Changes

Alcibiades desires because he presumes Socrates is in possession of the agalma - the phallus as desirable. But Socrates refuses the position of loved object to assert himself as desiring. For Lacan desire never occurs between two subjects but between a subject and an overvalorized being who has fallen to the state of an object. The only way to discover the other as subject is "to recognize that he speaks an articulated language and responds to ours with his own combinations; the other cannot fit into our calculations as someone who coheres like us." Socrates, by shying away from Alcibiades' declaration, by refusing to mask his lack with a fetish, and by showing him Agathon as the true object of his love, shows the analyst how to behave: such is the other aspect of "subjective disparity" taking place in analysis. There is no rapport between what the one possesses and what the other lacks. The phallus, from being objet a, the imaginary object, emerges as the signifier of signifiers, as "the only signifier that deserves the role of symbol. It designates the real presence that permits identification, the origin of the Ideal-of-the-Ego on the side of the Other." There is a woman in The Symposium, Diotima, who speaks in the form of myth. In the fable where female lack is confronted with male resources, the feminine first has an active role before the desirable masculine. The reversal occurs because in love one only gives what one does not have: the masculine, by shying away from the demand, is revealed as a subject of desire. Later, Lacan would make Socrates the model of hysterical discourse, but also of analytic discourse because he attains the knowledge, the episteme, of love.

Having managed to provoke "a mutation in the economy of his desire," the analyst has access both to the unconscious and to the experience of the unconscious because, like Socrates, he has confronted the desire for death and achieved the "between-two-deaths" - entre-deux-morts. Having placed the signifier in the position of the absolute, he has abolished "fear and trembling." "One puts one's desire aside so as to preserve what is the most precious, the phallus, the symbol of desire." Desire is only its empty place.