What might it be for the professor to respond to the student’s transference-love, but not respond in kind—instead turning it to good use in the pedagogical process? It would involve, presumably, the professor “convincing” the student that her desire for him is a form of projection: that what she really desires isn’t the professor at all, but what he represents. To switch from Freud’s terms to Plato’s, the teacher must redirect the student’s erotic energies from himself toward their proper object: knowledge, truth, understanding. (Plato, like Freud, is often invoked in defenses of professor–student sex, but in fact Socrates did not sleep with his students—to the apparent frustration of some of them. Indeed, in the Republic, Socrates tells us that “sexual pleasure mustn’t come into” relationships between philosopher-guardians and the young boys they are educating, “if they are to love and be loved in the right way.”20) It is the bad teacher who absorbs the student’s erotic energies into himself. As Freud puts it, “however highly he may prize love,” the good teacher must “prize even more highly the opportunity to help” his student.21