ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the importance of Plato and Socrates in Lacan’s thoughts on teaching, writing and institution-building. It provides an opportunity to consider the resistant nature of Lacan’s published seminars. Lacan must distance himself from Plato in establishing a Lacanian psychoanalysis that considers man as fundamentally inharmonious. But Plato’s dialogues (and the atopic figure of Socrates within them) provide a valuable precedent with regards to teaching through impasses, all the more pressing as Lacan’s fame grows and the very categories of truth and knowledge become problematic.
