Dante’s Comedy: Precursors of psychoanalytic technique and psyche

Abstract

This paper uses a literary approach to explore what common ground exists in both psychoanalytic technique and views of the psyche, of ‘person’. While Western literature has developed various views of psyche and person over centuries, there have been crystallizing, seminal portraits, for instance Shakespeare’s perspective on what is human, some of which have endured to the present. By using Dante’s Commedia, particularly the Inferno, a 14th century poem that both integrates and revises previous models of psyche and personhood, we can examine what features of psyche, and ‘techniques’ in soul‐healing psychoanalysts have inherited culturally. Discovering basic features of technique and model of psyche we share as psychoanalysts permits us to explore why we have differences in variations on technique and models of inner life.

Key words:

• Freud
• psychoanalytic technique
• literature
• therapeutic alliance

Acknowledgements

I thank the Wallerstein Research Fellowship in Psychoanalysis for ongoing support and the Ministry of Absorption of Israel for its support during the work on this paper. I thank Eliayhu Feldman, and Bob Wallerstein for their important critiques. And to Peter Giovacchini, my Virgil.

Notes

1. As Saul Bellow (1974) writes, bird warblings – so beautiful to human ears – are territorial markings, warnings to other birds not to trespass (psychoanalytic) turf. (Personal communication)

2. Bloom boldly subtitled his Shakespeare book, The Invention of the Human.

3.  While he was in Turkish exile from the Nazis.

4. The usual English translation is ‘imitation’, a word that may mislead us, for Plato and Aristotle meant not an imitative copying, but an attempt to replicate the reality that we see.

5. To refresh us, Auerbach appraises literary views of ‘reality’ before Dante.  Plato infamously dismissed poets and music from the Republic: our sensual reality is but a lower‐level representation of some ideal; therefore, the artist’s mimesis is a degraded version of the ideal.  Aristotle redeems art.  He argues cleverly that the good artist does not simply imitate seen‐reality, rather he has an image in his mind of the ‘ideal’ represented by the real thing: the artist’s soul is the nexus of imagined ideal and lower‐level real.  This permits Aristotle to embark on his Poetics– pointers on how best to ‘imitate’ reality so as to approach the beauty of the ideal.  He articulates differences between the tragic and the comic (sad versus happy endings); how the epic figure undergoes suffering from which he learns and grows (e.g. Odysseus), versus the tragic figure who undergoes suffering from which, because of his tragic flaws, he does not learn, struggles against his inevitable fate (built upon his unity of body and soul), passes through a moment of doom, and becomes less‐human, more two‐dimensional, ultimately dying or slouching towards death (e.g. Oedipus).

6. I am aware that an arch has one keystone, but ask the reader’s latitude for the moment.

7. Once, such a search for inner truth would have been accepted or at least persuasive for psychoanalysts; today, the debate over seeking historical truth versus a transference‐based relative truth has questioned this quest for what is an analysand’s truth (Fonagy, 2003b).

8. Just as Winnicott suggested that enjoying a drama is a developmental extension of transitional space; an area where we do not ask if what is happening is within us or outside us.

9. Virgil’s one underworld chapter can also be seen as the nucleus for Dante’s Inferno.

10. Perhaps like many men in midlife crisis, he tries to go directly to Paradise to find a beloved. And perhaps, like many such midlifers, he is tumbled backwards by the ‘sins’ of greed, envy, pride, and such.

11. This shift from solidifying identity and associated coming‐to‐terms with a father‐figure before being able to love another heterosexually we read in Erikson’s developmental shift from identity formation to intimacy and, later, in Peter Blos Sr’s account of the resolution of homoerotic love in late adolescence in order to achieve the capacity for mourning, and loving another.

12. The Bible also wrote of plain men, without using different styles, but Auerbach explains that as an exception and demonstrates the emphasis upon foreground in Bible versus background in Greek epic. This goes beyond this paper, but is a major point of Auerbach’s Mimesis.

13. Ethos Anthropo Daimon.

14. ‘Guide’ is an approximation to being an analyst, just as ‘midwife’ was Freud’s approximation. The midwife–analyst assists the birth of a personality, recognizes the analysand’s labour; the guide–analyst facilitates a journey, knows the treacherous paths, points out what may be ‘missed’. While guide, like midwife does not precisely describe the psychoanalyst’s role, it is a safer, more conservative metaphor than overstepping or violating our analysand’s boundaries (Celenza and Gabbard, 2003).

15. I want to be clear that I am in no manner suggesting touching the analysand in adult work. While Winnicott (1974) wrote of this, he later expressed regret that he had cradled the woman’s head and also wrote about it (Giovacchini, personal communication).

16. “Would not the psychoanalytic method remain the most highly developed technique for listening to what is not being said, for exposing self‐deception, and for helping patients examine wishes, conflicts, and tensions that they cannot by themselves confront honestly?” (Wolff, 1998).

17. Newton, put off by his contempories who prophesied the apocalypse in the 16th or 17th centuries, predicted the apocalypse in 2060 (Kolbrener, 2007).

18. In the New Testament, Auerbach argues, the figura represented both a connection with the Old Testament and connectedness with what was going on in Heaven. Here, I extend ‘higher powers’ to capture both Auerbach’s description of the authors of the Gospel, but also a psychoanalytic concept that there is sense or meaning to our everyday life of dreams, symptoms, parapraxes.