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The Plato Project: D. Konstan's essay of Plato & Freudian Theory of Ion

See also:  [The Paris Project]
           [The Plato Project]
          


PLATO’S IONAND THE PSYCHOANALYTICTHEORY OF ART


by D. Konstan


Mirrored from: [Complete text/refs/etc here]


In Plato’s Ion, a dialogue between Socrates and a rhapsode of that 
name, Socrates makes an extraordinary claim about poetic composition 
(533e-534a): “All good epic poets,” Socrates declares, “recite all 
their fine poems not by skill but because they are inspired and 
possessed, and the lyric poets do likewise. Just as corybants dance 
when they are not in their right minds, so too lyric poets compose 
their fine lyrics when they are not in their right minds. Rather, 
when they enter upon their harmonies and rhythms, they revel like 
bacchants and are possessed, just as bacchants draw honey and milk 
from rivers when they are possessed, and are not in their right minds. 

The souls of lyric poets do this as well, as they themselves affirm.
”There is a pun here on honey (mevli) and lyrics (mevlh), but I wish 
to call attention to the vivid description of poetic enthusiasm that 
Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates, which goes far beyond the kind 
of inspiration that Homer and Hesiod ascribe to the Muses. 

This is not, of course, an isolated passage in the Platonic corpus. 
In the Apology (22b-c), Socrates finds that poets are less able to 
explain the meaning of their own compositions than the man in the 
street, and he concludes that “they did not compose what they did 
through skill, but rather by a kind of innate talent and inspiration, 
the way prophets and soothsayers do.” In the Phaedrus (243e-245a), 
Socrates lists inspiration by the Muses as a form of madness (maniva), 
along with love, mantic enthusiasm (with a pun on manic), and a kind 
of mystical power of healing. Finally, in the Laws (719c), the 
Athenian asserts that “when a poet sits on the tripod of the Muses, 
then he is not in his right mind,” and he does not know whether what 
he is saying is true or not. Good poetry, of the quality of the 
Homeric epics, seems to Plato, at least in these passages, to derive 
from a divine source, or at all events from some place that is 
different fromour rational minds.3It is a commonplace that the 
account of the soul that Plato develops in the Phaedrus and Republic 
is in certain respects analogous to the model or models elaborated 
by Freud and other theorists of modern psychoanalysis. 

Thus, Micaela Janan (1994: 7) notes that “the theory of the 
tripartite soul in Plato ... resembles the tripartite psyche mapped 
by Freud” (cf. also Ferrari 1987, Santas 1988, Price 1990). Janan 
adds that “Plato, Freud, and Lacan all explicitly theorize a 
connection between desire and creative art.” In what follows, I 
shall attempt to relate Plato’s analysis of poetic creativity in 
the Ion to the psychoanalytic theory, or rather one psychoanalytic 
theory, of literary art. But that is not all. For Socrates, in the 
Ion, maintains not just that poets are inspired, but that singers 
of poetry, and those who hear them, are transported as well, each 
connected, in a famous image, like iron rings in a chain to the 
original magnetic source of energy, which is the god or Muse 
(535e-536d). What is more, Socrates applies this explanation not 
just to the rhapsodes’ performance of poetry ...

[Complete text/refs/etc here]


  

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