Encounters with “Dis” in the Clinical Situation and in Dante's Divine Comedy

Abstract

This article focuses on the inner world that results from trauma-generated dissociation and, through two clinical vignettes, explores how to work with the primitive forces that are liberated in the transference when daimonic levels of defense have become necessary to survive unbearable affects in early childhood. An archetypal story (Dante's descent into the Inferno) is used to demonstrate the preternatural presences that haunt or harrow the inner world of dissociation and how they are optimally approached. Comparisons are made between a depth-psychological understanding and contemporary relational theory in their respective approaches to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Recommendations are made for a “binocular stance” that keeps both the inner world and the interpersonal world in view as I try to humanize the primitive idealizations and diabolizations that infuse the transference in work with trauma's survivors.

Notes

¹This term was used by Ellenberger (1970) to describe a basic function of the unconscious, i.e., its tendency to present itself to consciousness in the form of images that trend in the direction of archaic and typical (archetypal) objects, affects, and images. He traces the term to Frederick Myers, Theodor Flournoy, and C. G. Jung, pointing out that this function of the unconscious has not received the attention it deserves.

²Daimons were described in Plato's Symposium (1961, p. 555) as “half way between god and man.”

³Diotima said:

[Daimons are] the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation and incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or sleeping, with the gods. [Plato, 1961, p. 555, italics added]