ABSTRACT
The Lacanian analyst is clearly far way from the perspective of Foulkes, who suggests that ‘individual psychotherapy is thus a form of group psychotherapy without being aware of it’. Jacques Lacan, however, did devote considerable attention to the distorting effects of ‘the group’—for example, with respect to psychoanalysis itself. For Lacan, however, the question of the group was to be posed not clinically but in relation to the psychoanalytic institution, charged with the transmission of psychoanalysis. Language and its constituent parts—’signifiers’—clearly occupy a central place in Lacan’s theorising. When Socrates does speak it is a speech act which aims to decipher the convergence and overlap of signifiers. S. H. Socrates shows them that nothing holds their arguments together. For Socrates, one might say group subversion was already a subjective necessity. Socrates and Alcibiades are engaged in a seduction. This seduction of Socrates produces—for Alcibiades—a form of pleasure which leads to nothing.
