The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2018

© 2018 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/18

www.palgrave.com/journals

GOOD AND BAD: LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM

PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

David Stromberg1

Melanie Klein’s theories on love outline a complex system of relations—an oscillating dynamic
of psychical and emotional tendencies following from both actual experience and fantasies
produced by the mind. Her insights are often discussed and applied in psychoanalytical con-
texts, but the philosophical implications of her theory—especially in relation to Platonic
thought—have rarely been discussed. In this article, I will attempt to address this gap by setting
out some preliminary yet core considerations shared by both Plato and Klein. First, I will
describe some structural parallels between Kleinian and Platonic thought, especially in
dialectical terms. Second, I will outline Plato’s covert influence on Freud as passing through the
teachings of philosopher Franz Brentano. And last, I will discuss intimacy as a struggle between
the forces of good and bad, creativity and destruction, and love and hate—suggesting that
Klein’s conception of love emerges as a moral exigency.

KEY WORDS: Klein; Plato; Freud; phenomenology; intimacy

https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-018-9136-7

GOOD AND BAD

Melanie Klein is often discussed in contexts that pair her with other
psychoanalytical theorists, yet when discussing the philosophical implica-
tions of her theory, her thought has at times been compared to Plato. In
Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva (2004) notes that “Klein’s notion of the object
always-already-there” is related to “Platonic solipsism, on the being-in-the-
world as an in-between, as an appearance-to-other-people within the
bounds of the polis, in Aristotle’s sense” (p. 254). Wilfred Bion raises a
related point in Transformations (1965), where in a discussion of pre-
determination he expresses an intent to “borrow freely any material that is
likely to simplify [his] task, starting with Plato’s theory of Forms,” and even

David Stromberg, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Fellow, Literary Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Israel.
Address correspondence to David Stromberg, Ph.D.; email: david.stromberg@mail.huji.ac.il
 STROMBERG

“claim[s] Plato as a supporter for the pre-conception, the Kleinian internal

object, the inborn anticipation” (p. 138). Bion notes that “Klein objected in
conversation” to his connecting her to Plato—yet he insists that while “it
may be difficult to produce evidence” for this connection, it still “seems to
[him] to be useful” (p. 138). The impression is given, in both cases, that
Platonic concepts are presented as a convenient way of offering philo-
sophical analogs for psychoanalytical phenomena. But the link may
indicate more than mere conceptual convenience.
At first glance, these comparisons seem arbitrary, and the evidence
difficult to produce. But I suggest that the usefulness of Platonic thought in
understanding Klein is not incidental—it is built into the Freudian concepts
that Klein developed—and further suggest that it is possible to produce both
textual and contextual evidence to delineate this connection. To do so, I
will offer some textual evidence to describe structural parallels between
Kleinian and Platonic thought, especially in terms of their theories of
psychical dynamics in works on love. I will also trace Plato’s covert
influence on Freud as passing through the teachings of philosopher Franz
Brentano, discussing how the structure of Platonic thought entered into
Aristotelian concepts that later passed into Freudian psychoanalysis. And
last, I will discuss love and intimacy in Kleinian philosophical terms, as a
struggle between the forces of good and bad, creativity and destruction, and
love and hate—suggesting that Klein’s conception of love emerges not only
as a dynamic system of relations but also as a moral exigency. This
discussion is part of a larger project titled “Idiot Love: Mutual Destruction
and Constructive Union,” employing concepts from literature, philosophy,
and psychoanalysis to explore literary portrayals of relational breakdown
(Stromberg 2018). By focusing on some of the links between Plato and Klein
in this article, I hope to also open up a broader discussion of the humanistic
significance of Kleinian thought.
Klein’s theories on object relations outline a dynamic complex system of
emotional and ideational phenomena (See “Love, Guilt, and Reparation”
[1937] and “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” [1946]). For her, love is
just one among a variety of psychical elements experienced and expressed
in relation to oneself and to others, issuing from both external stimulation
and from fantasies produced within the mind. In describing the psychical
mechanisms that regulate this complex system, she focuses especially on
the concepts of splitting and integration. In “Schizoid Mechanisms,” she
suggests that splitting mechanisms are “of vital importance for normal
development as well as for abnormal object relations” (Klein, 1946, p. 169).
Splitting, she suggests, is closely associated with infant fantasies, which she
calls “imaginative thinking” (Klein, 1937, p. 61), influencing the infant’s
relation to its mother. These relations oscillate, she says, between anxiety
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

when it is hungry (aggression and the death instinct) and satisfaction when it
is fed (reparative love and the life instinct). The unconscious internal
splitting of these complex emotional dynamics into “bad” and “good”
directly affects the external relation between the subject and its object
relations. So an anxious infant can assign the motivation for its fear of death
to its mother, making her into a bad object, or a satisfied infant can come to
believe that the mother has entered inside itself and will rest there forever,
making her into a good object. Through internal cycles of introjection2 and
projection—first splitting perceptions of behavior of a single person into
separate good or bad objects, and later integrating these perceptions into
complex relations with a single person—external relations are established
between people.
A significant aspect of Klein’s theory is the dynamic character of
psychical mechanisms and processes regulating internalization and exter-
nalization of emotions and fantasies. Her theory links human relations in the
external world with internal psychical mechanisms—on the one hand, the
cognitive splitting of perceived phenomena as either “good” or “bad,” and,
on the other hand, the emotional integration of these disparate perceptions
into relations with a single object. The ability to oscillate between these
two, to split and integrate perceptions of “good” and “bad,” leads to the
development of both emotional and cognitive capacities needed for mature
human relations. And while Klein never uses the word “intimacy,” her
theory of object relations in actuality refers to relationships between people,
suggesting that object relations is a conceptual frame in which to discuss
intimacy, a mode of relation which can be both “good” or “bad.” In this
sense, intimacy describes the circumstances under which object relations
take place, where complex emotional dynamics are expressed and
experienced both within people and between them, incorporating both
internal and external perception of the self and of the other. The field of
possibilities that Klein describes—outlining different relational elements
within object relations alongside the processes and mechanisms that
regulate those relational elements—is what I refer to as Klein’s complex
system of relations.3
Klein’s system of relations includes both internal and external processes,
and comprises relations both with and between oneself and the other.
Within her dynamic system, guilt plays a role by driving us to repair the
damage, real or imagined, caused by our innate aggression. She argues that
an overabundance of aggression directs our impulses towards destruction,
while an overabundance of guilt inhibits our impulses. This inhibition also
generates imagined fears that, in turn, generate more aggression. If guilt is
alleviated just enough to release our impulses, but fears are not lessened at
the same time, these impulses are again directed toward destruction. Relief
 STROMBERG

