In Affect, Representation, and Language (2022), psychoanalyst Howard Levine writes:
I was drawn to psychoanalysis, in part, because of a significant early emotional loss, one that left me feeling restless, incomplete and in search of something. My maternal grandmother, to whom my mother was extremely close, died in the seventh month of my second year….I have developed a strong conviction that this loss precipitated a significant depressive withdrawal on my mother’s part that had profound effects on my emotional development…[A]lthough in terms of historical reality, the early loss was that of an object, in an important sense of psychic reality, what I felt to be missing…turned out to be some aspect of my self. (Levine, p. 7; emphases in original)
While Levine’s focus in this book is on unrepresented states (e.g., the psychic space occulted by the lost object/lost self), my interest as a non-psychoanalyst is in the state of mind “conviction,” – which will lead to a question about psychoanalysts.
Consider the contrast between conviction and the emotional states (akin to curiosity) restless[ness], [feeling of] incomplete[ness], or being in search of something. Incompleteness also suggests desire, associated by Lacan with lack. Can a conviction be communicated so that another person can share it? (Can one have a “persuasion” like one has a conviction?) Further, how does Levine’s conviction contrast with “certainty,” as discussed, for example, by Ludwig Wittgenstein in On Certainty (1972), the philosopher’s final published work, which speaks of certainty predicated of often implicit personal knowledge that other beliefs presuppose? For example, Levine’s conviction rests on the certain knowledge that he had a mother.
Typically, one says: “I have a conviction that A” or “I am convinced of A” (call these sentences “C”) where “A” stands for an assertion such as “The unconscious exists”. Having a conviction (like having a belief) is something that one either has or doesn’t: the existence of a conviction is logically independent of the truth or falsity of A. (One can be wrongly convinced, though the likelihood of having a conviction is plausibly dependent upon having evidence for its truth.) Therefore, the truth of C depends upon whether (or not) one has such a state of mind, not on A. On the other hand, if certainty is something that can’t be doubted, the truth value of such sentences as “I am certain of A” must depend upon the truth of A. Being certain, on this analysis, would appear to imply a stronger relation to truth than having a conviction. Another way of saying this is that convictions are psychological, certainties are epistemological. Not all convictions have the force of certainty, although a person cannot be uncertain as to whether she has a conviction. And (like learning), to develop a conviction is to say at some time one didn’t have a conviction but that a later time one had one, presumably based on experience and
reflection. Perhaps Levine was not able to discover any other reason for his vocation than the temporary depression of his mother, and so he concluded that that must have been the reason (or the primary reason). Or, that what Levine identifies as his conviction is a plausible construction that sufficiently patches over the lack of an irrefutable explanation that he doesn’t need to explore further. Conviction would seem to be a place of rest.
Turning to representation, Levine’s primary concern, what are the representations associated with a conviction, such as that the unconscious exists? (Not simply descriptively, as in characterizing synapses, but ontologically, as in Freud’s topographical representation.) One tacitly affirms the unconscious or explicitly asserts that one believes in it because of its explanatory power: positing an unconscious yields involuntary actions or productions (slips of the tongue, dreams) intelligible. So, the representational contents of convictions are the affirmation accompanied by satisfactory explanations – satisfactory in that they’re more than merely probable, even if possibly false. Yet in the text there remains a deep and mysterious narrative gulf between the feeling states restlessness, incompleteness, and the impetus to search and the development of Levine’s conviction (no matter how plausible) that the “significant early emotional loss” grounds his psychoanalytic investigation of unrepresented states. Suppose that he discovered the foundation of his conviction during his personal analysis. So why is it that relatively few analysts describe their recollection of segments of their own analyses, with the same level of detail as the cases they present in supervision or in journal articles? Are unrepresented states inevitable, the negative spaces in any account of oneself, coexisting with convictions?
References
Levine, H. (1922). Affect, Representation and Language. New York: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, L. (1972). On Certainty. (G.E. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds.) New York: Harper & Row.
