Correspondence

I read with great interest Richard Chessick's article “Dante's Divine Comedy Revisited (Chessick, 2001). I am in agreement with all he writes in it, especially with the main point he makes, that is, the contradiction between Dante's empathy and understanding and his allegiance to medieval dogmatic Catholicism. As Chessick rightly points out, Dante's way to face such contradiction allows him to “transcend the medieval mind and become relevant to all ages and cultures.” I strongly endorse his suggestion that we, as modern psychoanalysts, have an important lesson to learn from this “medieval psychoanalyst”: “Rigid adherence such as those Freud himself proclaimed (although he never followed them)… must be understood as a form of counter transference, a character flaw in the analyst” (p. 302)

I have only two points to add to Chessick's reading of Dante. The first regards the meaning of the metaphor of Hell. Though I agree that one can see the activities in Hell as “motivated for the simple purpose of catharsis of the aggressive drive, and have no other purpose and value,” another possible reading (one which I prefer) is that the “sinners” do have a purpose in their sins. Violence, of which Hell is full, can also be seen as a way of refusing to come to terms with something painful, as a loss or a lack, that should be tolerated in a developmental perspective. In this view, the keynote of Hell is impatience, as the keynote of Purgatory is patience: One gains access to Purgatory if one is ready to tolerate whatever is on one's way to psychological growth. I want to underscore that I mean these keynotes as an addition, not a substitution for the ones Chessick proposes (rage and hope, respectively).

The second point regards the (erotic) transference-countertransference matrix, as illuminated by the story of Paolo and Francesca. If the Comedy is a case of “medieval psychoanalysis,” as Chessick suggests and I agree, where is the transference? In a monadic, one-person