(https://www.phabriqmedia.com/theory/analogy-of-the-charioteer)
Since its inception, psychoanalysis has been in robust conversation with Greek mythology and philosophy. Modern psychoanalytic theories developed in sustained dialogue with mythology and philosophy, mediated in no small part by Sigmund Freud’s reading of the Greeks. While more contemporary psychoanalysis has largely amended this Freudian dependence on the interpretation of Greek myth and philosophy, the advances made by Freud can contribute in reverse to our understanding of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato’s philosophy of the soul, love, and, by extension, self-identity. In the Phaedrus, Plato constructs a dialogue that stands out from the rest of his work for a number of reasons, among them being the work’s apparently disjointed structure. The first three speeches discuss the theme of erōs, or love, and the concluding dialogue focuses on rhetoric.
A contemporary view advanced by John I. Beare (1913) demonstrates that this is not at all inconsistent and in fact erōs acts as the unifying theme of the Phaedrus. If erōs animates the soul toward philosophy and rhetoric alike, then it must be understood not merely as an incidental theme of the work but as its explanatory principle: the soul pursues truth animated by erōs toward Beauty as the highest, most sensuous idea. Through Socrates’ speeches, Plato describes erōs as both painful and joyous and the soul as self-moving yet does not explain why the reasoning, rational acting part of the soul would be animated by a painful and unsatisfiable longing.
It is not exactly clear when the events of the Phaedrus took place, but scholars agree with some confidence that Plato likely wrote the book between 375 and 365 BCE. This time period is important because it was when Plato was entering the third phase of his philosophical development following his early and middle phases which saw the flourishing of his theory of forms. Some argue that the Phaedrus represents the beginning of a shift away from a doctrinarian view of this theory and toward a general view that exhorts the activity of philosophy as more important than any specific view of philosophy or intellect. In the Phaedrus, Plato advances this outlook by having Socrates take great concern over what should count as proper rhetoric and philosophy, responding to Lysias’s provocative speech on erōs as delivered by Phaedrus. The first provocative speech demonstrates the counterintuitive and untruthful ends to which rhetoric can be put. It paradoxically argues that a young boy should accept a lover who does not love him. Socrates rails against Lysias’s fallacious argument and demonstrates to Phaedrus how rhetoric can be disingenuous. True rhetoric, Socrates argues, must be pursued with regard for the truth and therefore must require philosophy. (Nehamas & Woodruff).
Through Socrates’s two speeches in the Phaedrus, Plato essentially articulates that erōs animates the soul as divine madness in pursuit of Beauty. This argument develops beginning in Socrates’s first speech that explains erōs as “an irrational impulse that overpowers our desire to do what is right and attracts us inescapably to beauty” (Nehamas & Woodruff, xvii). In this first speech, Socrates almost agrees with Lysias, emphasizing the irrational impulses that drive the lover, concluding that erōs is “a kind of madness, and all madness—especially the madness of love—must be avoided at all costs: it will destroy the soul as well as the body” (xviii). Socrates demonstrates that he can make Lysias’s point more effectively and truthfully than the orator, but that fundamentally he has not spoken the truth about erōs. In fact, Socrates says that has blasphemed because “erōs is a god or at least something divine… and cannot therefore be bad in any of the ways his speech has asserted” (xix).
In Socrates’ second speech, Plato articulates the thesis of the Phaedrus: not only is erōs a mechanism for philosophy, but moreover erōs is the animating force of the human soul, exciting it toward Beauty. In brief, this speech explains that in its lowered human plane of existence, the soul experiences moments of beauty that are reminiscent of the Beauty it experienced while it was in the chorus of a god before its descent into its embodied human form. In this experience of recollection, the soul is excited to move toward Beauty by erōs—it is the “force that moves the soul to the Forms” (xl). For Plato, erōs emerges as the motivating force behind the best human life and implies paradoxically that “losing one’s mind is a prerequisite for truly finding it and living according to the values that reason dictates” (xx).
And yet, unlike other madnesses that demonstrate the victory of desire over reason, erōs is “the recollection of Beauty and of the other Forms which… we cannot ever fully possess while we are still embodied… [it] is a… rational desire to understand the ultimate truth about the world” (xxv). In this explanation, there remains a paradoxical relationship to rationality: how can the soul rationally pursue that which it cannot ever fully possess? To this question, John I. Beare argues that erōs exists as the unifying theme of the Phaedrus because it is the explanatory principle of philosophy and rhetoric on account of its intellectual and sensory affect. Eros irrationally distorts the reason of the soul and, in so doing, enables a rational pursuit of the remembrance of true reality.
Still, the Phaedrus stops short of explaining why exactly erōs functions to animate the soul toward Beauty. Plato presents the soul as self-moving and therefore immortal, driven by its tripartite structure with reason steering competing influences of modesty and self-control on the one hand and indecent desire on the other. Through this extended metaphor of the charioteer and the two horses, Plato attributes the soul’s guiding reason to the charioteer—the part of the soul that remembers Beauty. Because of this, the embodied soul constructs its relationship to other people, to itself, and to the activities of philosophy and rhetoric. Beare makes as much clear in his argument that emphasizes the unity of the Phaedrus.
Understanding why the soul longs for Beauty, other than for its own sake (which seems to be the answer implied by Plato) can be elucidated by incorporating the contemporary psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, particularly concepts he develops in “Mourning and Melancholia” that surround object-loss, identification, and incorporation. The essential idea important for the purpose of this paper depends on Freud’s description of melancholia as a mourning disorder that involves the loss of a beloved object around which one unconsciously constructs identity. By putting Freud in conversation with Plato, this paper argues that erōs animates the soul not merely as divine madness, but specifically because the soul is melancholically attached to what it has lost, namely Beauty and true reality; as a form of melancholia, erōs affects the soul unconsciously to steer toward earthly objects reminiscent of that lost Beauty, joyfully and painfully constructing action and identity.
Before analyzing Plato directly, a brief account of the unity of the Phaedrus will establish the connection between the disparate parts of the work and how it develops the connection between erōs as the source of truth with regard to philosophy and rhetoric. John I. Beare argues that the connection between the three speeches in the Phaedrus and the concluding dialogue depends on “the erōs theme, and [that Plato] could, indeed, have chosen none other”, opposing the hypothesis that any principle or idea may have served just as well (Beare, 314). Beare deploys the following logic to prove his thesis, moving from the rhetoric of Lysias through Socrates’ first speech and to the second, demonstrating not only the requisite structure of the Phaedrus, but also the central importance of erōs.
Analyzing the concluding dialogue, Beare synthesizes Socrates’ point that “true rhetoric is based on dialectic” and that dialectic depends on truth seeking (315). False rhetoric is concerned only with persuasion without regard for the truth. Lysias’ speech represents the example of this type of false rhetoric in the Phaedrus. Although dialectic does not appear directly in the first portion of the Phaedrus, Beare argues that it appears implicitly disguised within the mythic structure of the soul’s love for Beauty: Plato identifies the soul’s recollection of true reality that it saw when travelling with god as dialectic (317). If souls “had never seen the truth, they would be unfit inhabitants of the human form… they would be unable to comply with the necessary law of human understanding” that proceeds in dialectic movement from the many to the one (317). So, Beare has it that the implicit principle across the Phaedrus is true rhetoric, which depends on philosophy, which depends on dialectic, which in turn depends on the soul’s recollection of Beauty that manifests as the divine madness that is erōs. Thus, erōs unites the Phaedrus.
This argument, however, hinges on Beauty being the only idea that the soul can recollect from its disembodied heavenly state. The crux of Beare’s argument is that Beauty, unlike other forms, is the only one perceptible by the human eye and therefore sensible to the embodied soul. Unlike other forms, Beauty can be seen and intellectually perceived: “the only idea whose image appeals directly to human sense… unlike…the other ideas” which only dimly affect the intellect, Beauty inspires a sensory and intellectual experience that prompts erōs (320). This account satisfies Beare’s argument to the extent that erōs, inspired by the sensory and intellectual recollection, draws the soul to Beauty and therefore inspires activities of rhetoric and philosophy toward truth. In his conclusion, Beare provides a critical textual analysis for why love of Beauty is the animating force of the soul—because Beauty is “the only idea in which sensibility and intellect have a common and equal concern” (322). But Beare fails to explicate the relationship that erōs has to rationality and why the soul, governed by reason, would cede power to irrational pursuit of that which it cannot obtain.
