Life's a highway (or something like that): Ghent & Surrender
I was driving home today and as per usual, there was a lot of traffic. The behaviours we see in rush hour—the racing, the tailgating, and the flipping offs are common and tend to go unnoticed in my usual Greater Toronto Area commute. Our roads are overflowing with cars, and we seem, on average, to treat each other like shit while we use them.
I want to be clear that this isn’t an essay about road rage, or traffic complaints, or really about driving at all. Instead, this drive had me thinking about why we often push each other so close to our breaking points, and why we allow ourselves to be this close in the first place.
So, obviously, this isn’t about cars. This is instead about our inclination to be cruel to one another, and in the same breath, the willingness to be treated with cruelty.
I was reminded of a paper I read years ago by Emmanuel Ghent, a relational psychoanalyst, and upon further reading, apparently, he’s one of the first electronic composers (go figure). My mind was brought to this paper written in 1990 called Masochism, Submission, Surrender: Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, how did this go from road rage to masochism? Well, I’ll get there.
Though Ghent refers to masochism in both the sexual and characterological meanings, I want to focus on the latter (mainly because without proper attention some of these ideas can seem like kink-shaming and I do not have the time to navigate that entire side of the conversation). Instead, I want to talk about sadism and masochism as distortions of the goal of surrender. I’ll try to make it clearer as we move on LOL.
So, sadism in the characterological sense is the tendency to derive pleasure from the pain of others. It’s important that we expand our scope beyond sex to various forms of pleasure and pain. For this conversation we need to escape the tendency to associate sadism with BDSM. Pain can be emotional, physical, psychological, environmental etc. The gist is: we are harming something in some capacity, and we enjoy it for any number of reasons.
Masochism is a little more layered. Masochism is the tendency to derive pleasure from our own pain (remember to have that expanded scope we talked about). We put ourselves in positions of hurt because it is in some ways enjoyable. Again, there’s nuance to this.
We’ll come back to all that.
Now, surrender is something we want to really focus on—mainly because it’s what Ghent wrote the entire paper about, and it combined with other relational psychoanalytical ideas at the time of his writing. Particularly, he looks to D.W Winnicott, a man whose ideas are honestly super fascinating, and maybe I’ll write something on that someday.
Winnicott has entire works written on something called transitional experience, or the space between one experience and another. It is a realm of illusion and may be more easily understood as a state of experience that happens between inner and outer worlds (more on this later). His famous example is play (yes, the same kind with kids and their toys) and creation (think musicians, artists etc.).
Winnicott spent much of his career looking to our psychic development through childhood to note the adaptive, progressive, and regressive attributes that come from spending time in these experiences. For the most part, Winnicott notes that they are progressive.
There’s much more to say on that, but for now we will say that Winnicott believes faith, surrender, the initial stages of creativity, and our processes of symbol formation find a centre point in transitional experience. These are all opportunities to exist in this type of space, and it’s important to note that these spaces all occur in the present. Think of it as being in ‘the zone’.
So, back to surrender. There are a few characteristics Ghent presents which illuminate how his definition strays from typical Western notions of surrender as defeat. It must be made clear: surrender is not submission.
Surrender results in this transitional experience and is not in relation to any foreseeable force.
Ghent suggests that psychological resistance (in the case of submission) can be described as a power (or will) operating against change or growth. Surrender is instead reflective of a power (or will) towards it. Resistance and submission then share the ultimate goal of maintaining the psychic status quo, and are intimately linked with our psychic structure of defensiveness, anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, etc.
Remember the road rage now? From this perspective, our push for violence (even internally) fixes us in our state, it cuts us off from transitional experience and is operating in service of our present sufferings. In other words, we get stuck, and it makes us absolutely miserable.
For a moment, let’s make extra clear the differences between surrender and submission. First, submission can at best be adaptive. We have all been in positions where it is safer for us to submit to another person or force. In some circumstances it’s helpful in achieving a goal (i.e. restoring safety).
Like I said before, surrender is progressive, it releases control to the present circumstances, it does not seek to alter them. Submission also requires more than one person—it seeks to establish a pecking order and to make clear a state of dominion. Surrender is absent of this hierarchical goal.
The process of submission is less passive than surrender—requiring members to choose to either push someone to submit or choose to submit themselves. These are real choices we make and are not usually relevant in moral conversations—sometimes we do what we need to do to survive, I won’t judge anyone for that.
Thought submission is active, it does not mean we should avoid the nuanced approach that are necessary to have in discussions of submission. This psychic process/behaviour occurs in sometimes difficult and frequently complicated contexts. Due to that, there are certain sensitivities that are necessary to possess here. However, we are, for the sake of this conversation, speaking generally and outside of extreme cases of trauma or maltreatment.
