The Shared Language of Unmaking

Long before psychoanalytic language existed, voices from the Indian subcontinent sang of surrender in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. Kabir, a fifteenth-century poet-saint, along with other Sufi-Bhakti mystics, moved through streets, riversides, and marketplaces, composing verses that challenged authority, hierarchy, and rigid forms of identity. Their practice was embodied in song, rhythm, and dance, moving toward freedom, encounter, and transformation and away from doctrinal certainty.

I did not expect Kabir to arrive in the middle of a psychoanalytic reading group. Yet that is where I found him, slipping between Ghent’s sentences, urging me toward that unstruck sound (anhadd baja). Our small circle of therapists, largely South Asian or adjacent to the subcontinent’s fractal of spiritual inheritances, was reading Emmanuel Ghent’s classic paper, “Masochism, submission, surrender: Masochism as a perversion of surrender.”

As others spoke, Kabir’s voice rose beneath the clinical discourse:

Milō re milō kō’ī mhārā des rā, do-bātān karāṅgā jī

(Oh come meet me, someone from my land; let us share a few words together)

In that moment, the paper settled into a familiar knowing within me. Ghent’s clinical clarity revealed itself not as a singular insight but as one tributary of a much older river.

In this half-reverie, half–scholarly space, the meaning of surrender thickened as two lineages, long held apart by geography, training, and colonial histories of knowledge, turned to face one another.

This essay is an attempt to stay with that moment of recognition, to place Emmanuel Ghent and Jessica Benjamin beside Kabir, and Fanon beside the Sufi understanding of fanā, braiding resonance without flattening difference. This is not a comparative project so much as a recognitional one. It is my search, as an Indian clinician, for a shared language of unmaking across seemingly distant terrains—psychic, political, spiritual—that have shaped my academic and inherited modes of knowing. I approach surrender here not as metaphor but as lived psychic and political practice.

Surrender as unmaking

Ghent distinguishes surrender from submission. Submission is a reaction to coercion, forcing the ego to collapse in a bid for survival; surrender, by contrast, is an act of agency: a conscious loosening of defensive structures that work to isolate us from experience.

Throughout this essay, terms such as ego, false self, rigid self, and constructed self refer to overlapping psychic formations that stabilize identity through defense, hierarchy, and exclusion, even as they constrain relational life.

Kabir knew this long before psychoanalysis had language for it:

Jis marne te jag darey, merā mann ānand hoye.

(The death from which the world is terrified fills me with joy)

Kabir’s ecstasy arises from the falling-away of structures the world mistakes for safety but which, in truth, bind and blind. His verse echoes the paradox Ghent observes: the structures we cling to most fiercely are often those that keep us bound. Within the analytic frame, surrender creates conditions for authentic encounter. As defenses soften and become porous, meaning emerges. This is not meaning produced through interpretation or mastery but from the willingness to let the unexpected flow through, and reshape, our being.

Sufi and Bhakti traditions dwell in this space of transformative surrender. This surrender is both fierce and ecstatic, shaped by resistance to illusion that dissolves false identities of caste, creed, ego, and hierarchy, to glimpse what remains. What is revealed when this constructed self falls away is not emptiness but a spacious, connective beingness that is whole, relational, and fundamentally free.

Jāti na pūcho sādhū kī, pūch lijīe gyān. Mol karo talvār kā, paṛā rahan do miyān.

(Do not ask a saint’s caste; ask about understanding. Value the blade; set aside the sheath.)

Kabir’s insistence that the ego never relinquishes itself willingly offers a diagnosis that cuts simultaneously across spiritual affliction, psychological defense, and political domination. By refusing to anchor freedom in caste, religious orthodoxy, or inherited lineage, Kabir exposes these categories as technologies of power rather than sources of truth. Surrender, in his work, is not an inward retreat but a strategic refusal: a withdrawal from the egoic subjectivity that power requires in order to operate. What is undone is the rigid self whose persistence sustains oppressive systems. What remains is agency.

Bhala huā morī gagrī phūṭī, maiṁ paniyā bharan se chūṭī.

(Blessed is the breaking of my clay pot; in its breaking, I am freed from the task of filling water.)

The clay pot is not the self but the rigid container of false identity. Its cracking marks an event of liberation, an opening through which relation becomes possible. Here, surrender becomes political refusal as well, anticipating by analogy rather than historical equivalence, Fanon’s insistence that liberation requires dismantling internalized structures, not merely opposing external ones. The Sufi concept of fanā—the dissolution of the false self—mirrors the psychic unmaking Fanon insists must precede decolonization. Both teach that freedom begins with an inner death that clears the ground for a new subjectivity.