While Beare focuses on arguing for a unified structure of the Phaedrus thematically, he incidentally engages a conversation about the motivation of the soul. What is the underlying aim of the soul in its pursuit of Beauty? Since erōs drives the soul to pursue Beauty as the most perceptible idea of true reality, it would follow that the goal of the divine madness is to reconnect with the Beauty it had formally possessed. “The soul… existed in the transcendent world before it fell and came by birth into the terrestrial form of humanity… it retains something of its divine original, in virtue of which it has the power of winning its way back to the sphere from which it has descended” (320). It is the remembrance of heavenly Beauty that produces erōs. And it is erōs that, according to Beare’s reading, produces in the embodied soul a perception of that higher heavenly realm of the forms. “The remembrance of the heavenly [Beauty], once excited in the soul, sets this upon the effort to recover its lost inheritance of ideas in general” (321). In this way, the Phaedrus demonstrates the remarkable and particular quality of erōs as that singular form of divine inspiration by which the embodied soul can identify and pursue lost Beauty. And yet, the aspiration of the embodied soul, to reconnect with Beauty, cannot ever be realized.
The embodied soul’s inability to grasp fully and continually Beauty again in its earthly existence creates the painful joy that erōs produces. Plato relates the union of pain and joy to erōs through an extended metaphor describing the regrowth of the soul’s heavenly wings. Socrates’ second speech begins by explaining that every “soul is immortal” and that in its heavenly state it has wings that are nourished by “beauty, wisdom, goodness, and everything of that sort” (Plato, 245C; 246E). Eventually, in the chorus of a god, the soul perceives some of true reality, but through a “terribly noisy, very sweaty, and disorderly” affair many souls “are crippled… many wings break” (248B). In this crippled state, the soul, having glimpsed some of true reality descends into its embodied human life. There, the soul recollects Beauty and is driven to it by erōs, a process that begins the regrowth its wings: through his eyes “the stream of beauty… warms him up and waters the growth of his wings… the whole soul seethes and throbs…[like] a child whose teeth are starting to grow in… when it looks upon the beauty… pain subsides and is replaced by joy” (251B-C). This process depends on both the visual perception of earthly beauty and remembrance of heavenly Beauty.
When the soul separates from Beauty, wing growth reverses, wounds scab over, and the soul’s ascent suspends, its wings’ growth having become painfully blocked. “From the outlandish mix of these two feelings—pain and joy—comes anguish and helpless raving: in its madness the lover’s soul cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes, yearning… to see…that beauty” (251D-E). This provides the basis of the pain and joy associated with erōs: the pursuit of Beauty cannot ever fully realize the regrowth of the soul’s wings and therefore the ascent of the soul. In other words, the joy experienced by perceiving beauty coexists alongside the pain of a desire that cannot be permanently satisfied.
This oscillation between pain and joy, between perception of and separation from beauty, describes Plato’s account of divine madness, the highest form of which is erōs. This divine madness at once animates and wounds the soul. Erōs, as divine madness, becomes rational yet irrational. Still, Plato describes erōs as the noblest form that all divine possession can take: “that which someone shows when he sees the beauty we have down here and is reminded of true beauty” (249D). By the pursuit of Beauty, erōs animates the soul in a heavenly ascent, yet tortures the soul in its unsatisfactory nature because the embodied soul cannot return to the heavenly state from where it came.
Plato clarifies the uncommon quality of this experience: “only a few [souls] remain whose memory is good enough…[to be] startled when they see an image of what they saw up there” (250A). Those souls that saw enough of true reality, that have good enough memory, experience erōs as divine madness, goading them toward the beauty that exists on earth. “This is the experience we humans call love” (252B). Through Socrates’ second speech, Plato establishes erōs as a painful and joyous occasion of divine madness that animates the soul to pursue the reminiscence of the Beauty it lost in its descent from heaven.
