Dante's Divine Comedy revisited: what can modern psychoanalysts learn from a medieval "psychoanalysis"?

Abstract

I realize after having gone over this material that I have done a sort of deconstruction of Dante's Divine Comedy which putatively attempts to raise the human vision to transcendent heights and to focus love on the love of God, but which along the way indulges in the very human aspects of pity, compassion, music, poetry, and the other arts, as well as reason and puzzlement. In this sense the poem is also an exposition of the value of the higher human faculties, which contrasts at times rather vividly with the apparently harsh autocratic fates that are assigned to some characters--who do not seem quite deserving of what is inflicted upon them. Here we have a collision between absolute faith in the judgment of God and human reason and compassion which sometimes seems to be unable to justify these judgments. In spite of the fact that Dante is trying to adhere to orthodox theology throughout, it is clear that his poetic soul has great difficulty in avoiding the depiction of characters for whom he has a secret sympathy. The central point of this study of The Divine Comedy is to emphasize how Dante, almost in spite of himself, expressed empathy and understanding for a variety of unfortunates either in the Inferno or in the Purgatorio. Virgil even scolds him for his compassion, arguing that God's justice is always correct and if God is angry at someone and punishes him or her, Dante should also be angry and not compassionate. Dante tries, but he cannot quite manage to do it. Translated into modern terminology, we can learn from this report of a medieval "psychoanalysis" an important lesson in our clinical work. Rigid adherence to rules such as those Freud himself proclaimed (although he never followed them), for instance in his famous demand that one be always opaque to the patient, and/or rigid adherence to one or another psychoanalytic theory, must be understood as a form of countertransference, a character flaw in the analyst. Each case demands its own approach and its own form or forms or channels of understanding, just as Dante offers us in The Divine Comedy. It is because he offers such a perspective almost in spite of himself that his poem transcends the medieval mind and becomes relevant to all ages and cultures. As a rule of thumb, when one finds one's instinctual convictions about how to proceed in conflict with one's theories and set of rules, something is wrong. It is with the greatest trepidation that a well-analysed psychoanalyst should force him- or herself to ignore an instinctual or intuitive feeling of how to respond to a patient because it conflicts with some theoretical principles or official rules of procedure. Such a conflict is a call for further self-analysis, consultation with colleagues, and creative solutions.