Subjectivity: the core we keep circling back to
Whenever we talk about power, attachment styles, and who we're drawn to, we keep running into the same thing: subjectivity. It's the existential core of being human. It means you hold the authorship of your own life — that you can build meaning on your own terms, affirm the legitimacy of your own will and needs, and stand in the world as an agent rather than someone things happen to. A whole subjectivity rests on a stable inner core: you can draw your worth from inside yourself instead of depending entirely on outside approval. You can keep your boundaries in a relationship and still open to the other.
It isn't born in us
But subjectivity isn't an instinct you're handed at birth. It's shaped by early attachment and everything the surrounding culture does to you afterward. When someone, early on, can't get enough response — when their will and needs are ignored, denied, pushed down again and again — they never manage to internalize a self that's a subject. They never form the quiet certainty of "I am the owner of my own existence." The self stops being someone who makes meaning and becomes an object, waiting to be defined, evaluated, chosen. Worth now hangs entirely on feedback from the outside. Asserting your own will brings a deep anxiety and fear, because autonomy means facing life's uncertainty alone, means carrying the weight of every choice — and a self without a stable core simply can't hold that.
Live long enough as an object and you get used to it. You learn to place yourself under examination. You discipline your behavior by someone else's standards, until you've internalized their will as your own rule. In the end you lose your grip on your own life entirely — a drifter, homeless at the level of being. Modern life makes this worse. Atomization and the collapse of old communities strip people of any stable identity; loneliness and emptiness become a shared predicament, and more and more of us turn outward, trying to fill the hole in the self through someone else's confirmation.
The pull toward the strong
Lose your subjectivity and you'll inevitably start hunting for value outside yourself. To me, "admiring the strong" (慕强) is the clearest shape that takes. Its essence: when you can't generate a steady sense of worth on your own, you try to bond with a strong other, borrowing their strength to patch the void in your existence, scraping together a little security and validation. And "strong" here was never one thing. It can be power, money, status — the worldly advantages. It can be a kind of spiritual steadiness, a clarity. And yes, it can be the controlling grip that runs everything in a relationship. For the person missing a subjectivity, the strong other's fatal pull isn't only their admirable traits. It's that their very presence hands you a framework of certainty. Attach to this strong one, earn their recognition and acceptance, and your existence seems to finally have a floor. You don't have to face the emptiness and panic of an empty core anymore.
An unequal exchange from the start
In the psychology of 慕强, the relationship with the other is lopsided before it even begins. The other is the source of value, the one who bestows meaning. You are only the receiver, a blank waiting to be written. The hollower you feel, the harder you clutch at the strong other. The more you lean on them, the more you disown your own strength — and round you go, into a loop of self-erasure and outward clinging. This isn't a moral flaw in the person. It's an instinctive defense driven by existential anxiety, the lifeline a self grabs when it can no longer hold itself up.
And then it deepens into surrender
When lost subjectivity tips into 慕强 and sinks a little deeper, it grows into what we usually call submission. For too long we've read the submissive side on the surface — flattened it into a liking for obedience, for passivity, even for pain — and missed where it actually comes from. Masochism is not a mere taste. It's a defensive way of relating, a survival strategy a person develops when subjectivity is missing. For someone like that, the active, dominant mode of being feels strange and threatening, because it asks the self to speak, to choose, to own the consequences — and a self never permitted to be a subject has no such capacity. Hand the lead of the relationship over to the one you experience as strong, though, and something shifts. Putting yourself in the passive, obedient seat brings a strange kind of safety. The dependent psychology of submissives makes sense here: obedience becomes a way to earn recognition. You give up your own will to trade for the strong one's acceptance and affirmation, and through that exchange you get a flicker of existential confirmation.
The loop that feeds itself
慕强 supplies the object and the engine for that obedience. The obedient act then reinforces the hierarchy of strength, which further cements your lost subjectivity. So you can see it — a self-reinforcing loop. Inside it, masochism finds solid psychological ground. It isn't some deliberate playing a role; it becomes the most familiar, most reassuring way of existing. Only in passivity and obedience does she feel the relationship's certainty, feel seen and needed — even if that seeing is being seen as an object, even if that need is instrumental. In obedience she dissolves her own edges, yet through that dissolving she gets the illusion of merging with the strong other, as if by attaching to them their strength becomes hers, their existence propping up her own. That sense of fusion carries real intensity. It can reach a depth of intimacy.
Why fusion feels like coming home
In earlier writing I used the ABO frame to point at our ultimate craving for fusion — the wish to become one with another life, to break the wall between self and other, to let connection dissolve the loneliness of simply existing. But in a normal relationship between equals, that craving for fusion always hits the wall of subjectivity. Two independent selves both want to move closer and fear being swallowed; want to blend and worry about losing themselves. So they swing forever between closeness and autonomy, never quite arriving at full merger. That tension is built into equal relationships. It keeps them healthy and sustainable, and it also caps how deep intimacy can go — two souls always separated by a thin membrane.
Being held, not consumed
But for the submissive, the dissolving of boundaries is not a loss of self and not being eaten alive. I'd call it the ease of being held. Because then she chooses to open her edges, to place a part of herself into the hands of someone she trusts, believing the other will keep that offering safe, believing that inside the other's frame her self gains firmer support. For the one on the receiving end, taking the other in expands and enriches their own life too. The two form a deep symbiosis — not the pathological tangle Freud meant, but what I'd rather name an existential fusion built on voluntariness and trust in D/s relationships. In that fusion nobody loses themselves. Two lives mesh at the deepest level and become indivisible parts of each other. It's an intimacy two always-bounded individuals can never quite know — the wall between self and other comes down, and two lives genuinely embed into each other's being. Existential loneliness gets dissolved to the bone, because you know: somewhere in this world a life is bound tightly to yours, sharing the same order of being, the same rhythm.
There's a related thread worth naming — the psychology of needing to be allowed. A lot of this only makes sense once you see how much comfort there is in being permitted, in having the strong other sanction your surrender, rather than having to authorize it yourself.
Maybe intimacy was never one size
Follow this far and a subjectivity-complementary intimacy gives us a new angle on relationships. The old ideal of equal footing and mutual respect may no longer fully fit the emotional void of a closed, atomized, fast-dating world. We've measured a relationship's health by equality, independence, autonomy — and overlooked how many ways there are to be close. We assume everyone should want the same shape of relationship, forgetting that each person exists differently and feels closeness differently. For some, two independent souls walking side by side is the best intimacy there is. For others, the connection found in complementary holding and receiving is the most ultimate intimacy. We can't use one standard to dismiss other relationship forms, or use a so-called "right" one to erase someone's real emotional need. The ultimate point of intimacy was never to meet a social standard. It was to let the people inside it find deep satisfaction and growth, find existential connection and comfort. As long as a relationship rests on voluntariness, clarity, and mutual respect — as long as both people are nourished and grow richer within it — then it has value, and it deserves respect. And if the dynamic lives through something like collars and leashes, that symbolism is just one language for the same trust.
A note: this is reflection, not clinical advice. If you're actually working through attachment wounds, a therapist beats a blog post.
References
- Fromm, E. (2011). The Art of Loving. Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
- Kohut, H. (2012). The Analysis of the Self. World Publishing Corporation.
- Foucault, M. (2005). The History of Sexuality. Shanghai People's Publishing House.
- Bowlby, J. (2017). Attachment. World Publishing Corporation.
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