ABSTRACT
Chapter Two concerns the role of myth in psychoanalysis and its implication for the discipline’s intellectual status. I concentrate on the recurrence, in the work of Freud and Lacan, of Aristophanes’ myth of Eros. In Freud’s essays, its changing role reflects his struggle to establish a logic for sexuality once desire has been unmoored from any natural end. Lacan returns to the Platonic source of the myth, as well as to Freud’s use of biology, in order to locate the origins of sexuality in mortality. Lacan invents his own myth, that of the ‘lamella’, as a means of confronting the limits of our imagination.
