On Wanting to Change

He has not exactly taught us what to believe, but how to believe. He has given us something that by definition doesn’t coerce assent.

in the conversion drama we are, in a sense, re-experiencing extreme versions of seduction and persuasion and pedagogy; of influencing and being influenced; of people changing – through a relationship with another person and their group – not merely their minds, but their lives.

In all conversion stories there is, then, an abiding fear – that can also sometimes be a reassurance – of what is inconvertible; of what resists the conversion of what is ultimately redescription, however hard-won.

Conversion means, in the language of the OED, ‘rotation, turning, returning’; the picture is often of reorientated perception. Socrates is saying that education is the craft that makes possible this turning around. No one is lacking anything, they are just pointing, just looking, in the wrong direction. Clearly if there is a right direction to be l

Winnicott’s striking formulation at least allows us to wonder how dependence and uncertainty can go together: clearly, our dependence on uncertainty – our dependence on our scepticism – is going to be quite different to our dependence on what we take to be guaranteed (God, nature, the leader, the ideology, psychoanalysis, the mother, and so on).

Converting others being the only antidote to one’s own doubt.

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

This is one of the things that people do to each other, that we grew up having done to us and gradually doing ourselves, and which makes conversion so resonant for us: we try to make people believe us, and we try to find ways of managing when they do and when they don’t.

(it is a shibboleth of psychoanalytic treatment that the patient comes to psychoanalysis to change by remaining the same).