Dante, l’acqua e l’analisi della coscienza: cosmologia psicosimbolica nella Divina Commedia

Dante and the Function of Water for an Investigation of the Self. Psychosymbolic Cosmology in the Divine Comedy The famous Epistle to Cangrande written by Dante encourages us to identify the Divine Comedy as an emblematic representation of a psychotherapeutic itinerary. The principal aim of his work is in fact creating a shocking poetic impression for freeing everyone from anxiety and pain, bringing us back to the origin of that eternal joy, which was lost through the Edenic sin, by creating the jail of egoism and the consequential abandon of a global and satisfactory perception of life. Associating itself with the feminine side of the soul and the mystery of the generation of life, the water symbolism in Dante’s poem acquires various meanings and is mainly connected with the malignant or positive rivers, which directly or indirectly indicate the right orientation for going back to the splendid sea of joy: the sea of divine intellect. This last is heaven, and corresponds to a psychic state where we can live together with the vivid memories of all the best we have experienced, learned and discovered during our mortal existence. Hell is a symbol of anguish and despair; here, a psychic emblem of a potential positive transformation is constituted by a little, apparently unimportant brook, which is studied in depth for the first time in this article, revealing the fundamental importance of this emblem, capable of guaranteeing a possible defeat of evil or, more specifically, the transformation of its destructive energy into a positive magic power, which can lead us to the stars. The whole journey of the Divine Comedy appears now more clearly as a symbolic example of ante litteram psychoanalysis.