Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Discourse' occupies a position far richer than simple verbal exchange. Heidegger establishes the foundational ontological claim: discourse (Rede) is not a derivative act of communication but an existential structure constitutive of Dasein's being-in-the-world, co-primordial with state-of-mind and understanding. Lacan elaborates this structural insight into the clinical and erotic register, treating each speech act in the Symposium — the discourses of Pausanias, Eryximachos, Aristophanes, Agathon, and ultimately Socrates — as functionally differentiated interventions within a field of desire and transference. Benveniste, from the side of linguistics, distinguishes discourse sharply from historical narrative through its mobilization of personal pronouns and instantaneous subjectivity, grounding enunciation as the very locus where the speaking subject emerges. Giegerich, within analytical psychology, interrogates the 'who,' 'how,' and 'what' of psychological discourse as threshold questions that determine whether depth-psychological speech achieves genuine interiority or merely performs it. Derrida's deconstruction of phenomenological language foregrounds the irresolvable tension between expression and meaning that inhabits all discourse. Plato's Sophist anchors an ancient anxiety: if not-being mingles with discourse, falsehood — and with it, sophistry — becomes possible. Ricoeur connects discourse to power, domination, and the systematic distortions that hermeneutics alone cannot cure. Across these voices, discourse is simultaneously an ontological condition, a clinical instrument, a linguistic event, and a site of ideological contest.
As an existential state in which Dasein is disclosed, discourse is constitutive for Dasein's existence. Hearing and keeping silent are possibilities belonging to discursive speech.
Heidegger establishes discourse not as communication between subjects but as an ontological-existential structure co-constitutive of Dasein's being-in-the-world.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
From the point of view of the entrance problem we have so far looked at two aspects of psychological discourse, the who of discourse... and the how... There is one more moment that needs to be investigated, the what.
Giegerich systematically dissects psychological discourse into three axes — who speaks, how they speak, and what is spoken — as a threshold condition for genuine depth-psychological speech.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
"No Admission!" The Entrance into Psychology and the Style of Psychological Discourse... a) The "who" of psychological discourse... b) The "how" of psychological discourse... c) The "what" of psychological discourse.
Giegerich frames psychological discourse as a rigorously structured entrance problem, distinguishing its style, subject, and logical status as preconditions for authentic psychological work.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
between discourse, power (in the sense of domination), and possession, the ties are so inextricable that a social therapeutics of the systematic distortions of language has to be added to a simple hermeneutic incapable of curing by its discourse alone the misunderstanding in discourse.
Ricoeur, following Habermas, argues that discourse is structurally entangled with power and domination such that hermeneutic interpretation alone cannot repair its systematic distortions.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
if not-being has a part, then false opinion and false speech are possible, for to think or to say what is not—is falsehood, which thus arises in the region of thought and in speech.
Plato's Sophist identifies the participation of not-being in discourse as the condition of possibility for falsehood, deception, and sophistic manipulation.
, Sophist, -360thesis
The fundamental existentialia which constitute the Being of the 'there', the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world, are states-of-mind and understanding. In understanding, there lurks the possibility of interpretation.
Heidegger situates discourse within the existential triad of state-of-mind, understanding, and interpretation, establishing it as the articulatory form of Dasein's disclosedness.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
the important thing is that it should be in the perspective of the tragic poet that we are given on love precisely the only discourse which is openly, completely derisive.
Lacan reads Agathon's discourse on love in the Symposium as a functionally derisive register whose irony is constitutive of its therapeutic and structural role in the sequence of speeches.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
the intervention of Socrates intervenes as a rupture, and not as something which devaluates, reduces to nothing what had just been enounced in the discourse of Agathon.
Lacan argues that Socratic intervention operates as a structural rupture within the sequence of discourses, not a negation, preserving prior discourses as necessary moments in the dialectic of desire.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
we will see in his discourse that Aristophanes will make us take a step, the first really illuminated one for us... It is a question of dioecism of this Spaltung, of this splitting.
Lacan identifies Aristophanes' discourse as the first genuinely illuminating step in the Symposium's progression, linking its myth of splitting directly to the structural concept of Spaltung in psychoanalysis.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
we do not have the impression that this discourse of Pausanias ended all that badly, we are so used to hearing idiocies of this kind about love.
Lacan draws attention to the tonality of Pausanias' discourse as a marker of how habituation to conventional love-speech dulls the ear to the discourse's structural inadequacy.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
we are legitimately entitled to ask ourselves if what is in question is not properly speaking something which is consonant with a comic work as such: in dealing with love, it is clear...
Lacan proposes that the overall tone of the Symposium's discourses on love aligns them generically with comedy, a structural observation that reframes each discourse's rhetorical register.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
Le discours emploie librement toutes les formes personnelles du verbe, aussi bien je/tu que il. Explicite ou non, la relation de personne est présente partout.
Benveniste defines discourse as the mode of enunciation distinguished from historical narrative by its free deployment of all personal verb forms and the pervasive presence of the speaker-hearer relation.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
some idea of a critical art of reasoned discourse stands in contrast to other ways in which one might speak persuasively... logoi, like drugs (pharmaka) have the power to 'stop fear and take away grief and engender joy.'
Nussbaum traces the therapeutic conception of discourse in Hellenistic philosophy, where reasoned speech is distinguished from mere persuasion and aligned with medical dialectic as a cure for psychic suffering.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
if the texture of the text, in a word, is irreducible, not only will the phenomenological description have failed but the descriptive 'principle' itself will have been put back into question.
Derrida argues that the irreducibility of textual texture undermines the phenomenological grounding of discourse in original presence, putting at stake the very principle of descriptive adequacy.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Throughout the Second Discourse of Great Seth the speaker uses the first-person singular ('I'), and the speaker identifies himself as Christ. Thus the text presents itself as the discourse of Christ himself.
Meyer identifies the Gnostic 'Second Discourse of Great Seth' as a self-authorizing first-person discourse in which the speaking 'I' constitutes the identity and authority of the text's revelatory voice.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting
When a philosopher such as Pherecydes wrote a book, what was he doing? He was transforming private knowledge into a subject for a public debate similar to that which was becoming established for political matters.
Vernant situates the emergence of philosophical discourse in ancient Greece as the transformation of esoteric knowledge into a public, contestable, politically-structured form of reasoned argument.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
the expression of an 'instantaneous and elusive subjectivity which forms the condition of dialogue', this experience participates in the infra- and the supra-linguistic, or rather in the translinguistic.
Benveniste's late lectures extend discourse theory toward the translinguistic, locating poetic and unconscious subjectivity at the boundary where discourse opens onto what language cannot fully contain.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
it is Socrates who knows it, it is not Alcibiades. Socrates highlights what is in question, he is going to speak about Agathon.
Lacan reads Socrates' post-Alcibiades intervention as an interpretive discourse that reveals what the apparently drunk speaker's speech concealed — the true addressee, Agathon.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015aside
do you remember the task I set you— all the matters you were to discourse upon?
The Timaeus opening frames discourse as an assigned, structured act of philosophical recollection and exposition, situating it within the dialectical economy of Platonic dialogue.
, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside