This book reorients the scholarship on Plato by returning readers to his most fundamental insights and reflections on the nature of the human psyche and the human condition.

By approaching the dialogue anew, as if for the first time, the book creates new intellectual pathways by opening the conversation to a clash of ideas. The contributors offer nuanced, nontraditional readings of Plato, readings that not only analyze but also build on the dialogues by bringing them into conversation with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary continental thought more broadly. It addresses a major gap in the literature caused by reading Plato as a metaphysician or moral or political philosopher and not, primarily, as a psychologist.

Psychologists and scholars in philosophy, psychoanalysis, Platonic thought, and other humanities-related disciplines will find this new approach to Plato refreshing, accessible, and uniquely innovative.