ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the elaboration of the collapse and submit response and the way that the individual becomes in thrall to the experience of death and dying that accompanies it. As the individual takes the experience of death and dying into their sphere of omnipotence, they become closely engaged with the experience of death and suicide. It also explores how the individual becomes in thrall to the experience of death, which they cannot bear, yet from which they find it extremely difficult to escape. Understanding the experience in terms of a primitive collapse response makes it more comprehensible, more "acceptable", more bearable, and facilitates the working through of the traumatic complex. In submitting, the individual hands themselves over to the other, originally as a capitulation, unable to struggle any further against the other's overwhelming power or position. This pattern can sometimes become incorporated and elaborated in the personality into a submission in the hope for protection and care.
