Archetypal Representations of Clinical Depression in Dante's Inferno

This is an essay I wrote as part of a literature in translation (Italian) course; to be integrated with 2 upcoming essays to make up a 3-part thesis on Dante's Divine Comedy. Enjoy.

Archetypal Representations of Clinical Depression in Dante's Inferno

In 1913, psychologist Carl Jung embarked on a cathartic journey through his own psyche, a sabbatical which lasted more than fifteen years, filling more than two hundred illuminated pages. Describing himself as “having a schizophrenia,” Jung took a leave of “creative illness” to unify several volumes of frenzied writing into what is perhaps the greatest contribution to modern psychology—his Liber Novus (meaning “New Book”), more commonly known as The Red Book. Here, Jung portrays his descent into psychosis, alongside his spiritual guides Elijah (an old man) and Salome (a young woman). These characters are the early embodiment of Jung’s theory of archetypal representations of the unconscious mind—they symbolize the animus (masculine energy) and anima (feminine energy) as repressed by the female and male sexes, respectively. Jung also explored the idea of the shadow archetype, that is, the shortcomings of the self, negative qualities which are also repressed (Jung, 66-75). The format used by Jung in his archetypal description of his downward spiral, however, was not entirely original. Approximately six hundred years before Jung and The Red Book, Dante Alighieri formulated the telling of his own psychospiritual pilgrimage, his Divine Comedy, beginning with his expedition through the realm of Inferno; here will be examined (through a retrospective lens) the archetypal representations of the illness potentially suffered by Dante—clinical depression—as portrayed therein.

The first hint of psychotic distress in Inferno comes dutifully within Dante’s very liberal first lines: “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was, the savage forest, dense and difficult, which even in recall renews my fears,” (Dante, lines 1-6). Here, the author situates himself in relation to the symbolic landscape, the “shadowed forest,” which represents crisis on a literal level—spiritual, psychological, epistemological, or otherwise. Dante continues with, “I cannot clearly say how I had entered the wood; I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path,” (Dante, lines 10-12). Dante’s use of the term “full of sleep” here alludes to the coexistence between the literal as stated above and the figurative indication that the crisis the pilgrim is experiencing is “acedia,” or sloth. In a sense contemporary with Dante, sloth was expressed as a loss of drive, purpose, urgency, and interest, meaning that one who suffered from sloth did not interact with the social world in a typical sense. In Dante’s time, clinical depression was not a recognized disease; Dante would have been condemned to hell by his peers for the expression of such symptoms, and so his depiction of his journey into salvation by descent into hell is not entirely illogical. Accompanying Dante into the realm of Inferno is Virgil. Virgil in Inferno is comparable to Jung’s spiritual guide Elijah, whom he later calls Philemon and identifies with the animus. According to Jung, his dialog with Elijah “brought home to [him] the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life,” (Jung, 178-194). Like Jung, Dante uses Virgil as an archetypal liaison with his subconscious; Virgil is the shadow of Dante, the only part of him to remain coherent to his confrontation with depression.

Dante (the pilgrim, as a character in Inferno) evinces first the quality of depression: it interferes with daily life. This is represented by Dante’s attempt to recover his footing when he finds himself at the base of a hill: “…Through the night of sorrow I had spent, the lake within my heart felt terror present. And just as he who, with exhausted breath, having escaped from sea to shore, turns back to watch the dangerous waters he has quit, so did my spirit, still a fugitive, turn back to look intently at the pass that never has let any man survive. I let my tired body rest awhile. Moving again, I tried the lonely slope—my firm foot always was the one below. And almost where the hillside starts to rise—look there!—a leopard, very quick and lithe, a leopard covered with a spotted hide,” (Dante, lines 22-33). The leopard begins a progression of three steadily escalating interruptions in Dante’s uphill struggle, which is arguably allusive to recovery; following the leopard, which only mildly impeded his ascent, is the lion. Dante describes himself as feeling fearful in the presence of this second beast, but with the appearance of the third creature, a lupa or she-wolf, comes the final interruption of Dante the pilgrim’s daily functioning. With the arrival of the lupa archetype, Dante begins to delve into the second aspect of clinical depression: a pervasive feeling of hopelessness.

