On Wanting to Change

Freudian conversions involve not a change of heart but a change of means, not a sacrifice of something but a re-presentation of it.

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

There is despair, an overhearing, a memory of a reading, and a reading experience; it is indeed a heartening transformation scene for departments of literature. For both Paul and Augustine it is, in part, a listening cure; and it is definitively a cure by language – or, as they would say, redemption through the word.

we may wonder, once we have been converted to neoliberal reason – when we no longer talk about the good and why we value what we value, but only talk about (and in terms of) profitability and money – what we will make of our former selves, and their supposedly abundant preoccupations, which were, it turned out, never what we really wanted; which we

The old objects, that is to say, had not been abolished, they had been redescribed; much of the old vocabulary was still there – God, faith, law, mercy, charity, grace, and so on – but grace was privileged over law, faith was preferred to observance, and there was more love and mercy in the picture. In other words – it is an obvious point, but one

Conversion is one of the words we use, traditionally, for the treating of contradictions, for the resolving of such conflict. Conversion experiences, at their most minimal, minimise, or at least regulate, what are felt to be the essential and most paralysing contradictions of a divided self.

The vision he recovers, so to speak, is different from the vision he lost; the text does not say he recovered his sight but that he received it. And this, of course, is the all too familiar description of conversion: the loss of an old way of seeing, and a new vision of things. The same eyes see things differently and are at once the old eyes and t

Conversion as the more or less successful form our hedonism takes (we are extremely adept, for example, at finding sexual solutions to non-sexual problems).

In a conversion experience the wish to change someone usurps the wish for exchange; the wish to make something specific happen pre-empts the possibility of surprise.