keeping a person psychologically intact. There are times when holding on is necessary. There are experiences we cannot yet afford to surrender to, and there are periods in life when greater structure, not greater openness, may be what allows us to function.
I think “letting go” can become moralized very easily. We admire openness, flexibility, vulnerability, and receptivity, and then without quite realizing it, we can begin to treat control or defensiveness as failures. But if control has been preserving coherence, simply asking someone to relinquish it is not therapeutic. The more interesting question is what made that control necessary, what it continues to protect, and what would have to become possible for the person not to need it quite so much.
Surrender is also not something we accomplish once and then possess. We move in and out of these configurations throughout treatment and throughout life. Someone may be remarkably open in one area and fiercely defended in another. A capacity that seemed well established may disappear under different emotional conditions and return later in another form. I find that very human.
So although I have called the book an anatomy and offered a map, I hope clinicians do not use that map as a ladder. I hope it encourages curiosity rather than evaluation. If it helps us become a little more interested in how a person is holding themselves together—and a little more patient about what has to happen before they can safely loosen that hold—then I think it has done what I wanted it to do.
*Originally published in the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies newsletter.
