Psychological surrender: A phenomenological study interpreted from an analytical psychology perspective

This study investigates subjective experience of psychological surrender, distinctively exploring how a depth orientation used to develop conscious-unconscious dialogue may be experienced when lived in the context of conscious relationship with God, and how an attitude of surrender may facilitate continual individuation. It addresses the research question: How may the phenomenon of psychological surrender be experienced when facing the known and the unknown and how may the phenomenon be understood? Extant literature acknowledges surrender as a versatile response to life challenges, facilitating personal growth. However, it is an under-researched phenomenon that is fundamental to ego development and expansion of consciousness. Investigation can provide in-depth understanding of how a person may experience surrender, derive meanings, and realise psychological development through its practice, and how a spiritual-religious sense of life-purpose, centred on personal relationship with God, may influence such surrender experiences. This empirical study, centred on an idiographic, longitudinal, single case data set, a personal self-report of the participant-researcher, assumes a constructivist-interpretive paradigm, a strategy of Phenomenological Inquiry, and a data analysis method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Scrutiny of the core data set is supplemented by phenomenon triangulation and interpretation draws on analytical psychology to explain findings. The experience of surrender varies for surface and depth orientations, with factors such as capacity for trust, for sacrifice and suffering, for hosting opposites in consciousness, for accompanying the body, for identity revision and for endurance, being common to both orientations. Depth surrender demands additional capacities for discovering and lowering unconscious defences, for double awareness facilitating age regression, for confronting complexes and for relating with expressions of deeper psychic patterns or archetypes. Psychological surrender increases capacity for engaging unknowns, cultivating felt body-mind unity and collaborative feminine and masculine modes of being, interlacing the rational and irrational and hosting opposites in consciousness while honouring distinctions.