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).

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.

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

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 far from being a rupture, a break with the past, in its psychoanalytic version conversion sustains continuity: in a sense we are more successfully our past selves after a conversion than before. What Ferenczi called in a memorable phrase ‘transitory conversions’ are the story of our life. To sustain our pleasure, our pleasure in life, we have

The question is: when your eyes have been opened, are you seeing more of what is real and true, or are you just seeing something else, something you didn’t see before, but that is taken to be essential by a particular group of people?

the irony is – if irony is not too weak a word – that in this perverse solution, in this necessary conversion, the man merely turns himself into a version of the woman he hates and fears (the dominated becomes a dominatrix). The identification with the cruel, frustrating mother becomes compulsory, apparently unavoidable. And it is then all too easy

we are urged to see the continuities and not the rupture in his conversion experience. Where once there seemed to be revolution, now there is punctuation, evolution rather than apocalypse.

And then there is the problem of what is taken to be inconvertible, beyond that form of acculturation. The risk, for example, is that the inconvertible gives the lie to the convertible; that cruelty gives the lie to civility. That the key, as it were, to conversion is whatever it is in someone that resists conversion. Conversion after all may