Petra Guggisberg Nocelli, friend and Trainer at the Trust, shares her thoughts on the concept of ‘Surrender’ ahead of the 15th International Congress taking place in Abano Terme, 25-27 October 2024.
Below is the original video of Petra speaking, presented in Italian with English subtitles. To see the English subtitles, click the subtitles button on the bottom of the video. Under the video is the full translation in English, with accompanying images.
When I read Piero Ferrucci’s email inviting me to contribute to the conference to celebrate SIPT’s 50th anniversary, the theme of “surrender” immediately came to mind. And, just as immediately, I had a reaction of perplexity. Surrender has in fact a somewhat different nuance than other qualities that we could define as “undoubtedly virtuous”, such as creativity, joy, or courage.
We learn to associate surrender with war scenarios where there are enemies, victims, and executioners. We can, for example, think of Winston Churchill’s famous speech, which has gone down in history precisely because of his “we shall never surrender”. And let us also think about what was at stake then.
But there are examples abound in every culture. An Arabic proverb reads “Do not surrender -you would risk doing so an hour before the miracle” or Confucius “Surrendering is the greatest advantage one can give the enemy.” Alberoni even admonishes us – “Surrender may be sweet, but its consequences terrible” and for Nelson Mandela – “A victor is a dreamer who has never surrendered.” I could go on and on.
Therefore, it is not surprising that thinking of surrender as a quality may raise some perplexity. In common sense, those who surrender are precisely the people without qualities; without courage, without perseverance and tenacity, without confidence. Hence, they are seen as the weak, the losers. Those who are destined to fail.
And the definitions we find in [Italian] dictionaries confirm this. Surrender is, in fact, “in war, the cessation of all resistance in the face of the enemy.” Perhaps the second definition opens a few more glimmers of difference. Surrender (“la resa” in Italian) also means “the restitution of something received by or owed to another” (“the return” in English).
Despite these less than encouraging premises, I decided to confirm the theme when, just as quickly as my initial perplexity, the question arose:
But whose surrender? To whom?
Or the restitution of what? To whom?
And when?
Assagioli said that the transpersonal qualities are all interconnected like pearls on a single necklace. And in following the thread of reflection stimulated by these questions, I discovered that indeed, surrender has many faces, many different facets: it is related to the capacity to discriminate (see discrīmen -ĭnis) in its original etymological meaning of “making distinctions” – “discern”. Surrender is acceptance, listening and containment but paradoxically also rebellion, liberation, courage, and authenticity. It is sacrifice, limitation, powerlessness, but also trust and transformation – even union, synthesis, and peace.
It is no coincidence that when we surrender, we wave a white flag that is a universal symbol of peace: the war is over, there are no more enemies. We begin to rebuild and life flourishes again. At least for a while. At least until the next cycle.
Surrender for me is not just a quality, but a quality with a capital Q that takes us right to the centre, to the heart. It is a synthetic quality, in the sense that it integrates, composing, the lights and shadows of psychic life. To be understood, it requires deepening and meditation. And, precisely because of these characteristics, it lends itself little to the risk of spiritual bypassing because it confronts us immediately with the complexity and multidimensionality that characterise our inner and outer worlds and which are, perhaps, also what most characterises the Psychosynthesis model compared to other approaches.
Let us now look at these different faces of surrender.
SURRENDER IS… THE ABILITY TO DISCERN
First of all, the ability to discriminate, to make clear distinctions. This magnificent tiger was drawn by Francesco Bordoni, a gentleman who had attended some of my courses and then the Self-Training Course at the Institute of Psychosynthesis. He drew it just a few days before he died of cancer. It is incredible how he managed it as he was very heavily medicated. With this tiger, he was trying to answer a question that he was constantly being asked by the nursing staff. He wrote:
“Kindly, you always ask me how I am, almost forgetting that in the nuances of my suffering I will no longer be well. But this passage by Yann Martel opens the insight to reality:
Pi: We fight endlessly.
We fight without caring what it costs us,
of the defeats we incur,
of the improbability of success.
We fight to the last breath.
It is not a question of courage.
The inability to surrender is a matter of character.
Perhaps it is simply a stupid hunger for life.”
Incidentally, I would like to thank Susanna, Francesco’s widow, for authorising me to share this beautiful image.
Now I ask you a slightly provocative question: would you ever propose to this tiger to surrender? Obviously not, it would maul you! And Francesco explains it well. Its nature, its function is another: it is “hunger for life”; it is life that fights endlessly. Out of metaphor, if we were in a therapeutic setting and offered such a tiger the quality of surrender, we would risk compromising the whole process. Our patient would most likely stop being patient with us and his tiger would do us in. And he would have a point.
Similarly, we cannot even propose the quality of surrender to people who are still very much identified with subjugated, victimised, depressed, or terrified and running away subpersonalities. It would mean consigning them to helplessness, despair, and thus traumatising or retraumatising them.
That is why the first face of surrender is the ability to distinguish. That is why it is essential to ask the question: “Whose surrender? To whom? The restitution of what? To whom? And when?”. If we are unable to distinguish the different levels and instances of our bio-psycho-spiritual constitution – so well represented in the well-known psychosynthetic Egg diagram – the quality of the relationships between these levels, and also the different stages of the psychosynthetic process, we are in danger of making a mess of things. We cannot naively approach the quality of surrender, but actually all qualities, especially in the therapeutic field. Otherwise, courage could become recklessness or arrogance, trust credulity, peace apathy and so on.
SURRENDER IS… ACCEPTANCE
Another important face of surrender is that of loving acceptance, listening and understanding of all the contents that come into the field of consciousness. These are functions proper to a qualitatively different level of the psyche than that of the subpersonalities: it is the level of the I, of the I-Self.
Only the I-Self is not at war, it does not consider any part of us to be an enemy and can accept them all.
In therapy, the psychotherapist is initially the symbol and guarantor of the functions of the patient’s I-Self. The therapist has the task of extracting, distilling the healthy need hidden at the root of each subpersonality, while distinguishing it from the dysfunctional strategies the party puts in place to satisfy that need. As therapists we are constantly challenged, in this case, not to surrender to the logic of the ‘enemy to defeat’, which is precisely the logic that usually brings us the patient who would like to finally induce surrender of certain aspects of himself, obviously those that make him suffer the most.
And, depending on our personal history, it can be difficult not to give in – we as therapist first – to the pressure of certain subpersonalities. Many examples from my practice come to mind. One out of all: a young girl not yet of age whom I followed some time ago and who was experiencing an intense conflict between the urge to grow and become autonomous and a subpersonality that was parentified and very dependent on the mother figure she had represented in this way.
As soon as I yielded, even just a little, to my internal pressure and allied myself with the part that wanted to separate and grow, I was taken out by the dependant one. The patient would only take its steps if I welcomed and contained her and my conflict. And this meant that I had to surrender to helplessness in relation to her conflict. The patient only grew if I myself recognised, in our relationship, my limits on the one hand and her autonomy, freedom and full responsibility on the other.
Surrender then as acceptance of our different sub-personalities and also, as acceptance of our history. This is not always evident because there are parts, even unconscious parts, trapped in the past and tenaciously clinging to the illusion that they can change it. These sub-personalities do not want to or cannot surrender; they minimise, justify what happened, or promise, bargain again, beg, or wait… to take revenge, to be saved, to be compensated. They all delude themselves that, thanks to their efforts, things will finally be different.
Instead, when an individual comes to surrender his or her history – that is, when he or she can tell themselves and say “things have turned out this way and there is nothing I can do about it” – there is great suffering, but it is a liberating suffering because it is precisely then that something changes. Not the past as such, but the relationship with it. When we surrender to our history, we can integrate it and, paradoxically, even let it go, at least a little. We finally return it (remember, in Italian, “surrender” also means “restitution”) to the time where it belongs, i.e. the past. And we can better discern the present, and live it, inhabit it more fully.
Surrender therefore as acceptance of oneself (of our multiplicity and our history) but also as acceptance of the Self: as adhesion to our deepest nature, to our truth. And here, in a continuous play of paradoxes, surrender from acceptance, listening and containment becomes instead rebellion, liberation, courage. Do you see how it is precisely a synthetic quality, a quality that integrates?
SURRENDER IS… REBELLION
I start again with the image brought by a patient who had started therapy because, despite a successful life, he kept repeating the same mistakes in relationships. This time it is a dream image. In his dream there is a man walking through a night landscape. He is looking for a hotel but cannot proceed. At a certain point he turns around and, to his amazement, realises that he is carrying around an enormous amount of junk, lots and lots of things that impede his movement. At first, he asks himself in anguish, “What am I doing with all this stuff? Why am I carrying it around?”. Then he realises that those things are not even his. And he gets angry, very angry. And he starts to dispose of them.
This dream fragment tells us that adhering to ourselves, to the Self – that is, surrendering to our inclinations, to our deepest nature – also means rebelling against everything that, as Alberto Alberti (1994), a pupil of Assagioli, writes, is “non-Self” – against what has never belonged to me or no longer belongs to me.
It is the “test of the grain” in fairy tales. Identifying all that junk (which are then the projections and expectations of others, educational impositions, the prescriptions of our delusional consumer society, religious and spiritual conditioning, etc.) and getting rid of it, disidentifying ourselves: that is, again, “returning” these things that are not ours, to those to whom they belong.
“(…) Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”
Mt 13:24-43
This also means facing deep-rooted fears: the fear of being judged, punished, of being marginalised, abandoned, of disappointment and so on. Realising oneself, realising the Self, means facing the unknown and uncertainty. And as we well know, identifications, even if obsolete or dysfunctional, structure our sense of identity. They are a source of a security that we also need.
“There is no certainty:
there is only adventure.”
Roberto Assagioli
SURRENDER IS… BECOMING ONESELF
But when we begin to choose on the basis of courage instead of fear – and get rid of the old junk we carry around – our development, our evolution, our blossoming begins. We set out along the way that, in the ovoid, connects the personal dimension with the transpersonal dimension of the Self, which is then the way of authenticity, of individuation. It is no coincidence that Psychosynthesis is also defined as “The wonderful promise of what we may be.”
This gradual surrender to our essential nature, however, is not a romantic journey. It has its own price to pay; of the rebellion and courage I have just mentioned, but there is more to it than that.
We probably all approach a therapeutic journey, or more generally an existential, spiritual quest, with an idealised image of what it means to become ourselves. I ask my patients during the first interview “if therapy was a journey what kind of journey would it be?”. But even more so we have an idealised image of the final destination of this journey. And I also ask them this: “how do you imagine yourself at the end of our journey?” And often fantasies emerge of pleasant cruises that will lead to a kind of Eldorado where, as in fairy tales, they will live happily ever after.
Becoming oneself, on the other hand, has nothing to do with these compensatory fantasies. It is a quite different and, in some ways, opposite process. It is the realisation of that seed, that autogenous image stored in our Soul that guides us towards the experience of wholeness, of fullness, which are quite different things from perfection or happiness.
“(…) And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”
K. KAVAFIS, Ithaca, 1911
It is a process that leads us to assume a form: our unique and unrepeatable form. And every form, by definition, is delimited. So, assuming a form also means surrendering to the fact that we have limits: of time, energy, resources, and capacity. This has to do with the process of dying. Hence, in the end, the price to pay for becoming oneself is to be willing to also confront the dimension of death in its various faces: as sacrifice, separation, mourning, etc.
SURRENDER IS… SACRIFICE
The process of dying is one of gradual simplification. It is about making choices. Assagioli spoke of necessary “psychic pruning”. If I assume one form, I cannot assume another. What are the branches I sacrifice? That is, what limits do I set?
To be able to make these choices, I must be clear about the values that guide my life. And in any case, pruning will also involve sacrificing aspects that we cherish. It is easy to let go of what we are indifferent to.
It is quite another thing to separate ourselves from what we hold dear: aspects of us, meaningful people and dreams, idealisations, consoling fantasies, projects and so on.
It is no coincidence that meditation on death – which is then a further deepening of the disidentification process – is a practice proposed by all spiritual paths. It opens us up to the possibility of going “beyond,” of accessing the trans-personal dimension that is a qualitatively still different level of the psyche.
