Symposium

The Symposium occupies a privileged and irreducible position in the depth-psychological corpus. As Plato’s dramatized banquet on the nature of Eros, it functions simultaneously as philosophical source text and clinical anticipation, providing the tradition with its inaugural sustained meditation on love, desire, and the movement of the soul toward the transcendent. Lacan’s Seminar VIII represents the most sustained psychoanalytic engagement with the dialogue, reading it not as a specimen of ancient philosophy but as the structural precursor to the theory of transference: the speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachos, Aristophanes, and Agathon are treated as graduated articulations of love’s nature, while Alcibiades’ drunken irruption is decoded as the enacted drama of transference-love itself, centering on the concept of the agalma — the hidden, precious object Alcibiades attributes to Socrates. Nussbaum and Hobbs read the Symposium through the lens of Platonic ethics and the soul’s tripartite structure, attending to thumoeidic motivation and the ascent passage. Thomas Moore situates Ficino’s imitation of the Symposium as the Renaissance recovery of soul-discourse. The text’s special significance for depth psychology lies in its staging of a question — what does love want? — that psychoanalysis will later reformulate as the question of desire and its object.

In the library 22 passages

it is precisely the point around which there turns everything that is in question in the Symposium, the point around which there is going to be clarified at the deepest level not so much the question of the nature of love as the question which interests us here, namely, of its relationship with transference

Lacan argues that the Symposium’s decisive contribution is not a theory of love per se but a structural anticipation of transference, with the Alcibiades episode as its pivotal enactment.

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

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as regards this thematic of love to which we have limited ourselves, as it is developed in the Symposium, it would be difficult, for us analysts, not to recognise the bridge, the hand that is stretched out to us in this articulation of the last scenario of the scene of the Symposium, namely what happens between Alcibiades and Socrates

Lacan contends that the Symposium’s closing drama — Alcibiades’ declaration organized around the agalma hidden within Socrates — constitutes a structural prototype that psychoanalysts must take as more than metaphor.

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

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he himself changes the rules of the game by making himself the presiding authority. From that moment on he tells us, it is no longer a question of praising love but the other person and specifically each one is to praise his neighbour on the right

Lacan reads Alcibiades’ restructuring of the symposium’s praise-rules as the moment at which love ceases to be abstract topic and becomes concrete relational act, directly prefiguring the analytic situation.

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

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Remember the extraordinary scene — and try to situate it in our terms — constituted by the public confession of Alcibiades. You should properly sense that there is something here which goes well beyond a pure and simple account of what happened between him and Socrates

Lacan invites his seminar to re-read Alcibiades’ confession as a clinical phenomenon — not biographical anecdote but a structural manifestation of transference whose weight exceeds narrative reporting.

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

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the entry of Alcibiades, to which corresponds the subversion of all the rules of the Symposium, if only because of the following: he comes in drunk

Lacan designates Alcibiades’ intoxicated arrival as a formal rupture in the Symposium’s structure, marking the transition from regulated philosophical discourse to the enacted reality of desire.

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

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there is not a single reflection on love throughout these twenty-four centuries, either among free-thinkers or among priests, there is not a single meditation on love which has not referred to this inaugural text

Lacan affirms the Symposium’s status as the founding text of Western love-discourse, making all subsequent reflection — theological or secular — tributary to it.

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

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agalma, this object which we have learned to circumscribe, to distinguish in analytic experience and around which, the next time, we will try to reconstruct, in its triple topology (of the subject, of the small other and of the big Other), at what point it comes into play

Lacan connects the Symposium’s agalma — the hidden precious object Alcibiades locates in Socrates — to the psychoanalytic object-concept operative in the topology of subject, other, and Other.

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

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When Aristophanes declares that love is the desire of the whole, he expresses a feeling not unlike that of the German philosopher, who says that ‘philosophy is home sickness.’

Jowett’s introduction identifies Aristophanes’ speech as articulating the ontological root of erotic longing — the desire to restore a lost primordial wholeness — anticipating its reception in psychoanalytic theories of lack.

