The inequalities of love – Plato’s symposium, Freud and Lacan

Lacan reads Plato’s Symposium as an account of a psychoanalysis (Lacan, SVIII 1960-61). In this paper, I read Freud’s account of a psychoanalysis of a homosexual woman (Freud, 1920) to illustrate Lacan’s conceptualisation of transference as elaborated through his reading of The Symposium. In his seminar of 8th February 1961, Lacan said that ‘the gods of antiquity did not shilly-shally … they knew that they could only reveal themselves to men in the rock of scandal, in the agalma of something which violates all the rules … it is in this sense that I say that Alcibiades is the demon of Socrates.’ I suggest that Freud’s text is a love story gone wrong and that Sidonie Csillag (Freud’s Female Homosexual of 1920) is Freud’s ‘demon’.