Dante’s Imagination—Down to Earth: Some Unconscious Roots of Dante’s Divine Comedy

Abstract: In this essay, we argue that Dante’s Commedia is best studied as a whole, rather than as three separate books of a tripartite composition. Book I— Inferno ’s popularity tends to overshadow the subsequent two books, Purgatorio and Paradiso . We focus not on one segment of the work, but on Dante’s unifying vision of human psychological development as a complex totality, best addressed as a whole. Studied together, the seamlessness of Dante’s achievement is discussed not unlike a psychoanalytic experience that includes initial process, working through, and termination, whereby an analysand’s new, revitalized individuation is achieved and celebrated. Between the lines of Dante’s masterpiece, the developmental links that bind together preoedipal, oedipal, and post oedipal complexity become strikingly clear. We suggest that psychoanalytic commentary adds to the poetic power of Dante’s masterpiece. Perhaps the author’s most outstanding achievement was to make the theological abstractions of Inferno, Purgatorio , and Paradiso more human—bringing them down to earth so to speak. We stress that Dante’s travels through the interior regions of his mind are essentially an intrapsychic journey, although they are represented as an external journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise.