On Wanting to Change

one way we have narrowed our minds is to describe our lives as only, or merely, double. Doubling doubles the problem in a way that multiplication doesn’t. Doubling, we can say now in the language of psychoanalysis, is a defence against proliferation.

For the secular, Williams’s definition of faith – it uncovers a world larger than you thought, it stops you denying, resisting, ignoring aspects of what is real – could easily be applied to the study of literature, or to philosophy, or to psychoanalysis. Indeed, Williams gives as good a description as you might want of the aims of a liberal educati

these questions, of course, lead to further conversations about what my criteria are for a good life, and where I got them from; all underwritten by the idea of the unconscious, of what our knowing and our wanting are really up against.

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

The problem with (and for) psychoanalysts has always been that they have had to believe in psychoanalysis. The problem for everyone is that they have needed to believe what certain people have told them (starting with their parents).

The patient who treats the analyst as, in Lacan’s phrase, ‘the one who is supposed to know’ is wanting a conversion experience, which is interpreted rather than acceded to.

the possibility of a relationship to oneself and others that is not based on conversion; a relationship in which persuasiveness is the problem not the point. And then we are left to wonder what a non-persuasive politics could be like.

When we talk about change, we are talking about our preferred norms, the standards we want to live by, what we would prefer to think of as normal. So there can be no non-normative therapies, no therapies that don’t want to tell us how to live and who to be (and which kinds of change are to be preferred). It is just a question of which of these norm

Liberals believe that freedom is born of acknowledged eccentricity, complexity and nuance; that, as Mill puts it, ‘different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate’.