Lacan’s Psychoanalysis and Plato’s Symposium:

There are very real limitations to any discussion of Jacques Lacan’s complex and voluminous commentary on Plato’s Symposium, not least in a paper of this length. The sheer number of connections that Lacan makes cannot be fully dealt with, nor can any particular point of interest be exhaustively discovered without drawing other issues into the fold. Nevertheless, what I have presented in this discussion is a suggestive interpretation of Lacan’s interest in the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, insofar as this relationship makes a certain common understanding of love in Plato and psychoanalysis emerge. What I suggest is that Lacan’s interpretation makes it possible to understand how, in the ancient text, desire is already understood as an unconscious motivation, not only in terms of its inexorable power to determine a person’s aims, but also in its ability to subsist between and beyond the rules of conscious discourse. Lacan highlights the particular point at which, within his speech on love, Socrates must hand over his explanation to the priestess Diotima, who as a functionary between the gods and human beings is in a unique position to give a description of desire’s metaxological status in the form of a myth. It remains a point of interest why Plato, who specifically disdains the status of myth as a form of true discourse, nonetheless includes them at certain points. In relation to the Symposium, it is precisely because desire subsists beyond or between the “activities of love” in the Socratic sense that an explanation must be sought beyond the efficacy of what Lacan understands as Socrates’s otherwise unanswerable interrogations of the signifying order. Lacan begins his psychoanalytic interpretation of Plato’s Symposium in the second session of the seminar on transference, where he initiates his audience with a discussion of the dialogue’s somewhat scandalous and unexpected character; it is perhaps even a special kind of literature that “could be considered a statutory offence by a police inquiry.” The dialogue itself has a transgressive 1