Conviction and conversion: The role of shared fantasies about analysis

This paper is an attempt to understand the origin of the analyst conviction about both the patient analyzability and the psychoanalytic endeavor: Clin ical material will be used to illustrate the way that the intensity of the analyst's conviction is or isn't noticed or interpreted, by both patient an d analyst. The primary hypothesis to be proposed is that the analyst's awar eness of the transmission of conviction during conversion (or evaluation) c an trigger recognition and use of a critical period for identification with an underlying mutual fantasy of intergenerational, analyst-patient convict ion about analysis.