The theme of erōs develops alongside Plato’s conception of the tripartite soul. Plato famously describes the three parts as comprised of a charioteer that steers two horses. The charioteer drives the soul by reining the horses—one inclined toward self-control, the other toward excess and desire—to direct the ascent of the embodied soul to truth. This “natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer” works together across the soul’s embodied earthly existence and disembodied heavenly state (246B). Prior to its descent, the soul “that follows a god most closely… raises the head of its charioteer up to the place outside,” and, though “distracted by the horses, [it has] a view of Reality” (248A). It is thus the charioteer that has glimpsed true reality and, in particular, Beauty. The disembodied soul perceives the reality of the forms before its embodied human existence through the charioteer part of its tripartite structure: gaining reason by glimpsing true reality.
According to Plato, the soul’s immortality derives from its self-movement. If “whatever is always in motion is immortal”, then the immortality of the soul depends on the motion of the two horses steered by reason (245C). The self-motion of the soul articulates itself internally dependent on the charioteer’s perception of reality. But what animates the charioteer and does it necessarily act rationally? While Plato never explicitly ascribes rationality to the charioteer in the Phaedrus, he describes the soul as proceeding “to bring many perceptions into a reasoned unity. That process is the recollection of the things our soul saw when it was traveling with god” (249C). Recollection, therefore, governs the self-movement of the soul. Specifically, the charioteer’s recollection produces the soul’s ability to assimilate the many human perceptions into a reasoned unity. It is the part of the soul that recollects reality and confronts beauty with its ability to “to pull the reins back so fiercely that both horses are set on their haunches” (254C). The charioteer responds to stimuli reminiscent of true reality and guides the soul rationally by reason, dictating the movement of the soul in its pursuit of truth.
Though driving the soul by reason, the charioteer saw Beauty and thus also experiences erōtic madness that prevents the soul from acting with complete rationality. The tension that Plato creates within the soul exists only within the charioteer: the tension between perception of true reality as the source of reason and erōs, the longing for heavenly Beauty that strains rational action. This tension is internal to the reason of the charioteer, recognizing beauty in the world and being called to pursue it as it recollects a Beauty which it cannot possess. Erōs names the condition of rational longing for the unattainable, marked by both pain and joy. The consequence of the tension that erōs inspires dictates the movement of the embodied soul. Because of erōs, the soul is steered to honor “the god in whose chorus he danced” and to emulate “that god in every way he can,” to choose “love after his own fashion from among… [the] beautiful… adorning… an image to honor and worship” (252E).
Separated from the Beauty it once knew, the reason of the charioteer depends not only on recollection but also on loss—the loss of heavenly Beauty once perceived. The charioteer directs the soul toward images that approximate that lost true reality. Plato thus constructs erōs as that which rationally distorts reason so that the soul’s embodied life can be lived in response to the loss of true reality, driven by divine madness in remembrance of that which cannot be fully and completely recovered.
In his seminal essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud distinguishes between healthy mourning and pathological melancholia. This is a distinction that will prove useful for interpreting the underlying motivation of the soul’s charioteer through a psychoanalytic lens. Freud describes mourning as a “reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as… an ideal” (Freud, 243). Exhibiting the same basic structure, melancholia’s “exciting causes are different… one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind” (245). Unlike mourning, in which the loss of the loved person or object is consciously recognized as final, melancholia involves an object that “has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love” and which cannot be consciously perceived as lost (245). This unconscious misunderstanding of what has been lost may reflect back to the subject “in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (245). Freud characterizes melancholia as an unconscious object-loss that obscures the relationship between the subject and the lost object. As an interpretive lens, Freud can demonstrate why love, loss, and identity remain bound together despite the unconscious experience of loss.
As important for the purposes of this paper as the causes of mourning and melancholia are their effects. Freud describes healthy mourning as a process in which “the loved object no longer exists,” and the subject withdraws “from its attachments to that object…bit by bit” until “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (245). By contrast, the effects of melancholia involve much more pain and suffering. The melancholic self-denigrates, associating the external object-loss with an internal “loss in regard to his ego” (247).
To abbreviate a much more thorough analysis of this pathology: Freud essentially explains that the energy expended in loving the object, once confronted with its loss, serves unconsciously for the melancholic “to establish an identification of the ego with the [lost] object” (249). This explains the pathological aspect of melancholia whereby the subject cannot properly relinquish the lost object because the ego identifies with it and has incorporated it into itself.