Seen together, the analytic and mystical frames illuminate one another. Psychoanalytic surrender invites the ego to loosen its grip so that truth may be encountered without distortion. Sufi-Bhakti surrender demands comparable undoing, though articulated through devotion rather than analysis, exposing the boundaries we habitually mistake for identity. In the relinquishment of false structures, whether in the analyst’s office or the mystic’s song, freedom is discovered, not achieved.

Relational Expansion: From Dyad to Collective

If surrender is the unmaking of the rigid self, it also clears the ground for new forms of relating. Ghent describes this as authentic encounter; Sufi-Bhakti traditions frame it as dissolving the false self in devotion; Fanon sees it as the psychic precondition for decolonization. But once surrender becomes a mode of resistance, the question is: resistance in relation to whom? And toward what new forms of relating?

Here, Jessica Benjamin (along with other relational analysts) becomes a necessary bridge, attending not only to the undoing of the enclosed self but to what becomes possible afterward. In these terms, surrender opens the possibility of Thirdness—a shared, generative space where self and Other meet without erasing each other in a field of mutual recognition.

What Benjamin theorizes in the analytic dyad, Sufi-Bhakti traditions enact through collective, embodied ritual. In sama, kirtan, communal song, and ecstatic dance, identity becomes porous; bodies attune to one another; separateness loosens. The relational space that Benjamin describes is not only interpersonal but communal. A many-bodied Third emerges, one that is fluid, rhythmic, and participatory. Surrender becomes collective, expansive, and resistant, extending Benjamin’s dyadic mutual recognition into a communal mode of liberation.

Kabir gives voice to this relational opening:

Jab mein thā tab Hari nahīn, ab Hari hai, main nahīn.

(When “I” was, the Divine was not. Now the Divine is; the “I” is not.)

This is not self-loss but relational expansion. It is an “I” transformed through contact with the Other who is no longer a threat, rival, or master.

Once seen this way, surrender becomes a reorganization of relation itself: a refusal of the ego’s demand to dominate, a refusal of colonial definitions of subjecthood, a refusal of the binary of doer and done-to.

This reframing of surrender feels especially urgent in the present moment, marked by the intensification of religious and ideological extremism of Savarna Hindu majoritarianism in India. As inherited certainties about nation, belonging, leadership, and faith fracture, often painfully, what dissolves is not only political trust but the psychic scaffolding that once organized attachment, loyalty, and meaning. Kabir’s insistence on the refusal of rigid belonging speaks directly to this disorientation. His surrender is not an abdication in the face of power, but a refusal of the forms of selfhood that extremism depends upon: fixed identities, purified loyalties, and the fantasy of moral supremacy. In such times, surrender names the courage to relinquish false coherence in order to remain ethically and relationally alive.

Listening for a New Song

As surrender unfolds from the intrapsychic to the collective, my hope for psychoanalysis is that it might trace a similar arc. Across relational, decolonial, and intersubjective approaches, there is already a movement toward loosening older certainties—structures that were once vital for survival but may now constrain growth.

This, too, can be understood as a form of surrender: an opening to reciprocal transformation rather than continued reliance on the mastery of meaning.

From this perspective, Sufi-Bhakti traditions need not appear as external correctives but as lineages psychoanalysis may only now be able to hear. Their practices offer another grammar of liberation, one grounded in attunement, song, permeability, and the undoing of false separations. Where psychoanalysis has often articulated surrender within the dyad, Sufi-Bhakti traditions gesture toward collective, embodied forms of recognition.

The aim is not to remake psychoanalysis into something it is not. Rather, these traditions widen the horizon of what surrender might mean: a quiet resistance to fragmentation, an insistence on relation, a soft undoing of power’s exclusionist grammar. Relational psychoanalysis names this within the encounter of two subjectivities; Sufi-Bhakti imagines it as a communal, and potentially decolonizing, gesture.

Listening to Kabir, Ghent, Fanon, and Benjamin together, one begins to sense a new song emerging—surrender as a radical act through which liberation is not only theorized but tentatively lived.

From this vantage, the collective dreaming of a more liberatory psychoanalysis may itself be a practice of resistance: a willingness to relinquish familiar forms of mastery and step into a more fluid, interconnected field. Psychoanalysis may not need to defend itself so much as learn to enter dialogue—and multilogue—with traditions that have long cultivated practices of surrender. Perhaps psychoanalysis, too, can learn to listen, to soften, and to risk being transformed.

 Author’s Note:

All translations of Kabir’s verses in this essay are my own and are offered as loose, interpretive renderings rather than literal translations. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the APA Division 39 Spring Meeting (2025) on the panel “The Impact of Political Conflict on Physical, Psychological, and Spiritual Bodies.”