and correction involve moving unconscious mechanisms into conscious

expression. For her, the act of reparation can mean making conscious efforts
to relieve the guilt we feel about our inherent aggression using thought and
action directed toward both the self and the other. This way, reparation can
direct our internal impulses back toward creativity. For our creative
impulses to remain dominant, a kind of calibration involving aggression and
guilt has to constantly take place. The right measure of guilt, combined with
release from imagined fears, is the way to direct impulses away from
destructive aggression and instead toward creativity. And she maintains that
these kinds of early relational schemes manifest themselves in various ways
throughout our lives both as children and as adults—influencing our
expression of creative or destructive impulses.
When allowed to develop properly, this complex system of relations—
with its splitting and integration of mental and emotional perceptions, and
its projecting and introjecting processes of internalization and externaliza-
tion—generates a capacity to oscillate between good and bad perceptions
of the self and of the other. It helps people, both children and adults,
communicate with one another and allows for mental and emotional
distinctions, as well as connections, between self and other. Yet, as Klein
also points out, the same psychical mechanisms needed for cognitive and
emotional maturity can also be responsible, depending on both external and
internal factors, for pathology in human relations. The ambiguity of these
mechanisms—especially, Klein suggests, the tendency in splitting toward
“ideational contents” rather than “affect,” which more closely characterizes
integration—makes “particular demands” on establishing “intellectually
clear… links between the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious”
(Klein, 1937, p. 177). That is, to navigate these complex psychical
mechanisms, which lead as quickly to pathology as to normality in human
relations, it is helpful to have a clear intellectual understanding of the links
between different aspects of the human psyche and how they affect human
relations.
In tracing this movement from unconscious mechanisms to conscious
thought and feeling, from emotional cognition to ideational content, Klein
highlights interactions between affect and intellect. She emphasizes the
need to develop language and concepts about the psyche in order to
negotiate it in reality—revealing links between the therapeutic implications
of her theory and the underlying intellectual value of her work, and bringing
psychoanalysis in touch with philosophy. In considering these philosophical
aspects, we could, like Kristeva (2004, p. 254) or Bion (1965, p. 138), look
to Plato as a convenient figure, conceptually illustrating those mechanisms
that Klein suggests work within the psychical realm. We could be satisfied
with saying that by describing a dynamic system with opposing elements—
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

good and bad, love and hate, normality and pathology—her theory recalls
Platonic dialectics.4 Yet if we examine this theoretical comparisons more
closely, we discover not only that Platonic dialectics are “useful” in
explaining splitting and integration, but that these concepts are themselves
already present in Plato’s description of the building blocks of dialectics—
suggesting that these philosophically theoretical concepts also have
emotional and psychical significance.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes the art of dialectics as an oscillating
dynamic between “collecting” and “dividing” (Plato, trans. 2005, p. 51). He
says that collection (συναγωγῶν) is “perceiving together and bringing into
one form items which are scattered,” and that division (διαιρέσεων) is the
ability to “cut up whatever [the thing] is… according to its natural joints” (p.
50).5 In this dialogue, the capacity for properly collecting and dividing is of
paramount significance to both cognitive and expressive abilities. Socrates
actually calls anyone who has the “natural capacity” to collect and divide
properly “experts in dialectic” and attributes to this capacity his very ability
“to speak and to think” (p. 51). This description provides a philosophical foil
for Klein’s splitting and integration: oscillation between opposing elements,
the need for splitting expertly, the equal need for perceiving scattered
elements as a whole form, and the importance of these capacities for
speaking and thinking—which, by implication, influence one’s relations
with others. Socrates actually draws a direct link between love and speech,
urging Phaedrus to “direct his life towards love accompanied by talk of a
philosophical kind” (p. 39), suggesting that the manifestation of Eros—as
love or the life instinct—depends on the ability to expertly deploy the art of
dialectics, or the capacity of splitting and integration. His further claim that
“the power of speech is in fact a leading of the soul” (p. 58) provides
philosophical context for Klein’s call to draw “intellectually clear” links
between the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, exploring them
intellectually to develop language and concepts that describe the ways that
mental and emotional mechanisms function within the psyche, and in
human relations.
The relevance of Platonic dialectics, as discussed in the Phaedrus, to
Kleinian splitting and integration is found in another aspect of dialectics
discussed by Plato in his second canonical text on love: the Symposium
(Plato, trans. 2008, c. 384–380 BCE).6 In that dialogue, Socrates recounts a
speech by Diotima, a priestess and wise woman, whom he quotes as
chiding him as a young philosopher. “When you yourself admit that Love is
not good and not beautiful,” Socrates quotes her having said to him, “that is
no reason for thinking [Love] has to be ugly and bad. [Love] is something
between the two” (Plato, trans. 2008, p. 38). Diotima expresses a dynamic
rather than static conception of love, incorporating a capacity for
 STROMBERG

complexity, and focusing not on the mechanism of splitting that is present in

thinking and speaking, and which calls love either bad or good, but the
ambiguity and tension created by the concurrence of both attributes, the
need to integrate opposing perceptions of a single object into a complex
whole. The Platonic notion of love as being “in between”—in the oscillation
between splitting and integration to perceive the relational object as both
good and bad—is essential to Klein’s theory of object relations and her
notion of reparative love. Her lesson to young psychoanalysts, like
Diotima’s lesson to the young philosopher, is that the good and bad parts
of love cannot be separated. Instead a capacity must be developed, using
the tools of the intellect, to conceive of them as existing simultaneously in
the mental and emotional space “between.”
Kleinian discourse thus describes, in unconscious or psychical terms,
capacities that Plato describes in conscious philosophical terms—between
“collection and division” or “splitting and integration.” This parallel is
present in the dialectical nature of love as being “between” objects in
tension, which in Klein appears as her complex system of relations. Klein
thus extends our understanding of the dialectical capacity beyond its
conscious intellectual function and shows its unconscious psychical
implications. For Socrates, dividing or splitting helps us understand ideal
forms of perceived phenomena, while collecting or integrating helps us
perceive their appearance in the world. For Klein, the mechanisms of
splitting and integration regulate our perception and communication of
conflicting emotions and fantasies—good and bad, love and hate, anxiety
and satisfaction. Just as Socrates warns against dividing up perceived
phenomena “like an inexpert butcher” (Plato, trans. 2005, p. 50), so Klein
warns that, when deployed inexpertly, splitting can lead to psychical,
behavioral, and relational pathology—for example by experiencing one’s
own aggression as caused by the badness of an other (Klein, 1946, p. 183).
Klein’s system of relations, like Plato’s theory of forms, is a complex
theoretical construct that incorporates both the separate mechanisms of
splitting and integration, and their constant oscillation, to describe the
dynamics of human relations. Her portrayal of relations as oscillating
between perceptions of good and bad aligns itself with Diotima’s claim that
love is “between” good and bad, in a way that reveals parallel modes of
thought rather than ideas or concepts. By refusing to collapse the experience
of love into a single good or bad tendency, emphasizing the inherent
tensions between, her theory promotes a conception of love as an active
negotiation between opposing tendencies. It suggests that love is both and
neither, each in turn and all at once, and that negotiating the object
relations found in intimacy involves developing a capacity for a Platonic
form of dialectical thinking.
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