This identification produces the central paradox of melancholia: the lost object is at once hated externally for its absence and loved internally through its incorporation into the ego. Once lost, the beloved object becomes constitutive of the subject’s identity: “the ego wants to incorporate this object into itself” (249). In paradoxical fashion, the persistence of love depends on the persistence of the lost object. The beloved object becomes identified with the ego by virtue of its loss: “identification is the expression of there being something in common” between the ego and the object, between love and loss (250). This analysis contributes to a pathological description of melancholia whereas healthy mourning can re-establish love beyond and by relinquishing the lost object. Freud describes this pathology as narcissistic identification. Although pathological in Freud’s clinical framework, the melancholic constitution nevertheless reveals a structure by which loss perpetuates love and vice versa, contributing to identity formation through incorporation of the lost object. This structure offers a frame for understanding how the ego may be animated by an unconsciously experienced loss and so interpret Plato’s conception of erōs as that which animates the soul’s charioteer.
The unconscious loss experienced in melancholia illuminates how the descent of the soul from heaven into embodied existence perverts its ability to understand Beauty consciously. When the soul encounters something reminiscent of heavenly Beauty and a becomes enthralled by erōs, recollection of Beauty acts upon the embodied soul without conscious perception of what is recalled. Human experience of erōs is “beyond their comprehension because they cannot fully grasp what it is that they are seeing” (Plato, 250A). Because this recollection cannot be consciously apprehended as the perception of lost heavenly Beauty, erōs appears not as a rational pursuit of true reality but as a form of divine madness.
Freud’s account of melancholia provides an interpretive basis for understanding erōs as melancholic longing. Beauty and the forms represent the true “ideal” of reality that is “lost as an object of love” when the soul descends to its embodied existence (Freud, 245). Still, the soul remains unconsciously oriented toward the true reality of the lost heavenly realm. Having descended, the soul cannot perceive Beauty itself but recollects it in earthly beauty: it “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” (245). Erōs therefore manifests as unconscious longing for that which the soul cannot perceive. This leaves only “divine madness” to describe that which drives the soul to recollect an ideal that it cannot but faintly recall. Erōs thus emerges not as some divinely inspired madness, but as a recollection of a loss that is structurally inaccessible to human consciousness.
The soul’s charioteer metabolizes the loss of Beauty and true reality into erōs—a divine madness driven by the unity of loss and love—by which the soul identifies with the lost object. Erōs animates the soul toward Beauty because the reasoning part of the soul identifies itself with lost Beauty. The charioteer alone had “a view of Reality” but, “weighed down” by its soul that could not keep up with the god it followed, “sheds its wings and falls to earth” (Plato, 248A-C). Plato figures this fall as the origin of the soul’s embodiment and as the defining loss: the soul’s failure to remain in the divine chorus.
Freud describes a similar process in melancholia, wherein the subject, unable to relinquish the lost object, “establishes an identification of the ego with the [lost] object” (Freud, 249). Through this identification, love persists not by regaining the object, but by incorporating it into the ego. In a melancholic manner, the charioteer internalizes the loss of Beauty and organizes the experiences of the embodied soul around that loss, tracking “down their god’s true nature with their own resources because of their driving need to gaze at god” (Plato, 253A). Though the soul cannot gaze at the god from whose chorus it descended, it is nevertheless steered by the reason toward earthly beauty reminiscent of the lost heavenly Beauty. In this way, the embodied soul identifies itself in relation to external objects that most recall its lost beloved object: Beauty and true reality. By this account, erōs becomes further clarified as the charioteer’s melancholic persistence to be animated toward Beauty by identification with an idealized object that the soul once beheld in its disembodied divine existence.
The joy and pain that Plato describes as inseparable from the experience of erōs highlights the paradox by which identity is formed and incorporated into the soul. The melancholic identifies with the lost object and incorporates that identification internally, continuing to love on the basis of what has been lost. Those souls “who followed Zeus, for example, choose someone to love who is a Zeus himself” (252E). Having lost the ability to follow in its god’s chorus, the soul loves according to its heavenly loss. Erōs animates the soul precisely by a love that bears the trace of its loss. This paradox explains the emotional confusion erōs inspires: the “outlandish mix of these two feelings—pain and joy” reflects the pain of loss bound together with the joy of love (251D). And as the embodied soul strives toward Beauty, the paradox redoubles: the joy in love cannot ever fully be recovered, inspiring a pain that confronts its heavenly fall and the impossibility of its total recovery. Yet the soul nevertheless chases the beauty of god, inspired to “take their god’s path” and seek experiences that resemble the reminiscence of Beauty (253B).
