ABSTRACT
The idea that eros and the desire for death are meaningfully bound and fundamental to human motivation is one of the central tenets of early psychoanalytic theory. In the Symposium, Socrates praises eros by reporting an account of love conveyed to him by the priestess Diotima. The lover, on Plato’s account, is in an in-between state, and is constantly being changed by his pursuit of something he perceives to be beautiful but which in one way or another eludes his grasp. Self-destruction is not antithetical to erotic love, however, whether or not it meets the Platonic ideal. The central relationship depicted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread is a paradigm of non-intellectualized Platonic eros. Reynolds’ transcendent moment is enough to spur him to marriage, but it does not suffice to pull him entirely out of his old patterns.
