On Wanting to Change

a conversion is not felt to be what Mill calls an experiment of living.

More secular modern doublings may take the form of the private and the public, or the unconscious and the conscious, or the sane and the mad, or simply the unacceptable and the acceptable.

What he called ‘a capacity for conversion’ was a capacity to change while remaining the same, a capacity not to renounce anything and replace what has been supposedly lost.

And, indeed, what do we think language is like, language being the primary medium of conversion, if it can have this kind of effect on people (language also being the medium of psychoanalysis and all the other talking therapies)? And one answer would be that, consciously or unconsciously, we think of language as daemonic. We think of ourselves as d

But that change is an object of desire goes without saying now; though it is, of course, preferred change that is wanted.

There is in this, whatever else there is, a terrified misogyny; and a terror of our earlier, more dependent selves. A terror of something about love, and a terror about what the loss of love exposes.

From a psychoanalytic point of view it is the conversions that frustrate and get stuck – the conversions that need to believe in themselves – that we suffer from. We suffer inordinately when we allow, in Frank Kermode’s terms, a fiction to degenerate into a myth; when we believe too absolutely in what Freud would call our sublimations. ‘If a man wh

We want to get over them, and we don’t. We crave them, and we fear their failure or their unavailability. They link us to our losses, and they remind us of extraordinary boons and benefits. We crave them as opportunities and we fear them as tyrannies. Conversion experiences that, by definition, seem to answer so many questions for the converted can

People are prone to conversion experiences when they can no longer bear the complexity of their own minds.