“On Wanting to Change” by Adam Phillips

This collection of essays by Phillips focuses on the idea of conversion. “Conversion was once the profoundest instance of personal and cultural change.” While Phillips begins by discussing the religious, he also parses the concept in its secular contexts. “Both psychoanalysis and American Pragmatism are driven by a desire to help the individual keep things moving…. They promote — American Pragmatism far more than psychoanalysis — the strangely radical, modern political idea that how we want to change can have something to do with how we do change. Change as choice rather than fate. Change as something we make…. We are the only animals for whom radical change can be an object of desire…. What haunts all religions — and then all secular therapies — is that the wish for change may be in excess of the capacity for change.”

Phillips delves into the psychoanalysis. “Conversion, that is to say — in its psychoanalytic version — is a way of not having to change. It is the way the individual sustains the desires that sustain her…. We never change, we convert…. It was indeed the seminal observation from which psychoanalysis developed — that feelings and desires could be converted into their opposite, into apparently unrelated ideas, into physical symptoms…. Conversion, then, in its psychoanalytic sense, is a cover story…. It is a reconfiguring rather than a radical transformation. Indeed, conversion is in the service of sustaining the very thing that is supposedly being replaced.”

Phillips views conversion as opposed to education. It is a closing off of paths and possibilities. “It is, I think, integral to liberal societies to assume that education and conversion are distinct, if not actually at odds with each other…. Conversion tends to be a cure for scepticism; a narrowing of the mind that frees the mind…. Conversion is a conversation that has failed…. Conversion depends on a supposedly known outcome…. Perhaps the opposite of conversion is experiment.” 

A conversion often seeks to simplify the ambiguities raised throughout one’s life. “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.” However, what was there before never completely goes away. “In conversion experiences there has to be something there to be converted; the new can only be made out of the old…. The key, as it were, to conversion is whatever it is in someone that resists conversion. Conversion after all may change everything by keeping everything the same…. People are also what you can’t make of them, or make them into. We are, too, the conversions we have resisted; and indeed the conversions we are tempted by.”

Conversion is the end point. “Conversion proposes the kind of change that makes other or future forms of change unthinkable. It is the kind of change that renders all future change redundant…. Conversion experiences must, by definition, dispel scepticism. Ultimately it is doubt that has to be converted.” The tension of conversion is the tension of living within civilization. “The Freudian individual is a convert: converted by acculturation to acculturation: converted both to civilization and to being one of its discontents.” The struggle is life. “It has been difficult for us to find pleasures that are sufficiently sustaining; pleasures that convince us, so to speak, that our lives are worth the suffering.”