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aggressive energy to the canvas as in infancy it carried it from the mouth to the skin. The canvas may sometimes represent the skin” (Rose 1963, p. 787-788). Concerning literary arts , according to Ernest Jones (1953), Freud read Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” during his self-analysis and writing of his “Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). The Comedy was subsequently dubbed “psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages’ (Chessick 2001), and several North American authors attempted to subject it to psychoanalytic exploration. David Aberbach (1984) approaches the Comedy from the Object Relations perspective, focusing on the fate of aggression and love in lost, found and created objects. According to Richard Chessick (2001), Comedy is a drama of structural conflict, where Inferno represents the Id, Purgatory the Ego, and Paradise the Ego Ideal superstructure. Eva Papiasvili (2020) draws and expands on both, giving a multiperspectival account of Dante’s masterpiece as a proto-psychoanalytic poetic representation of recovery and expansion of Eros , involving a complicated self-transforming journey, accessing the most remote parts of the psyche, where the drive is represented throughout in the unprecedented unity of form and content . Dante’s invention and usage of the rhyme ‘terzine’ is viewed as a poetic means of representing the drive of incredible vivacity , which sets in motion and drives the plot without ever falling into monotony. If “For the psychoanalyst, the divine is the metaphor of the capacity to represent” (ibid, p.48), the progression is from the immediacy of unmitigated drive, ‘discharged’ in the ‘language of corporeality’ in the Inferno, to the dreamlike focus on the internal processes, unfolding subjectively, giving rise to expanded symbolic and representational range in the Purgatorio, to the attempt to create a Love/Eros filled expanded “trans-representational” world of the Paradiso, deploying full range of motions, lights and colors of its creation. Viewed this way, the Comedy presents a proto-psychoanalytic insight into the complex role of regression, destruction, transgression, and conflict in generating growth, expansion, and creativity, within the context of the presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective inquiry leading to psychic reorganization: “… Inferno is to allow troubled Dante to become aware, with the aid of the reliable protective soothing presence of Virgil, of the conundrum of the most primitive sexual and aggressive forces... Their verbal representation within the intrasubjective and intersubjective context begins the process of recognition of such forces as part of one’s own internal endowment, and their consequent integration, attenuation, sublimation, and mastery” (Papiasvili 2020, p. 41).
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