In both Plato and Klein, we find repeated application of splitting and

integration, and a consistent preoccupation with the need to examine their
origins, directions, and the dynamics “in between”—which influence our
emotional and cognitive states. The centrality of Plato’s notion of love as “in
between” rather than a single emotion, and its relevance to psychoanalytic
theory, is evinced by Jacques Lacan’s examination of the Symposium in his
seminar on transference, where he emphasizes that “love, according to the
Platonic term, is metaxu, ‘between the two’” (Lacan, 1960–1961, p. 112).
Lacan explored the resonance between Plato and psychoanalysis directly,
through a thematic analysis of the Symposium, but he included no structural
or historical contextualization for his comparison. Klein’s theory, on the
other hand, covertly reveals structural similarities with the form of thinking
that Diotima teaches, expressing conceptual frameworks found in the
Symposium in psychoanalytical terms—as emotional and cognitive mech-
anisms. I argue that in this case, too, the appearance of Plato is more than
serendipitous. It is built into the philosophical foundations of the Freudian
concepts that psychoanalytical theorists like Klein and Lacan channeled and
developed in their own work.7

PLATO IN FREUDIAN THEORY

The intellectual connection between Freud and Plato has been firmly
established in recent decades.8 But few works explore the contextual
circumstance of Sigmund Freud’s philosophical studies, or the debt that his
philosophical education owes to Franz Brentano, the German philosopher
and psychologist credited with reintroducing intentionality and setting the
groundwork for both Freudian and Husserlian concepts.9 This may be due
in part to Freud’s continuous minimizing of the influence that philosophy
had on his ideas (Kelman, 1965, p. 197). In spite of Freud’s eventual denials,
the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy has its roots in
Freud’s own early interest in philosophy, which began even before
commencing his medical education. Although the requirement to take a
philosophy course had been dropped, Freud nevertheless attended philo-
sophical lectures from 1874 to 1875, given by the eminent Viennese
philosopher Franz Brentano, a noted Aristotle scholar at the University of
Vienna. Freud wrote to his boyhood friend, Eduard Silberstein in 1875:
“under Brentano’s fruitful influence I have arrived at the decision to take my
Ph.D. in philosophy and zoology” (Appelbaum, 2013, p. 117). Brentano’s
earliest major works—On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862)
and The Psychology of Aristotle (1867)—were published in the decade
before Freud entered the University of Vienna. Freud audited five lecture
 STROMBERG

courses given by Brentano during his studies, among them a course on

Aristotelian logic (Askay and Farquhar, 2006, p. 20). Freud also read
Brentano’s Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint (1874), in which
“Brentano specifically discussed Plato’s pioneering efforts in the funda-
mental classification of mental phenomenon” (Askay and Farquhar, 2006,
p. 59). This suggests, among other things, that the presence of Platonic
methods and Aristotelian concepts in Freud’s theory might be more than
coincidence. His appropriation of their symbols and constructs—from
Oedipus, to catharsis, to the tripartite structure of the soul—may be more
than a mere matter of convenience. Freud was not merely exploiting
generally recognizable ideas and traditions, recruited and redefined to
develop his own psychoanalytical discourse. Rather, these concepts and
methods were tapping into a lifelong engagement with Aristotle and Plato
by a teacher who greatly influenced Freud’s intellectual development. It
seems that Freud may not have been fully conscious of the extent of this
influence (Askay and Farquhar, 2006, p. 60).10 But its traces remain in the
concepts that Freud introduced.
Chief among these is the Oedipus Complex, a core Freudian concept
describing a pivotal stage of psychological maturation and repeating itself in
various ways from childhood into adulthood. Yet Oedipus was central to
another seminal theory—Aristotle’s Poetics (trans. 1987) and the surviving
theory of tragedy, which also included the notion of catharsis appropriated
by Freud.11 While the concepts themselves are Aristotelian, they describe,
in literary terms, phenomena that relate to philosophical problems raised in
Plato. This connection is established in the opening of the Poetics when
Aristotle includes the “Socratic dialogues” within his category of “literary
representation,” (trans. 1987, p. 2) which problematizes Socrates’s so-called
banishment of the imitative poet in the Republic (Plato, trans. 2000) and
serves as a warning against reading Plato too literally. But there is a deeper
link between Aristotle’s Poetics and Plato—suggested by an enigmatic and
significant sentence at the very end of the Symposium.
The sentence in question appears in a scene that takes place some time
after everyone has gone home. Aristodemus, repeatedly waking and
sleeping, says he remembers in general terms that “Socrates was pressing
[Agathon and Aristophanes] to agree that writing comedy required the same
qualities in an author as writing tragedy, and [that] the true tragic poet was a
comic poet also” (Plato, trans. 2008, p. 63). The fact that the Symposium
ends in an unreported Socratic discourse on the poetics of comedy and
tragedy should be enough to give us pause. It suggests a connection
between this missing discourse and the Poetics, where Aristotle addresses a
similar topic: pointing out that Homer had the ability to compose both epics
and lampoons, literary forms he says evolved into the “greater and more
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

honorable” forms of tragedy and comedy (Aristotle, trans. 1987, p. 5). But
Aristotle adds that neither Homer, nor any of the composers that developed
tragedy and comedy, were ever able to combine the two forms into
tragicomedy. Indeed, though never relating their argument to Aristotle,
Kevin Corrigan and Elena Glazov-Corrigan argue that Plato “aspires to such
an art” and suggest that “the Symposium is itself the ‘missing argument,’ the
embodiment of just such a tragicomedy… but in a new literary-philosoph-
ical form” (Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan, 2004, p. 217). The link between
the Symposium as “an indirect enactment of philosophical tragicomedy” (p.
218), and the Poetics as a discourse on the forms of tragedy, comedy, and
satire, brings to the fore the influence of Plato’s literary art on Aristotelian
theory—and the possibility that Aristotle was giving voice to methods that
were used but not articulated by Plato.
Since Freud studied philosophy with a leading Aristotelian, and
Aristotle’s Poetics includes several direct precursors to Freudian concepts,
the echoes between Freudian and Platonic methods warrant a closer
consideration. One of the core methodological elements that Freud shares
with Plato is an emphasis on speech. In Freud (2005), Jonathan Lear, himself
a distinguished Aristotelian, offers an evaluation of Freud’s achievements
from a philosophical perspective, remarking that “[p]sychoanalytic conver-
sation is meant to bring about a fundamental change in the structure of the
psyche” so that “[w]here once there was psychic division and conflict, there
is now creative and vibrant communication between id, ego and superego”
(Lear, 2005, pp. 173, 222). The method of such a change is discourse and
dialogue, speech and intercourse—which is at the root of the Socratic
method that Plato repeatedly represents in his works. Structurally, then, the
Freudian method of “psychoanalytic conversation” is Socratic in nature.12
Lacan goes further in this connection, suggesting that Socrates, as
intellectual history’s first psychotherapist, is “at the origin… of the longest
transference… that the history of thought has known” (Lacan, 1960–1961,
p. 5). Not only the method of speech, but also its therapeutic value, appear
as a core link between Plato and Freud.
But in order to speak, one needs language—and one of Freud’s greatest
achievements was to develop and consolidate a modern discourse to
discuss the elements of the psyche and their interworking dynamics. It is
almost as if he took literally one of Diotima’s central principles in the
Symposium: that love, as Eros or the life-instinct, is the “giv[ing] birth to the
kind of discourse that will make youth better people” (Plato, trans. 2008,
p. 48).13 Throughout her speech, Diotima compares the “activity of love” to
“giving birth” and adds that those who experience “pregnancy” of the
“soul” rather than the “body” bear “offspring” not in the form of biological
children but of wisdom (φρόνησίν) and other virtues (pp. 44–46).14 The
 STROMBERG

brilliance of the Symposium is that it is, itself, a discourse that breeds other
discourses. It might indeed be seen in meta-critical terms as a kind of
reproductive system of discourses whose “offspring” include both Aristotle’s
philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis. In Platonic terms, Freud “loved”
humanity by developing a discourse called psychoanalysis intended to
facilitate conversation between the parts of the soul and help to make
people better. The very need to create such a discourse—the function of
which is healing and the method of which is speech—connects the raison
d’être of psychoanalysis with the ethos of the Symposium. This is not to say
that there is nothing new in psychoanalysis. Rather, what is new in
psychoanalysis may have to do less with its function or method, and more
with the discourse of its function and method.
Freud’s psychoanalytic discourse is much more than an extension of
Platonic or Aristotelian thought. Yet it serves an aim that is similar to that of
the Republic—founding a “regime within” that structures the parts of the
soul (Plato, trans. 2000, p. 312). Lear suggests in Freud that Plato “uses his
study of social and individual pathology” to ask whether “there is any
normative structuring of society that would promote the health and
happiness of its citizens” (Lear, 2005, p. 199). He writes that the
“Republic—the beautiful polis—is Plato’s affirmative answer” (p. 199).
But the idea of the “beautiful polis” may not be meant to be taken as literally
as it is presented. Socrates himself says that the person who recognizes the
polis’s “pattern or model laid up in heaven” chooses “to found a city within
himself” (Plato, trans. 2000, p. 312). The “beautiful polis” is not necessarily
a real place: it can be read as a metaphor for an internal structure of the
psyche. Rather than a “normative structuring of society” it can be seen as a
normative structuring of a person’s varying social and psychical roles,
internal and external.15 The Republic thus structures social and psychical
functions that the Symposium implicitly calls forth in its emphasis on active
relation to internal and external elements that are in tension “between”
opposing elements. Put slightly differently, by raising the relational aspect of
self and society, the Symposium poses an ethical quandary to which the
Republic replies with an applied theory.16
Lear argues that “Freud was not in a position to use the discovery of
psychological structure to think afresh about the possibilities for human
happiness” whereas “Socrates, in the Republic, gives an account of
happiness that depends on the right arrangement of psychic structure”
(Lear, 2005, p. 201). The implication is that while Freud’s discourse of
psychic structure was new and described unconscious inter-psychic
dynamics in modern concepts, its moral foundation, pace Freud, was
essentially Platonic. Lear even concludes that “there is nothing in Freud’s
critique of morality that calls [the] Socratic-Platonic picture into question”
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

(p. 202). This too suggests that Freud’s project was less to revise the structure
of human wellbeing and more to develop a new discourse to facilitate such
wellbeing—less in the realm of happiness or wisdom that is the subject of
the Republic and more in the realm of love and discourse that is the subject
of the Symposium. Indeed, Freud’s psychoanalytical project makes no direct
claim on happiness or wisdom. Like the Symposium, it has the nature of a
prompt that calls forth a healing discourse.
Freud famously wrote in a letter to Carl Jung that psychoanalysis is a
“cure through love,” (Freud, 1906, p. 12) with Lear explaining the
proclamation as saying “that psychoanalytic therapy requires the analy-
sand’s emotional engagement with the analyst’s empathic understanding of
his patient” (Lear, 1990, p. 27). Lacan put it more radically: “The analytic
cell… [is] a bed of love” and “I am not there… for [the client’s] good, but in
order that he should love” (Lacan, 1960–1961, pp. 11–12).17 Lear develops
his own interpretation of love, emphasizing it as a process of individuation
in which, he claims, “the individual I is, in his essence, a response to love,”
adding that “for love to run through a person [means] that he himself
becomes a locus of activity” (Lear, 1990, p. 219). Klein’s work differs from
such psychoanalytical theorists in that she positions love as one potential
outcome among many (1937), making out of the analytic cell a stage for a
struggle between opposing forces. If, as Lear suggests, for Freud love “is an
active force that promotes the development of ever more complex unities”
(Lear, 1990, p. 212), for Klein that drive is reparation, which can result in
love only when the creative impulse is activated. Love issues from a choice
made within a broader contingent situation, which can also lead to hate.
Love is not merely a force that drives people to be a locus of activity, it is an
emotional and mental activity that struggles against other destructive
impulses. And while it can result in the integration of split parts into
complex wholes, creating what may temporarily function as psychical
unities, Klein’s theory, like Plato’s, is constantly wary of the destructive parts
of the soul, and their influence on ourselves and on others.
The intellectual connection between Plato and Freud, passing as it does
through Aristotle and Brentano, gives historical and intellectual context to
the Platonic aspect of psychoanalysis in general, and Kleinian thought in
particular. Yet the resonance between Klein and Plato is less rhetorical than
structural, and belongs to the originality of her own thought. Recognizing
the philosophical underpinnings of her work, we can continue to consider
her theories on theoretical grounds, together with other philosophers or
thinkers, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but to reveal the broader
humanistic significance of her work. Klein’s way of conceptualizing human
relations can, as she says, help draw clearer intellectual links between the
different aspects of the psyche, extending her contribution beyond the
 STROMBERG