The soul, remaining “in touch with the god by memory” is “inspired by him” to “adopt his customs and practices” (253A). Erōs may then be described as an irrational influence that reason permits because it is unsatisfiable yet constructive in its futility: though fulfillment is impossible, erōs encourages the regrowth of the soul’s wings, sustaining the soul’s orientation toward ascent, even if that ascent cannot be accomplished in embodied existence (251B-C). In this way, erōs describes divinely inspired melancholia that constructs a soul constituted by love of irrevocable loss.
Through this analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus, erōs emerges as more than the theme that unifies philosophy and rhetoric, but as the animating force of the soul that participates in the formation of identity. While such a reading could be derived from plain text interpretation of Plato’s work alone, Freud helps clarify why this move to identity formation occurs. The soul is driven by erōs not merely because of divine inspiration, but because the soul is marked by a particular condition of unresolved loss—a melancholic orientation toward that which it once possessed, lost, and can no longer consciously remember. Erōs calls the soul persistently to pursue its most beloved lost object: the Beauty and true reality that it once beheld in its disembodied state and toward which it remains oriented.
Yet “melancholia,” with the Freudian clinical connotation as an excessively depressed and pathological condition, may not finally be the most fitting term. Though erōs bears striking structural resemblance to melancholia, perhaps it would be more appropriate to write erōs as a sort of lovesickness, or maybe even homesickness: an intense yet unsatisfiable desire to be at home with one’s beloved. In the severe anguish of erōtic madness, the soul yearns to return to the chorus of its god, to recover those fleeting glimpses of true reality that once defined its being. And yet that aim cannot be realized. Instead, this erōs—whether named melancholia, lovesickness, or homesickness—acquires a productive quality for the embodied soul. It is precisely the impossibility of fulfillment that gives erōs its formative power: a divine inspiration that drives the soul toward Beauty, creating experiences and forming identity in pursuit of an unattainable true reality.
The conclusion, then, though it risks sounding trivial, is nevertheless a serious one: one ought to attend to what moves the soul most deeply. From Plato to Freud and back again, the divine madness that animates the soul’s most impassioned activity signals a reminiscent perception of the Beauty that was lost in its descent into embodiment. Despite what Freudian analysis may reveal as the soul’s essentially sad disposition, namely, that it cannot perceive the futility of its erōtic attempt to regain the transcendent Beauty of its lost heavenly home, solace exists in appreciating that it erōs, love, inspires the embodied soul to become more truly divine and as at home in its wandering as it may ever be. To live by erōs, then, is not simply to be inspired by the divine, but to live faithfully to the constitutive loss that forms the embodied soul into what it may become.
References:
Barnes, Hazel E. 1946. “Plato and the Psychology of Love: Phaedrus 252c-253c.” The Classical Weekly 40 (5): 34–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/4342266.
Beare, John I. “THE ‘PHAEDRUS’: ITS STRUCTURE; THE ἜΡΩΣ THEME: NOTES.” Hermathena 17, no. 39 (1913): 312–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23037048.
Demos, Raphael. 1968. “Plato’s Doctrine of the Psyche as a Self-Moving Motion.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (2): 133–46. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.1968.a229546.
Freud, Sigmund. 1917. “Mourning and Melancholia.” ed. James Strachey and trans. Joan Riviere. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14:237-258
Griswold, Charles L. 1996. Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Hollywood, Amy. 2006. “Acute Melancholia.” The Harvard Theological Review 99 (4): 381–406. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816006001325.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated with introduction and notes by Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.
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In previous PEL episodes, issues broached here in Plato’s Phaedrus and Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia have been covered by our very own Wes Alwan, Mark Linsenmeyer, and Dylan Casey.
You can learn more about issues of the soul, love, and madness here:
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