The Seba library treats Submission in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming, Liu I-ming, Jung, C.G.).
What is efficacy? It is effectiveness in submission to what is right, most effective in abiding in faithfulness to rectitude. Only thus is it an auspicious path that is sound in the beginning and sound at the end.
Submission, in the Taoist I Ching framework, is not passivity but the most efficacious form of volitional alignment with rectitude, constituting the foundation of a fully integrated and auspicious life-path.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
If superior people practicing the Tao are able to be like the moon following the sun when they travel the path of flexibility by means of submission, then they know what gain and loss are, and they are effective in advancing as well as in withdrawing.
Submission here is the dynamic, yin-governed capacity for flexible responsiveness that enables the Taoist practitioner to navigate advance and withdrawal with genuine efficacy.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
as long as there is any kind of bias, there is no submission. My Somali friend in Africa gave me very good teaching in that respect… There is no prejudice, there is supreme submission. God can appear in any form he chooses.
Jung identifies supreme submission as the total relinquishment of theological bias, positing it as the sine qua non of genuine, unprejudiced religious openness to the numinous in any form.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
Traumatic memories involving total submission and its inherent hypoarousal are very hard to treat, including memories that involved abuse when the victim was sedated through the use of
Van der Hart identifies ‘total submission’ as an animal-defense-derived dissociative state of complete dorsal vagal collapse, presenting among the most therapeutically intractable of traumatic memory configurations.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
rituals of domination and submission are a subversive way to put one over on a society that glorifies control, belittles dependency, and demands equality.
Perel reads erotic domination-and-submission as a culturally subversive ritual that inverts and symbolically transgresses the egalitarian and autonomy-valorizing norms of contemporary Western society.
, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007thesis
Many action tendencies of social defense involve psychophysiological conditions quite similar to action tendencies of physical defense: hypervigilance, flight, fight, freeze, and submission.
Van der Hart situates submission within a continuum of psychophysiological defensive action tendencies, noting its structural homology with shame-related social behaviors such as gaze aversion and emotional hiding.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
submission to them, therefore, has a different quality from the kind of submission that exists once two individuals have become really separate.
Fromm argues that the developmental moment of individuation radically transforms the psychological character of submission, distinguishing pre-individual participation from submission between genuinely autonomous persons.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
the audience proved far less interested in the couple’s overall relationship than in the disconcerting presence of domination and submission in their erotic life. What pathology, several participants asked, might underlie the man’s need to sexually objectify his wife
Perel documents the clinical and cultural anxiety surrounding erotic submission, showing how professional discourse tends to pathologize it rather than situate it within a broader relational and symbolic context.
, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007supporting
At this final stage of surrender, analgesia prevents nociception of injury—which may account for the fact that many clients report that they felt no pain during the abuse.
Ogden describes the somatic endpoint of traumatic submission—floppy immobility or ‘surrender’—as accompanied by endogenous analgesia, revealing the biological function of total submission as a last-resort survival mechanism.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting