When I was a naïve, novice psychotherapist, I had the good fortune of a psych hospital’s support to attend professional conventions, partly to learn, and partly to represent the hospital. I remember my first psychoanalytic convention: I was thrilled to sit in the presence of famous psychoanalysts, soaking up their wisdom. I was at just such a convention when I had my first shot of Universal Solvent, neat.

I’d gone to a presentation by one of the Greats, eager to advance my skills in this craft I was practicing. Well, art. He read a paper, after which there was time for discussion. A question from the back. A response. A response to the response. Soon it became apparent that these two figures, embodiments of Psychoanalysis, were talking only to each other—and in a way that astounded me. The interaction (and thankfully, the session) drew to a close with these two psychoanalyzing each other, interventions and counter-interventions flying. As in:

Analyst A: “You’ve always had problems with authority, and that’s the basis of your objection to my argument.”

Analyst B: “No, you’re the one with delusions of grandeur. You’ve always thought narcissism was a substitute for evidence.”

I came home dismayed, so I took up the subject with my mentor, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist. He listened with all the practiced, professional empathy at his command. Laying a hand on my shoulder, he said, “Psychoanalysis is a sword. It also cuts against the grain of Truth.” This was just the sort of thing my Zen-master-esque psychoanalytic supervisors all said to me (regularly), and I wasn’t sure how this koan was supposed to make me a better therapist. He sent me summarily to interpret the world, gesturing as if he were drawing a sword. “The sharper it is, the more dangerous.” Thanks.

Scroll forward a few months. I happened to be present at a social gathering at UT, where I was a grad student in philosophy. In the course of the afternoon, I dazzled a group of young Marxists by recounting a course I’d taken with a certain well-known Marxist professor of anthropology at UC. Suddenly, a phalanx of antiMarxists from across the room engaged us, raising the flags of their objections—which the Young Marxists promptly dismissed as false consciousness of exactly the bourgeois sort one would expect from a bunch of “soft” anthropologists. Or worse, philosophers.

These experiences put me in mind of my granny, who loved me unconditionally, but who was also a reliable fount of crackpot ideas. Her response to scientific theories (that word was always pejorative with her) was that they were patently false, because scientists continually change their minds. Take nutrition, she would say, or evolution. Butter cannot possibly both be good for you and not good for you, and it was equally obvious to her that God had planted dinosaur bones, C-14 and all, precisely to entice people onto the wide road to Hell. (Most of my early life, I wondered why God had bothered, as there didn’t seem to me to be any evidence of a shortage.)

And so I learned something at a tender age that I would later learn to call the “problem of critical theory,” a particularly virulent disease of thinking in which one’s interpretive framework masquerades as theory but dissolves everything in its path by applying a Universal Solvent.

Take psychoanalytic theory, for instance. Suppose I state an ordinary psychoanalytic principle. Now suppose you offer a counterargument, perhaps even with evidence. I can deploy psychoanalytic solvents for your objection that leave me the victor and you one person short of a genuine discussion. Somewhere in the neighborhood of that solvent, theory turns into self-certifying discourse, and right there, the condensate you’re slipping on is Universal Solvent.

Incidentally, no one is immune — professors, politicians, business leaders, bus drivers, even the barista at your favorite espresso shop. Consider debates about your personal bête-noire in whatever your favorite belief-system is: Have you ever been in a conversation in which someone “argues” with you by merely stating a principle as if it were an incantation that wards off the evil spirits of dissent? You too have had the Universal Solvent, my friend.

But let’s not end on such a pessimistic note. No, there is actually a simple test you can perform to determine whether you’re in a genuine conversation. Ask everyone involved to take a short intermission to answer this question: Under what conditions would you change your mind? 

People talking about what might change their minds about a topic is an excellent way to engage in a genuine conversation that goes somewhere. On the other hand. . . .

It’s probably obvious, but if a putative conversation partner says there are no conditions under which she or he would change positions—but wants to keep talking at you anyway—then get ready to duck when you say anything, because there’s most likely a spurt of Universal Solvent on the way.