But, to put it more succinctly, submission can be made to happen where surrender simply happens. We slip gracefully into transitory states, we are not put there.
Where the goal of submission is to establish hierarchy, the goal of surrender is one of discovery: both of a sense of identity and sense of self. We hope, through surrender, to achieve an uncovering of the self, one where we can be relieved of our separateness through the dissolution of the ego (ego death).
That said, surrender has the aim of finding a sense of wholeness and unity with others; a connection and identification of self through totality. It occurs almost instinctually, like our brains are hardwired to slip into these brief pockets of seemingly infinite and liminal space. It can bring about feelings of clarity or relief, but also feelings of death and dread.
Despite this, Winnicott believed that the outcomes of spending time in transitional experience were overall positive. Think about when you lose track of time doing something you love.
But, like most things, our idleness can reveal discomforts (for comparison, think of the anxiety you may feel when you first meditate). Still, he suggested that there was something restorative about this human proclivity.
Now, brief checkpoint. If you are wondering how I’m going to keep tying in road rage, I promise I’ll get there.
Ghent, when presented with this understanding of transitional space, pushed forward the idea that this phenomenon was not just a happenstance psychic attribute but was representative of a universal need, wish, or longing for the goals of surrender. He suggested that there was something innate about our wish to enter this space, and this is made evident through it’s true organic and progressive form (surrender) and our tendency to adopt its perversions (masochism and sadism).
Now what kind of wish would potentially bring feelings of death or dread? Well, Harry Guntrip, a British psychoanalyst proposed that there was an intimate connection between dread and wish.
Think of the second of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. Samudaya, or the root of suffering, suggests a connection between human suffering and our inclination for desire. For easier understanding, it may be helpful to reframe desire as resistance in the sense that it also seeks to maintain the current state of suffering and forces us to escape presence through a drive for something different. In short, when we lean too far into our wishes, we welcome forms of suffering.
Okay, there’s a lot there but to tie it all into a nice little bow we can say that our seemingly intrinsic goal of escaping our outer and inner worlds, which can momentarily take place in these transitional experiences, reflect our deepest sense of suffering and has an inseparable tie to the longing for both the presence of a static unchanging ‘true self’, and for that true self to be discovered by others.
So, Ghent takes all of this and says masochism results from this innate desire to experience ego death (which occurs in the space between these worlds), to enter transitional space and to hold the promise of surrender: a perceivable abandonment of the boundaries of ordinary experience (though it does not achieve it). He thought that this promise develops a sense of urgency, pushing us to take measures to uncover some part of ourselves (or of others, in cases of sadism).
In short, sadism can be reframed as the distorted longing to see another’s true self, and masochism as the misshapen longing to have oneself be seen.
This is all to say that perhaps subconsciously we just want to relate to one another. We want to be met halfway and be known deeply and intimately. When we are stuck in traffic, we wonder why the drivers on the road don’t sense our own urgency, and yet we fail to sense theirs. I think in many ways we want to.
In sadism, we use destruction (or violence in the full breadth of the term) to distinguish the subject outside of oneself. Can I separate us? Can I reenforce my idea that I am alone in the universe? Can I confirm my sense of separateness? This is far from surrender, but rather a forced hierarchy, and a reduced sense of self beyond the context of totality. I think it seems rather lonely, but we do it every day.
In masochism, we use submission as an avenue for being ‘found’. We think, for whatever reason, that we must move through submission to signal to others that there is something to uncover. Paired with the longing for the sense of the true self, we hope that our submission will prove to others something about ourselves. Maybe if I do this, they’ll see some part of me and finally understand, or love, or care. Maybe if I submit to my circumstances, something will tear me open and share my soul with me.
But what if there is no soul to share? What if there is no separateness beyond corporeality? Can we allow ourselves to instead take a role that avoids cruelty all together? Can we neither partake in cruelty nor accept it as it is brought unto us? There must be a balance somewhere.
Maybe this longing can be addressed through our own presence, as suggested through the third of the Buddhist Noble Truths. Maybe we can take our time and stop giving a shit about being late, or being cut off, or traffic all together. What if that’s simply what we owe to one another?
Maybe our dread makes us feel lonelier than we need to be, and maybe it ensures that loneliness has what it needs to maintain itself. A snake eating its own tail.
I wonder if we can find a way to avoid choosing to align with the perversions of our intentions, to act despite our instincts and maintain presence where we can. Maybe this would make for a kinder world (and less honking on the highway).
Find Ghent's work here.