Not to Belong to Himself
“He no longer belonged to himself. And that was the only thing he had ever truly wanted.” In Simon’s long fantasy, what matters is not the “what” but the “why”. For years he has carried a self he hates: guilty, shameful, wrong. The fantasy of total surrender — chains, another’s power, “you no longer belong to yourself” — solves that problem radically: where there is no choice, there is no guilt. Surrender is the only way he knows to stop being himself.
Fantasies of submission — including harsh ones — are common in people carrying heavy loads of shame and hyper-control: the psyche looks for a place where responsibility can finally be laid down. In itself such a fantasy is neither pathology nor “brokenness”. Pathology begins where Simon is already standing: when the border between the script in one’s head and a living person stops being visible.