therapeutic realm to additional forms of searching for emotional and

intellectual wisdom, or knowledge of the soul. At the same time, it can
strengthen her contribution to psychoanalytical theory, bringing language
on love and intimacy from other fields into a discussion of her work, and
widening the potential therapeutic impact of her theory on clinical
situations. Discussing her work in a broader humanistic context expands
not only the critical perspective on the specific psychical mechanisms she
describes as present in love and intimacy, but also their influence and
function within human life and relations between people.

LOVE AND INTIMACY

Love, as Diotima suggests in the Symposium, is giving birth to discourse.
Such discourse can be clinical, as when prompted by psychoanalysis, or
philosophical discourse as portrayed in Plato, or a personal discourse of the
self in relation to the world, all of which open onto relations with others. For
Klein, discourse is cultivated by psychoanalytic conversation, but when
links between Freud and Plato are taken into account, this can be seen as a
specific instance of what Socrates called in Phaedrus a “leading of the soul
by the means of speech” (Plato, trans. 2005, p. 44). Psychoanalysis—
sustained observation, reflection, and interpretation, focused and associa-
tive, on the self and how it influences and is influenced both by the self and
by others—can function as its own theoretical discourse, and can also
prompt the creation of a personal discourse within its analysands: acting
like the Symposium as a discourse that breeds other discourses. In Platonic
terms, psychoanalytical conversation can be seen as the pursuit of love in its
highest form, as wisdom of the soul, as when Socrates pairs discourse with
Eros and wishes Phaedrus to “direct his life towards love accompanied by
talk of a philosophical kind” (Plato, trans. 2005, p. 39). Klein’s work,
however, shows that the power of discourse in one’s life is its potential to
influence and direct our impulses toward creativity or destruction—in
relation to both ourselves and to others.
Freud reinvented Platonic discourse as psychoanalytical conversation,
linking it with the psychosexual significance of orality, and pointing to the
significance of orality in speech. Describing it in terms of a stage, drive, or
fixation focused on fulfilling a pleasure, he connected the physicality of the
mouth and tongue with the function of discourse, something that did not
exist in overtly in Platonic thought. This set the stage for the bodily turn in
Klein, who portrayed the image of an infant’s relation to its mother’s breast
—experienced as omnipotence (satisfaction with life) when the infant is
filled with the mother’s milk, and powerless anxiety (fear of death) when the
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

breast is missing and hunger returns—as a drama that associated orality with
additional psychical mechanisms, especially internal emotions that affect
the external manifestation of love and hate (Klein, 1937, pp. 58–62).
Platonic discourse, which Freud had turned into psychoanalytical conver-
sation, became in Klein a performance stage for the kind of tragicomic
drama which the Symposium exemplified and which the Poetics theorized
in literary terms. Yet unlike Aristotle, whose aim was to describe the
structure of drama to achieve the greatest destruction and tragic effect,
Klein’s work expressed this human drama in terms of psychical mechanisms
and processes that affect intimate relations both with the self and with the
other—with the aim of creative reparation.
The originality of Klein’s contribution was noted by French phenome-
nologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who wrote that, in Klein, “Freudian
notions receive an extreme simplification” (Phillips, 1999, p. 76). This
simplification issues, I believe, in part from a shift of emphasis in their two
approaches to the psyche. Whereas Freud tended to emphasize the structure
of the psyche and enumerating its elements, Klein tended to focus on the
structure of relations between these elements and enumerating their
dynamics. But unlike Ronald Fairbairn (1952), who saw in object relations
theory a turn away from Freud, Klein would consistently relate her
development of object relations to Freud’s discoveries. Her simplification
of Freud, building as it does on established discourse and theory, can be
compared to Aristotle’s turn to the phenomenal world after Plato’s teachings
of ideal forms. Like Aristotle, Klein focused on the physical manifestation of
symbolic processes. Merleau-Ponty, as a philosophical disciple of Husserl
who also inherited Brentano’s legacy, was able to see this aspect of Klein’s
work. He notes that, by developing her theories through observation of
infants, she turned infant activity into “an activity that is corporeal as much
as psychical” (Phillips, 1999, p. 76)—fusing theory about internal processes
with externally manifested behavior. In terms of orality, by basing her theory
on close observations of infant activity, Klein’s conception takes on new
facets and extends psychoanalytical theory about the interaction between
the body and the soul.
Klein links the healing process of psychoanalysis to a later stage of
orality, writing that “creative impulses which [are] dormant [due to extreme
guilt] awake and express themselves” in creative activities such as “speech,”
which leads to “fears of various kinds becom[ing] lessened” and “destruc-
tive impulses also [being] lessened” (Klein, 1937, p. 107). In this way, she
looks beyond orality’s internal psychical implications and connects speech
and discourse to reparation, making the claim that imagined fears, whose
roots lie in the suckling oral stage, can be alleviated later in life through
creative speech—with both potentialities located in the mouth and tongue.
 STROMBERG

