Abstract
This commentary examines Lacan’s discussion of the nature of love and its relation to transference. The author investigates why Lacan chose to turn to Plato’s The Symposium, instead of the many psychoanalytic writings available at the time, in his treatment of the topic of transference, and follow the progression of his text with a commentary on the themes it presents: how myth and stories take over where knowledge and discourse fail; how love occupies the shadowy space between them; and how lack itself is the key to being able to love.
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References
Lacan, Jacques. 1957/1958. Unpublished, May 7, 1958, from Seminar V: The Formations of the Unconscious.
———. 2014. Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VX (1962–1963). Translated by A.R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———. 2015. Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and Translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity.
Plato. 2005. The Symposium. Trans. C. Gill and D. Lee. London: Penguin.
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Hewitson, O. (2020). “From Episteme to Mythous”: Commentary on Session VIII. In: Basu Thakur, G., Dickstein, J. (eds) Reading Lacan’s Seminar VIII. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32742-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32742-2_7
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