Plato, Symposium, -385supporting

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human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love

Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium defines Eros as the drive to recover an originary unity, a formulation that will resonate throughout depth-psychological accounts of libido, desire, and the death instinct.

Plato, Symposium, -385supporting

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This constituting what is properly speaking the Symposium, namely everything that happens up to this crucial point which, the last time, I pointed out to you should be considered as essential, namely the entry of Alcibiades

Lacan formally delimits the Symposium’s proper domain — the sequence of speeches — against the Alcibiades episode, treating the latter as the text’s decisive structural and clinical turning point.

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

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the properly Socratic discourse, the discourse of episteme, of knowledge transparent to itself, cannot be pursued beyond a certain limit with regard to a particular object, when this object, if indeed it is the one on which Freudian thought has been able to bring new light, this object is love

Lacan argues that the Symposium exposes the constitutive limit of epistemic discourse precisely when love becomes its object, a limit Freudian thought first renders theoretically explicit.

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

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this is how I introduced it three years ago now in my discourse, remember that in order to define the object o of phantasy for you I took the example, in La Grande Illusion by Renoir, of Dalio showing his little automaton

Lacan uses Alcibiades’ public confession in the Symposium as a parallel to the objet a of phantasy, illustrating the structure of a uniquely covetous object made known through the Other.

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

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the Symposium’s enterprise, however, is markedly different. It is a relatively short account of a private dinner party, and the style of its discussion of eros is in keeping with the relaxed surroundings: this is not the time for a technical disquisition on the anatomy of the soul

Hobbs argues that the Symposium’s informal symposiastic setting conditions its mode of psychological inquiry, privileging behavioral and motivational observation over the technical soul-analysis of the Republic.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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Plato’s Symposium was a literary drinking-party at which guests addressed the nature of love. Ficino, a devoted follower of Plato, imitated the Symposium at his own lit

Moore situates the Symposium as the prototype for Ficino’s Platonic Academy gatherings, underscoring its role as the living transmission point for soul-centered love philosophy into Renaissance depth-psychological humanism.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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Alcibiades then insists that they shall drink, and has a large wine-cooler filled, which he first empties himself, and then fills again and passes on to Socrates. He is informed of the nature of the entertainment; and is ready to join, if only in the character of a drunken and disappointed lover he may be allowed to sing the praises of Socrates

The text of the Symposium itself stages Alcibiades’ arrival as the disruption of philosophical form by the reality of frustrated erotic attachment, the scene that anchors psychoanalytic readings of the dialogue.

Plato, Symposium, -385supporting

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if he sets out to seek what he has and does not know about, what he is going to find is what is lacking to him

In the context of his Symposium seminar, Lacan formulates the structure of analytic desire — seeking what one has but does not know — as the clinical correlate of the Platonic account of love as lack.

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

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‘Reason and Eros in the ascent passage of the Symposium’, in J. Anton and G. Kustas, eds., Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Nussbaum’s bibliography cites the ascent passage of the Symposium as a contested crux for understanding the role of reason and erotic motivation in Platonic ethics, indicating the text’s centrality to debates about fragility and rational desire.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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it seems virtually certain that the kind of poetry preserved in the Theognid corpus was composed for performance at the aristocratic drinking party, the symposium

Cairns locates the symposium as the primary social institution for the production and transmission of aristocratic ethical poetry, grounding the Platonic Symposium within a real cultural practice organized around collective speech on virtue and honor.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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curiously, at the precise moment where there reappears for us, in its authentic texts, the Platonic message: the divine agape qua addressing itself to the sinner as such, here is the centre, the heart of the Lutheran position

Lacan traces the historical transformation of the Symposium’s erotic theology — Platonic eros — into Lutheran agape, marking the counter-history of love within which psychoanalysis must locate itself.

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

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three times in this century there have been extraordinary symposia on Feelings and Emotions. The first, the Wittenberg symposium, was held in 1927, and many illustrious psychologists — Alfred Adler, Vladimir Bekhterev, Pierre Janet, Henri Piéron, Karl Bühler — took part

Von Franz uses ‘symposium’ in its modern institutional sense to denote twentieth-century congresses on affect and emotion, invoking the term’s classical heritage only implicitly.

Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013aside

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