In “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), Merleau-Ponty

speaks of the “expressive word” which he says “gropes around a
significative intention” just as Matisse’s hand hovers over a canvas to
create a painting “which did not yet exist” (p. 247, emphasis in the original).
In Kleinian terms, we may say that such expressive speech can mitigate fear
by putting into words emotions that an individual has not yet formulated
into thoughts, externalizing the internal by relating directly to the specific
contexts or circumstances that might have prompted those feelings or
thoughts. In Klein, speech becomes an expressive activity that can not only
heal, but also influence the manifestation of creative and destructive
impulses. Speech is no longer merely an expression for its own sake. It
directly influences the manifestation of creative or destructive impulses in
the world.
Creating expressive speech, which in turn affects our creative and
destructive impulses, requires the capacity to process psychical complexity.
It involves processing oscillation between splitting and integration, or
dividing and collecting—which Socrates calls the art of dialects and says is
essential for thinking and speaking, and which Klein calls psychical
mechanisms that are necessary for regulating psychical phenomena. The
difficultly arises from the need to experience each mechanism separately
while remaining conscious of them as two distinctly experienced aspects of
a single complex dynamic system. Navigating this kind of complexity is
taxing to the psyche and so it seeks ways of alleviating the burden. The
mechanisms at its disposal for relief, however, are the very same ones that it
uses for processing the psychic phenomena: splitting and integration. This
mirroring of functions inherent in splitting and integration, which is at the
root of these mechanisms’ doubled potential for both normality and
pathology, can be understood using a dialectical mode of thought on
paradoxy and ambiguity.
Splitting alleviates complexity by dividing integrated experience into
opposing elements, but the presence of opposing elements within a single
system of relations can make a relationship feel paradoxical. In Love as
Passion (1986), Niklas Luhmann explains this element through an evolu-
tionary account of what he calls the “codification of intimacy,” claiming
that “paradoxy started to be related to itself” within human relations most
noticeably in modern society (pp. 5, 58).18 His discussion of love as an
aspect of intimacy provides a wider context for the interaction “between”
love and hate, yet notes that in “widely held opinion” the presence of
paradoxical motivation “produces schizophrenia or at least the repetition of
pathological behavior,” adding that in activities seemingly governed by
reason, paradox runs the risk of fostering “an inability to act” (p. 55). Yet he
insists that paradox is necessary in love because of the “paradoxical nature
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

of intimate communication” (pp. 55–56). In Kleinian terms, such intimate

communication involves splitting that divides opposing tendencies into
separate elements that can be projected or introjected. When not viewed
within a complex dynamic system, such opposing elements can seem
irreconcilable or logically impossible, making the experience of love within
intimacy seem paradoxical. This is especially true if the splitting or dividing
is done “inexpertly,” or if opposing elements are never integrated or
collected back together again. Taken to the extreme, paradoxy caused by
splitting can lead, as Luhmann notes, to pathology in the form of
schizophrenia—a similar conclusion to Klein’s, despite her never using
the term “intimacy.” Yet Luhmann also suggests that, without letting it
become a dominant tendency, the ability to tolerate paradoxy is necessary
in intimate relations, making it possible for them to later manifest
themselves as either love or hate. Splitting, a mechanism of relief, creates
another form of complexity.
Integration, on the other hand, counteracts splitting, alleviating the
complexity of paradox by collecting separate elements into a single mass.
But in intimacy, the experience of opposing elements within a single
relationship creates ambiguity about the object of love. Merleau-Ponty,
discussing the philosophical advances of Freudian psychoanalysis in a
lecture titled “Man and Adversity” (1951), describes “adult love” as being
“sustained by a trusting tenderness which does not constantly insist upon
new proofs of absolute attachment but takes the other person as he is, at his
distance and in his autonomy”—but which, he points out, psychoanalysis
considers to develop “from an infantile ‘erotic attachment’ [‘aimence’],
which demands everything at all times and is responsible for whatever
devouring, impossible aspects may remain in any love” (Merleau-Ponty,
1951, p. 193). Later, in a transcribed discussion of his lecture with other
discussants, he situates the distinction between infantile and adult love in a
Kleinian context, shifting from a description of the development of love, to
modes of relation within love: “Melanie Klein,” he says, “shows that the
ambiguity which can be found in adult thought, and which perhaps even
characterizes it… does not consist in having two alternative images of the
same object, but in firmly and truly thinking that the same object is good
and bad” (1951, p. 217). He implies that adult love—which he character-
izes as trusting, tender, and respectful of autonomy—is dependent on the
ability to integrate perceptions of good and bad into a single intimate
relationship. Like Luhmann with the paradoxy, he is also aware of
ambiguity’s pathological potential, which he suggests can result in
“wallowing” (Merleau-Ponty, 1951, p. 219). And, like Luhmann, he also
suggests that ambiguity nevertheless has a place in intimacy—at least as
long as we find ourselves “reflecting on the ambiguity and never taking a
 STROMBERG

place either within it or outside of it.” (p. 219).19 Like the need for paradox,
Merleau-Ponty suggests that, without letting it become a dominant
tendency, the ability to reflect on the ambiguity created by integration is
also necessary in intimate relations.
The capacity to oscillate between paradoxy and ambiguity, tolerating
one and reflecting on the other, emerges as a conscious parallel to an
oscillation between the unconscious psychical mechanisms of splitting and
integration. Tolerance helps us experience elements in tension while
reflection helps us understand their coexistence. And just as splitting and
integration relieve the dangers inherent in the excessive application of
either psychical mechanism, so paradoxy and ambiguity relieve the dangers
inherent in each opposing state. The suppression of either state can lead to
pathology, stripping intimacy of its dynamic complexity—both its opposing
elements and oscillating nature—and aiming to impose uniformity where
none exists. Without oscillation and tension, each mechanism can
potentially overtake one’s perception or experience of cognitive or
emotional phenomena, leading to skewed experiences of intimacy and
love. The negotiation of complexity arises from navigating the system’s
opposing tendencies, which manifest themselves as discrete elements,
while remaining conscious of their being parts of a larger whole.
Klein’s conception of love as a complex system of relations, like
Diotima’s notion of love as “between,” suggests that negotiating complexity
requires a capacity for dialectical thinking—or oscillation between splitting
and integration, paradoxy and ambiguity. This may explain Plato’s emphasis
on the art of dialectics in the Phaedrus, and it is even present in the structure
of the Symposium. The characters who speak before Socrates all exhibit the
ability to distinguish between good and bad.20 But their speeches make up
only the first half Plato’s dialogue, and the second half can be seen as a
criticism of these prior positions. Their focus on distinctions, forms of
splitting or dividing, omits the complementary capacity to collect or
integrate, revealing each speaker to lack expertise in the art of dialectics and
leading them to static rather than dynamic understandings of love.21 While
each character speaks beautifully about the differences between creative
and destructive tendencies, their split reasoning leads them to merely favor
the positive over the negative, without ever understanding how these
tendencies work together in a complex dynamic way. When Socrates
invokes Diotima’s challenge to think of love as “between,” he goes beyond
each speaker’s emphasis on distinction, and stresses the additional need for
a capacity to experience the relational tension that exists between opposing
elements. Plato describes in conscious terms what Klein suggests happens
with psychical mechanisms on an unconscious level. This suggests that the
capacity to experience unconscious opposing tendencies in tension,
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

