Penia

the poor Penia, by definition, by structure has properly speaking nothing to give, except her constitutive lack, aporia… “to give what one does not have” literally written there in the form of the development which starting from there Diotima is going to give to the function of love

Lacan argues that Penia’s structural poverty — her aporia — is the ontological ground of love’s paradox: giving what one does not possess, a formula he reads directly from Symposium 202a and installs at the heart of his theory of transference.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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harsh and squalid, barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the naked earth, in the streets and doorways beneath the open sky; and like his mother [Penia] he is always in want.

Hillman cites the Symposium passage on Penia directly as epigraph to his Adlerian chapter, establishing her as the mythic archetype of insufficiency that underlies the psychological imagination of inferiority and need.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis

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The myth of Poros and of Penia is reborn here under the form of spiritual blindness… Orian who confronts her is indeed the one whose gift cannot be accepted precisely because it is superabundance.

Lacan re-animates the Penia–Poros polarity in his reading of Claudel’s drama, showing how the myth of constitutive lack versus superabundant resource structures the impasse of love across literary and clinical registers.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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woman is a hunger (limos) at the heart of the house, installed there forever. She cannot tolerate poverty (penia) and seeks ever more in her craving to be satisfied (koros)

Vernant locates a Hesiodic analogue of Penia in the mythological construction of woman as insatiable want, linking cosmic poverty to gendered hunger and connecting archaic myth to the Platonic figure.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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we have to establish the significance, here, of Poverty and Possession, and show in what way the parentage is appropriate: we have also to bring these two into line with the other Supernals

Plotinus undertakes a philosophical investigation of Penia and Poros as the mythic parents of Eros, seeking to reconcile their allegorical significance with his Neoplatonic hierarchy of hypostases.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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Penia, 47

Neumann’s index entry for Penia at page 47 registers the term’s presence in his developmental schema of consciousness, though without extended elaboration.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019aside

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