ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic work most often occurs through narrative. The patient describes his or her experience in narrative form, attempting to create order out of chaos and using narrative as an organizing principle. This chapter suggests that the analyst’s preoccupation with theoretical models and formulation of a psychoanalytic narrative can be limiting as well as liberating. Despite some differences of emphasis, contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers all advance the view that surrender plays an important role in the psychoanalytic process, that it implies freedom from any interest to control or dominate, and a devotion to human relationships, and allows for creativity and development to unfold in the intersubjective field. Psychoanalysis has paid attention to a patient’s action of not narrating. The chapter illustrates how a surrender to emptiness can appear in psychoanalytic work, with a vignette of a Japanese female patient who often fell asleep in session, and often remained silent for long periods.
