Not much had been written or thought about functions or divisions of the psuchê when Plato began his work. The psuchê had been dealt with as one single entity. When he wrote his last works, there were motions, parts and structures galore, very much by merit of his own achievement. Emotions were among these things. Price (1995, 70) estimated that "Plato's neglect of most of the emotions was over- determined", but this seems a bit far-fetched. Plato's psychological doctrine was not a systematic body (Copleston, 1993, 215). Plato's dialogue form was not perhaps very apt for systematizing his psychology, especially when one remembers its nature as an auxiliary science, especially for ethics, as Copleston also remarks. In his works there are abundant materials on emotions, but an account of them must be constructed from unsystematic remarks, as also noted by Irwin (1977, 192) for appetite.
             In other words, the problem is not lack of material, but locating and analyzing it. This poses methodological problems, as is always the case when something has to be selected. One should be careful not to give rise to a systematic bias for any reason, for instance according to one's own conscious or unconscious preferences. But it is impossible to deal with every instance where some emotion was mentioned, and it is no easy matter to use any methods of sampling, either. I shall thus have to trust the method of intuitive selection. It also seems that it is advantageous to deal with love in a chapter separate from the other emotions. The problem with love is that it was at one time so thoroughgoingly important for Plato. There is, as Knuuttila and Sihvola (1998 put it, a "surprising amount of praise given to erotic madness in the Phaedrus", to be modified to a more reserved attitude later. Extracting the 'emotional' aspects from the others is a difficult task as such. In this task of the analysis of affects and feelings, several dialogues are useful, b...