Dante and the Unconscious: When Poetry Anticipates Psychology

Love, Guilt, and Inner Descent in the Commedia as a Clinical Lens on the Present

Introduction

On May 11, 2026, in the Duomo of Milan, Toni Servillo's voice brought Dante Alighieri's verses back to life through Giuseppe Montesano's dramaturgical reading. The initiative — produced by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano as part of the cycle Le voci di Dante nelle chiese di Lombardia — was not simply a performance. It was a cultural act that posed an uncomfortable question: does poetry still make sense in a time when violence erupts daily into collective life?

The answer, offered by Montesano himself, was not consolatory. It was structural: poetry makes sense today more than ever, precisely because it offers a language for what ordinary discourse cannot contain. This statement, seemingly aesthetic, carries profound implications for those working in clinical psychology and human development. Literature — and in particular Dante's Commedia — is not a cultural ornament to be placed alongside psychological science. In many cases, it is its anticipation.

"There Are No Crimes of Love, Only Crimes for Love"

One of the most charged statements of the evening concerned the distinction between a crime of love and a crime for love. The grammatical difference is minimal; the conceptual one is radical.

To speak of a crime of love merges violence and feeling into a single semantic entity, as if affection could, by its very nature, justify or explain the harm inflicted on another human being. It is a linguistic construction that absolves before it understands, that naturalizes violence within the affective bond. To speak instead of a crime for love restores the causal structure of the sentence: there is a subject, there is an act, there is a motivation — but the motivation does not coincide with the act, nor does it justify it.

This distinction is not merely rhetorical. It touches on one of the most complex knots in contemporary clinical psychology: the confusion between love and control, between attachment and possession.

Attachment theory, originally developed by Bowlby (1969/1982) and subsequently expanded by Ainsworth et al. (1978), has shown how internal working models built in early caregiving relationships durably structure the way individuals experience affective bonds in adulthood. Insecure attachment patterns — particularly anxious and disorganized ones — are associated with greater difficulty in regulating emotional distance from the other, and with a tendency toward fusionality or control as strategies for managing separation anxiety (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016).

In these contexts, the love subjectively experienced is genuine. The suffering is real. But the behavior that follows can be profoundly harmful to the partner. Research on intimate partner violence has extensively documented how many coercive and violent behaviors are justified — by those who enact them and sometimes by those who endure them — precisely through reference to love (Johnson, 2008). The phrase "I did it because I love you" is, in this sense, one of the most dangerous available in the linguistic repertoire of human relationships.

Dante, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, encounters Paolo and Francesca. The two love each other — and this Dante acknowledges, understands, is moved by to the point of fainting. But he does not absolve them. Compassion does not eliminate responsibility. The poet weeps, and then continues walking. It is a gesture that clinical psychology knows well: holding together empathic understanding of lived experience and clarity about the consequences of action is one of the most difficult — and most necessary — goals of therapeutic work (Linehan, 1993).

The Parallel Between Dreams, the Unconscious, and the Descent into Hell

The second suggestion to emerge from the evening concerned the structure of the Commedia as a journey into interiority: the descent into Hell as a metaphor for the descent into the unconscious, with the dream as the privileged form of access to that dimension.

Dante begins his journey midway along the journey of our life, at night, in a dark forest, without knowing how he arrived there. It is an opening that has the phenomenological structure of a dream: disorientation, loss of familiar boundaries, immersion in a space that obeys different laws from those of waking life. Freud (1900/1953), in his foundational work on dream interpretation, described the dream as the royal road to the unconscious — a space in which repressed contents find expression in symbolic and narrative form, distorted just enough to bypass the censorship of consciousness.

Jung (1964) deepened this direction, arguing that great myths and great literary works draw from the same archetypes that populate the collective unconscious. From this perspective, the Commedia does not merely recount the journey of a medieval poet: it recounts the universal structure of the individuation process — the descent into one's own dark material, the confrontation with the shadow, the ascent toward a more integrated form of awareness.

But there is something more specific worthy of attention from a clinical standpoint. The Dantean descent is not an act of detached observation: it is a traversal. Virgil does not lead Dante out of Hell from the outside or from above. He accompanies him within, circle by circle, skipping nothing. This structural detail has a precise echo in contemporary psychotherapy, particularly in approaches that work with trauma and dissociated contents.

Van der Kolk (2014) has shown that unprocessed trauma does not disappear: it becomes embodied, repeats itself, emerges in dreams and behaviors without the person understanding where it comes from. Healing does not occur through bypassing painful material, but through its reworking — a process that requires the presence of another who accompanies without substituting, who witnesses without overwhelming. This is exactly Virgil's function: guide, not savior; presence, not solution.

Both psychodynamic and trauma-oriented psychotherapy share this intuition: change does not occur in the comfort zone of consciousness, but in contact — regulated and contained — with what had been kept at a distance (Fonagy et al., 2002). Dante knew this seven centuries ago. He called it Hell. We call it the therapeutic process.

Why Poetry Has Clinical Meaning

Montesano's question — does poetry still make sense in this time? — can be reread as a question about the function of symbolic language in psychic life.

Research in narrative psychology has shown that the capacity to construct coherent stories about one's own experience — including painful experience — is associated with better mental health outcomes (McAdams, 2001). This is not about finding a happy ending, but about giving narrative form to what has happened: moving from chaos to story, from fragmentation to sequence. This is what poetry does par excellence — it does not simplify, but contains. It does not resolve, but gives form.

Literature as a clinical tool has a well-established history. Bibliotherapy — the therapeutic use of narrative and poetic texts — has been studied across diverse contexts, showing efficacy in reducing emotional isolation, fostering mentalization, and promoting affective regulation (Brewster, 2008). Reading about a pain that is not one's own, but that resonates with one's own, activates processes of identification and distance simultaneously — precisely the optimal condition for emotional processing.

In this sense, listening to Dante in a cathedral is not an aesthetic experience separate from psychological life. It is an act that mobilizes the same resources that therapy seeks to activate: the capacity to stay with difficulty, to recognize oneself in a larger narrative, to find words — or to let words find us — for what would otherwise remain mute.

Conclusion

Dante's Commedia is not a psychological text. But those working in clinical, developmental, or research psychology can recognize in it, page after page, the fundamental structures of human functioning: attachment and loss, guilt and responsibility, dissociation and integration, the need for a guide in the dark.

The evening of May 11 at the Duomo of Milan was a reminder of something essential: that psychological knowledge does not live only in manuals and research databases. It lives also — and for far longer — in great literature. And that our task, as a scientific and clinical community, is also to know how to recognize this knowledge, name it, and return it to those who need it.

Because some truths need poetic form in order to be spoken.

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969)

Brewster, L. (2008). The reading remedy: Bibliotherapy in practice. Aplis, 21(4), 172–177.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.

Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vols. 4–5). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900)

Johnson, M. P. (2008). A typology of domestic violence: Intimate terrorism, violent resistance, and situational couple violence. Northeastern University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday.

Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.

McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.