What makes the passage to the Beyond possible? Trust. It is trust that allows us to face these psychological deaths, these prunings, these progressive restitutions and transformations.
SURRENDER IS… TRUST
Obviously, the subject of trust would require an entire intervention; an entire conference. I will limit myself to saying that perhaps, the ultimate goal of psychotherapy could be precisely the healing of trust, of the relationship of trust: with oneself, with others, with Life and its continuous flow of which our Soul is a participant. The therapist is the guardian of this trust, and the therapeutic relationship is the space in which the cure takes place.
I am reminded of the image with which I myself was first initiated by one of my patients to the quality of surrender. It is an image that, from then on, many others have brought into therapy: drawn, dreamed, visualised, even embodied or just verbalised. There is a figure in the middle of a rushing river. This figure clings to a branch, or to a rope, to something she does not want to let go of. It is very frightened. Sometimes angry. And she tries with all her might to resist the current that drags her, that invites her to surrender.
Shortly after agreeing to prepare this talk, I happened to read a passage that struck me because it corresponds exactly to this image. It is taken from G. P. Quaglino and A. Romano’s book, A colazione con Jung – “Breakfast with Jung” – (2006). In it they recount a dream had by Elliott Sandler in which Jung says:
“This is what happened at crucial moments in my life. I accepted to be carried along by the current, not knowing where it would take me.
I tried to resist (…) but each time I was defeated (…). I experienced how difficult it is to resist this current and how beneficial it is to trust it without rules.
I have learnt, over the years, to let myself be carried along. (…) I know that there is a force that knows where to lead us: it takes us exactly where we must realise our becoming.”
When this act of trust and surrender happens, the possibility of the ultimate surrender opens up: it is the surrender of the “I” to the Self, i.e. the restitution by the “I” go of what it has been handed over and is due to others, to the Self.
SURRENDER IS… SYNTHESIS
The ultimate goal, the highest aim of Psychosynthesis is precisely to foster this dialogue and the progressive unification, the synthesis between the “I” and the Self. The quality of surrender is the necessary condition for the realisation of this purpose.
“This is what happened at crucial moments in my life. I accepted to be carried along by the current, not knowing where it would take me.
I tried to resist (…) but each time I was defeated (…). I experienced how difficult it is to resist this current and how beneficial it is to trust it without rules.
I have learnt, over the years, to let myself be carried along. (…) I know that there is a force that knows where to lead us: it takes us exactly where we must realise our becoming.
As Assagioli writes in a note: “Psychosynthesis – Unification, synthesis achieved through the act of surrender: import.“
To conclude, we can therefore say that surrender and synthesis are nothing more than two sides of the same coin: from surrender to surrender, from synthesis to synthesis, gradually the reflection (the “I”) moves back towards the source (the Self.
Then the golden age is no longer a compensatory childish fantasy, but conscious and voluntary adhesion to the movement of Life. An adhesion that spares us nothing, on the contrary.
It is – in Roberto Assagioli’s own words –
“that fruitful self-surrender which the old sages of India called “inaction in action,” the great Lao-Tse considered the highest principle of conduct: Wu-Wei and Paul expressed in his famous triumphant affirmation: “I live, not I but Christ lives in me.”
CONCLUSION
I take my leave by proposing a very short exercise that Assagioli liked and that would be good to practise “at least in every hour”. A “very easy, very simple and very refreshing” exercise. “Whatever you may be doing, without exception, stop long enough to draw one breath with the whole body, yielded by you to your Holy Spirit within [the transpersonal Self]”. A symbolic act of “joyful surrender of all our efforts, all our work, all our feelings” that will bring you “to the Heavenly state of involuntary Work which is the Perfection of Play”.
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“Then man comes to his true identity and truly knows himself, not when he pursues a noble ideal, however great and holy, but when he shows himself capable of accepting reality, all reality, just as it is, without excluding anything, with perfect inner peace”.
St. Francis of Assisi, Admonition, (quoted from memory by Father Andrea Schnöller)
The images containing Roberto Assagioli’s autograph writings have been taken from the Assagioli Archive of the Institute of Psychosynthesis: www.archivioassagioli