| This dissertation uses Plato's Symposium, his primary dialogue on love, to critique Freud's theory of love and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. While Plato's psychology preserves the integrity of peak experiences such as the love of the Beautiful and the love of the Good, Freud sees such experiences as an illusory superstructure, unmasking their bodily and mechanical foundations. Each speaker in the Symposium delivers a speech about Eros capturing the experience of love at some level of metaphysical ascent.; Aristophanes, a comic poet, captures what men and women actually feel when they embrace one another. From his account, Plato abstracts the quality of longing for wholeness. Freud concretizes that longing, tracing it to the human mother. Phaedrus, the first speaker in the Symposium, sees the avoidance of shame as a source of ascension toward nobility. By contrast, the psychoanalyst sees shame as the deeper reality underlying the facade of narcissism. Pausanias' speech brings the problem of reason verses rationalization to the fore. While Plato sees reason (and even rationalization) as something that can elevate the human soul, Freud has no clear model of reason or thinking, seeing humans as driven primarily by irrational forces. During Agathon's speech, Socrates opens the debate between fleeting and more lasting ways of evaluating oneself. The psychoanalytic stance of value neutrality can leave the therapist at a loss when such discernment and judgment becomes necessary for the patient. As patients become more reliant on genuine wisdom as a source of self-evaluation, the expression of their love ascends toward greater refinement. When Alcibiades crashes the party attempting to seduce Socrates, Socrates refuses his advances, demonstrating his preference for the sublimity of philosophical Eros over carnal expression. His example offers a positive recommendation for reflection rather than the negative prohibition against sex in the therapeutic setting. |
