Agalma enters depth-psychological discourse through Lacan’s sustained philological and clinical excavation in Seminar VIII, where it ceases to be merely an archaic Greek term for a votive offering or cult image and becomes the pivotal concept articulating what is hidden, coveted, and ultimately untransferable in the structure of desire. Lacan locates agalma at the intersection of classical philology and psychoanalytic theory: tracing its appearances in Homer and Plato’s Symposium, he demonstrates that each deployment—however seemingly mundane—carries a ‘fetish-accent,’ designating an object at once fascinating, embarrassing, and resistant to display. The term’s etymological ambiguity (evoking admiration, envy, indignation, and brilliance simultaneously) reinforces its structural function as the hidden treasure within the Other that organizes love and transference. Beyond Lacan, the term surfaces in classical scholarship: Seaford documents agalma’s evolution from a Homeric gift of delight between persons to a temple dedication, tracing how communal display and memory-preservation replace the interpersonal bond. Proclus’s Neoplatonic usage, preserved in Cornford’s commentary on the Timaeus, designates the cosmos itself as an agalma of the everlasting gods. Kerényi registers the term in his iconological study of Dionysus. The concept thus sits at the crossing of Lacanian object theory, Platonic cosmology, and Greek religious anthropology—an object that condenses fascination and concealment in a single, untranslatable form.