together with the ability to make conscious distinctions between them, can
contribute to experiences and even choices that manifest good over bad, or
love over hate.
This struggle between creative and destructive impulses is central to
Klein’s conception of love—and reflected in the language that scholars use
to describe her theory. Joanne Brown calls it a “struggle between love and
gratitude, and hate and envy” (Brown, 2006, p. 103), while Otto Kernberg
observes that “the complex ways in which love and aggression merge and
interact… highlights the mechanisms by which love can integrate and
neutralize aggression and, under many circumstances, triumph over it”
(Kernberg, 1995, p. x). It can be considered in Aristotelian terms of comedy
and tragedy—especially as Dante interpreted them, with tragedy ending
badly and comedy ending well—gaining the kind of moral significance that
Aristotle finds in the plays of Sophocles. As a performance stage for the
human drama, Klein’s system of relations is not a neutral space for a variety
of emotional experiences. It is a battlefield in the eternal struggle between
good and bad, love and hate, creativity and destruction. In this battle, Klein
herself writes, love is always in danger of being “smothered under
resentment, grievances and hatred” and only “the drive to make reparation
can keep at bay the despair arising out of feelings of guilt”—in which case
“hope will prevail” (Klein, 1937, pp. 116–117). Her approach to love
emphasizes the need to actively relate to the system’s disparate parts,
maintaining “relation to all that we cherish and love and to all that we hate”
(Klein, 1937, p. 114)—in ourselves and in others. This makes the experience
of intimacy doubly risky. Not only does it involve experiencing the
complexity of others—their thoughts, feelings, actions—in their rawest state,
but it also suggests that our ability to negotiate this complexity in turn
influences the outcome of our intimate relations, which have the potential
to be as destructive as they can be creative.
The conception of intimacy between two people as a complex system of
relations, within which love can but does not necessarily prevail over hate,
is different from other general notions associated with love or intimacy,
including affection, attachment, concern, romance, or sex. It is also more
than a balance or compromise between different “forms” of love, whether
passionate or companionate. While all these are indeed ways of discussing
intimacy, and can be experienced in human relations where love prevails—
reinforcing intimacy’s positive aspects—the attempt to delimit love to these
emotions and states alone ends in an “inexpert” splitting that deforms the
experience of intimacy. It isolates positive tendencies without relating to the
overall dynamic system from which they emerge among their negative
correlates. Klein never used the concept of intimacy, preferring to focus on
the object relations framework, but, in Kleinian terms, love can emerge from
 STROMBERG

intimacy only when it is taken together with hate—when love emerges as

the main tendency “between” the two—with a potential for individuals to
enact a higher measure of love.
Love cannot reconcile the good or bad aspects of intimacy into
permanent harmony, because the forces of creativity and destruction
cannot be either activated or defused once and for all. Their mutual
persistence necessitates our oscillating “between” them—an active ongoing
process that involves both coming into relations with unconscious tenden-
cies, and developing conscious ways of tolerating paradoxy and reflecting
on ambiguity, making it possible to choose creativity and good within
human relations. Intimacy is a constant relation to both the separate
tendencies perceived by us, and the tension between these opposing
tendencies. And while it may not constitute an ethical system in itself, its
emphasis on relating to conflicting states, and the need for tolerance and
reflection, emerges as a moral exigency. Love and intimacy, as active
relation to unconscious tension and conscious choosing of good over bad,
exists not only between concepts or emotions, but also between people.
Klein’s conception of love is not a pure feeling or state but something in
between—the overriding tendency and result of a dynamic system of
relations constantly in flux. And, like Plato’s Symposium, it sets the stage for
love as emerging from an active relation to elements in tension.

NOTES

1. David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem. His articles
have appeared in The Russian Review, French Forum, In geveb, La Revue—Motifs, and
Comparative Literature Studies, and in collections including The Ethics of Literary
Communication (Benjamins 2013) and Emerging Vectors of Narratology (de Gruyter 2017).
He is author of Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer (University of Delaware
Press, 2017) and editor of In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times
(Delacorte/Random House 2018). His work on psychoanalytical theory—including an
article titled “Noble Errors: Examples of Love and Tragedy from Literature, Philosophy, and
Psychoanalysis” (2018)—is part of a research project titled Idiot Love dealing with concepts
of intimacy in Plato, Dostoevsky, Melanie Klein, and Catherine Breillat. He is a
postdoctoral fellow in literary studies at the Hebrew University, and is preparing a critical
biography of Yiddish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer.
2. The term introjection was introduced by Ferenczi in 1909. In his seminal paper,
“Introjection and Transference,” he described the two opposing processes, projection and
introjection. Freud (1911) later elaborated on the term projection and Klein adapted both in
1937.
3. This aspect of Klein’s theory has been reformulated and extended by many psychoanalysts
—especially Joan Riviere (1937), Donald Winnicott (1958), and Wilfred Bion (1962). Two
more recent books particularly stand out for their ability to develop Klein’s theory and
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

integrate it with additional theoretical approaches: Otto Kernberg’s Love Relations:

Normality and Pathology (1995) and Joanne Brown’s A Psychosocial Exploration of Love
and Intimacy (2006).
4. Lucia Angelino (2008) has discussed the dialectical aspect of Klein’s thought, especially in
the oscillation between projection and introjection, in connection with French phenome-
nologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intertwining and chiasm (p. 68). And
Sheldon Bach (2006) has also pointed to the “dialectical problem between subjective and
objective self-awareness” in relation to Kleinian theory (p. 115).
5. Fowler (Plato, trans. 1925) translates συναγωγός as “bringing together” rather than
collecting. This term is the Greek root for the modern-day usage of synagogue.
6. The synergy between psychoanalytical thought and the Symposium has already been
explored in depth by Jacques Lacan in his Seminar VIII: Transference (1960–1961), which
centers almost entirely on this Platonic dialogue. Lacan deals with what he calls the
“analytic situation” (10, 189–194) and suggests that the relations portrayed between
Socrates and Alcibiades represent the first recorded case of psychoanalytical transference.
But Lacan’s thematic analysis, focusing on the circumstantial aspects of these relations,
does not address the kinds of psychical mechanisms that Klein describes. Nevertheless,
though it is beyond the scope of this article, the dynamic described by Alcibiades—his
attraction to Socrates, the reversal of roles between lover and beloved, Socrates’s
frustration of Alcibiades’s advances, Alcibiades’s anger and fear portrayed in his
appearance at the drinking party—can actually be described in terms of object relations
theory. For a useful overview of Lacan’s notions on love, see Bruce Fink’s “Love and/in
Psychoanalysis: A Commentary on Lacan’s Reading of Plato’s Symposium in Seminar VIII:
Transference” (2015).
7. For focused examinations of these two theorists’ work considered together, see The Klein-
Lacan Dialogues (1997) edited by Bernard Burgoyne and Mary Sullivan, and The New
Klein-Lacan Dialogues (2015) edited by Julia Borossa, Catalina Bronstein, and Claire
Pajaczkowska.
8. See: Jonathan Lear’s Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of
Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990), which deals extensively with Freud’s connections to Plato
and Aristotle; Santas Gerasimos’s Plato & Freud: Two Theories of Love (1988); the
chapter “Unity and Separation” in Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar’s Apprehending the
Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology (2006), especially
the section titled “Plato and Freud”; and Stella Sandford’s Plato and Sex (2010), which
includes two chapters on Freud.
9. For a discussion of Brentano’s influence on Freud see especially Askay and Farquhar (2006,
pp. 160–163); and Rubovits-Seitz (1998, pp. 153–156). In addition, Brentano’s (1874)
focus on conscious intensionality, which in Edmund Husserl was developed into the
famous ego cogito cogitatum (1931) cannot be disregarded when considering Freud’s later
exploration—against Brentano’s position on the lack of “any proof for the existence of
unconscious mental activity” (2015 [1874], p. 116)—of the unconscious. The link between
Husserl’s ego or “Ich” and Freud’s ego or “Ich” is well summarized in Joanne Morra’s Julia
Kristeva (1998): “With the transcendental Ego—largely taken over from Kant—Husserl
strives to provide an irreducible basis for consciousness…. [It] may be a pure product of
classical German idealist philosophy, which implies that it may simply be an empty
abstraction related only to itself—a kind of transcendental correlate of the immanent ego of
psychoanalysis” (Morra, 1998, p. 113). I would also make the claim, more difficult to
prove, that this cultural lineage may be related to the fact that the work of Klein and
Merleau-Ponty, who developed the thoughts of Freud and Husserl respectively, has so
many parallels.
 STROMBERG

10. Although it is not my intention to speculate on why Freud did not acknowledge the
influence that Brentano and, through him, Aristotle and Plato might have had on his
thought, I will mention that Neville Symington (2004) has come up with three possibilities:
“In the first place, Freud was most anxious to present psychoanalysis as scientifically
respectable…. Second, Freud was very ambitious and wanted to be respected within the
scientific community…. Lastly, Brentano did not believe in the existence of the
unconscious” (Symington, 2004, pp. 25–26).
11. For a detailed analysis of Freud in view of Aristotle’s Poetics see William N. West’s
“Repeating Staging Meaning Between Aristotle and Freud” (1999).
12. See: Askay and Farquhar’s chapter “Unity and Separation: Freud and Greek Philosophy,”
particularly the section titled “Methodological Similarities between Plato and Freud”
(2006, pp. 70–71); and Lear’s chapter on “The Socratic Method and Psychoanalysis” in A
Companion to Socrates (2006, pp. 442–462).
13. Give birth here translates “τίκτειν” and I have replaced “young men” with “youth.” The
Jowett translation (Plato, trans. 1875) has this fragment as follows: “bring to the birth
thoughts which may improve the young.” The Fowler translation (Plato, trans. 1925) has:
“bringing forth and soliciting such converse as will tend to the betterment of the young.”
14. Even Socrates’s choice in the Republic of structuring the soul in terms of a city can be seen
as rooted in Diotima’s speech in the Symposium. Though she gives few specifics about
what shape such “offspring” might take, she does tell Socrates that “the most important and
beautiful expression of this wisdom is the good ordering of cities” (Plato, trans. 2008,
p. 47). In this way, Socrates’s choice in the Republic (Plato, trans. 2000) of expressing his
discourse of wisdom in terms of city-planning can be seen as a response to Diotima’s
prompt—his personal attempt at the most important and beautiful expression of this
wisdom.
15. This poses many interpretational challenges that are beyond the scope of the present study,
such as the significance of the polis’s different social classes when considered as a variety
of roles that a single person can fulfill.
16. Indeed, Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan note that the Symposium “was intended to be read
as a companion piece to… the Republic” (2004, p. 2).
17. Lacan also relates this directly to the figure of Socrates in the Symposium: “[A]s regards
loving and what love is it must be said that the two things must not be confused… As
regards loving and knowing what it is to love, I must all the same, like Socrates, be able to
testify on my own behalf that I know something about it” (Lacan, 1960–1961, p. 12).
18. Luhmann’s book describes a shift from idealization in traditional society to paradoxical-
ization in modernity, with the emergence of “traditional paradoxes” (1986, p. 5). For
example, love is “characterized as a battle” while also “present[ing] itself… in the form of
unconditional submission… involv[ing] complete renunciation of personal characteristics”
(1986, p. 63).
19. As when he says of language that it is “ambiguous and nevertheless we speak” (Merleau-
Ponty, 1951, p. 224).
20. We see this when Eryximachus the doctor, discussing the gratification of the body’s “good”
and “bad” parts, says that people must “distinguish the right from the wrong kind of love”
and suggests that “wrong” love can follow from the gratification of bad (Plato, trans. 2008,
p. 19). It also appears in an example given by Pausanius, who speaks of the ability to
distinguish between good and bad: “[I]f a beloved gratifies a lover on the grounds that the
man is good… but is deceived and the man turns out to be bad and devoid of excellence, in
this case his being deceived is a noble error” (p. 17).
 LOVE AND INTIMACY FROM PLATO TO MELANIE KLEIN

21. We can extend this challenge to the other speakers and thus explore the problematic
consequences of “inexpert” splitting that appear in each speech. Indeed, the preservation
of split conception results in several concepts that are put into doubt by Diotima’s notion of
in between: Phaedrus’s split between shame and pride leads him to praising love (Eros, life)
in terms of those willing to die and so give up life (Plato, trans. 2005, p. 10); Pausanius’s
split between right and wrong leads him to love as excellence through servitude (p. 17);
Eryximachus’s split between healthy and diseased leads him to a notion of love as harmony
that reconciles disagreement and, in a sense, eliminates the bad by turning it into the good
(pp. 19–20); Aristophanes’s myth of the split human leads him to love as healing through a
restoration to a primal state of being in which fusion is more desirable than procreation (p.
22); Agaton’s split between enmity and amity, harshness and tenderness, ugliness and
beauty, leads him to love as a source of comfort and creativity, placing these creative
potentials outside himself (pp. 29–31). In all these cases maintaining the split has
repercussions on the function of creativity, production, and reproduction.

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