The Divine Comedy of Dante

The picture of genius is an unhappy one and few men of great inspiration have functioned in society in a completely average fashion. Van Gogh, Liszt, Nijinsky, Heine, Balzac, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Newton, Schumann, Rembrandt, Schopenhauer, Nietszche and countless others bear out the contention of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel who once remarked that neurosis was the goddess who bestowed upon the artist the power of expressing what he felt. Lombroso went so far as to wed all genius to madness. Hirsch, in his Genius and Degeneration, stated that happiness was denied to really great men, but that melancholia went hand in hand with prominence in the arts, politics and philosophies.

Kretschmer declared that great actions never sprang from healthy integrated states, but only from inner turmoil and restlessness. Schopenhauer, whose own maladjustment sired both his genius and terminal psychosis, realized this also and remarked that “If Petrarch's passion had been gratified his song would have been silenced.” W. M. Allen summed the matter up as follows: “The greater the dissatisfaction, the more vivid the picture; the more accentuated the neurosis, the more magnificent the production; and the more productions, the greater the revelations.”(1) In an analysis of genius Hart claims that poets and musicians were more miserable than average people.(2) Nevertheless we must conclude that our culture has been enormously enriched by gifted persons who oftentimes wore the mantle of genius over strange and interesting variations.

There are two divergencies for which Alighieri Dante is outstanding: first, his poetic love for Beatrice and, second, the creation in the Divine Comedy of the most hideous Inferno man has ever conceived. It is the purpose of this paper to show that both of these circumstances had a common source in a primal identification with the parents. The paper is thus a further addition to the surprising amount of literature that has accumulated depicting the Œdipus theme of parent