This pervasive feeling of hopelessness is symbolized in Canto III of Inferno by the Gate of Hell, over which is inscribed, “Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way to the eternal pain, through me the way that runs among the lost. Justice urged on my high artificer; my maker was divine authority, the highest wisdom, and the primal love. Before me, nothing but eternal things were made, and I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, who enter here,” (Dante, lines 1-9). Archetypally, the gate exemplifies the cognitive dissonance felt by Dante the pilgrim by corresponding to the paradoxical notion that the gate was created and inscribed by God and is the portal to eternal suffering and all that is hopeless. Dante, however, realizes this paradox; the gate makes no sense to the pilgrim, foreshadowing his recovery as achieved by his journey, not only through Inferno, but also Purgatorio and Paradiso. This latter prediction, however, is not made apparent to Dante relative to his placement in time as the pilgrim in the story.

Thirdly exhibited in archetypal form is perhaps the most significant indicator of clinical depression: the notion of prevalent and long term neurotic suffering. In the Ninth Circle of Inferno, Dante encounters “that creature who was once a handsome presence,” (Dante, line 18). Here, the introduction of Dis engages the reader in an intertextual dialogue with the extracanonical myth of Lucifer. According to some accounts, Lucifer, who was once God’s most magnificent angel, “grew curious about what God was planning for the future,” (Kalsched, pg. 4). His perfectionism and pride as a supernatural being overcame his love for God upon his discovery that God intended to enter the earthly realm in the incarnate body of a man, made in His image, who would then be placed upon the throne of heaven. Outraged, Lucifer rebelled against God’s incarnation, rallying a group of other rebel angels; all were punished for this transgression when God cast them into hell. Here, Lucifer created for himself an underworld, placing himself “in the service of Nothing rather than the service of being, and so he became the great nihilist, Dis,” (Kalsched, pg. 5). Understanding this etymology of Dis, one is able to infer the true implication of the idea of “eternal suffering” presented in the Ninth Circle. The endless suffering of Dis and his driven and sustained sense of inner refusal is familiar to the clinical setting. Depressed patients frequently seem to be caught in a perpetual state of hopelessness, as if personally residing in the vicious circle of victimization occupied by Dis himself. As Dante and Virgil ascend the inverted body of Dis, Virgil says to Dante, “We must take our leave of so much evil,” (Dante, line 84), so while Dis’s suffering is indeed eternal, Dante’s is merely pervasive until the end of his journey.

While Carl Jung may not have been entirely original in the metaphorical representation of his journey into his own psyche, his psychological ideas present a valuable schema for the retrospective analysis of Dante’s Inferno. Jung emphasizes the need to retain awareness of the archetypal shadow without identifying with it and becoming absorbed by it, which requires significant moral effort and becomes the center of the self-actualizing process. Doing so without recognition of the anima and animus is impossible; Dante sets himself well on his journey to recovery by recognizing his animus in Virgil (and later, his anima in Beatrice), as well as the archetypal representations of cognitive dissonance, interruption of daily life, the pervasive feeling of hopelessness, and prevalent and long term nature of clinical depression as represented by the lupa, the Gate of Hell, and Dis himself.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. “Inferno”. Bantam Books. New York, New York. 1982.

Jung, Carl G. “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections”. 1961.

Jung, Carl G. “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”. London. 1996.

Jung, Carl G. “The Red Book”. W.W. Norton & Company. New York. 2009.

Kalsched, Donald E.“Hope vs. Hopelessness in the Psychoanalytic Situation and in Dante’s Divine Comedy”. New York Association for Analytical Psychology. New York, New York. 2009.