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Maroda's message is that for transformation to occur, both analyst and analysand need to surrender—not to each other, but to their individual selves. I wish she had said “surrender to the process of analysis” instead Unfortunately, she damages her cause. The book is burdened by her battle with grief about “the stressful chaos” of her own analysis. Having wondered what she has to offer if she has not deeply grieved all her losses, Maroda then adds, “What if I have suffered too much, grieved too much? What do I have to offer then? Somehow the knowledge of what is heartbreaking and disappointing must be balanced with optimism and faith in one's own desire to do good in the world.” This brings to mind Scott's (1980) very different idea that that the faith be in one's capacity to mourn, which leads to the emergence of a zest for life and to enthusiasm for analysis. Much depends on the sturdiness of the analyst's belief in the merits of mourning.
Scott linked our capacity to mourn with our willingness to woo our infinite ignorance from which all that is new will come, to mourn our illusory omnipotence and omniscience. This capacity includes coming to better terms with our ignorance of “the other,” whom we will never know—analyst, patient, lover, parent, sibling—but about whom we might discover a great deal. Maroda seems plagued by this “How exactly do we communicate to the patient that we have shared his or her emotional experience and ‘emerged intact’?” “The communication of affect is critical to the change process, and it does not seem possible to express adequately affective states without self-disclosure”
In her title, Maroda juxtaposes surrender and seduction, although she decries what she sees as the need to seduce people into analysis. By introducing seduction as a necessary evil, Maroda makes betrayal inevitable For most of the book she wrestles to differentiate—for both analyst and analysand-between surrender and masochistic submission. She insists on the analyst's