Archetypal Principles for the Restoration of the Fractured Soul A Seminar for Psychotherapists and Psychoanalysts
Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD
“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had gone astray and lost my way.” ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno, I:1-3
“Not I, but the poets discovered the unconscious.” ~Sigmund Freud
“Poets can speak of the tragic with elegance and tenderness so that its truth can be tolerated. Truth without a loving intent can destitute.” ~Paul Ricoeur
“Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility.” —Martin Heidegger
The background condition for our experience as therapists is always rooted in the tragic. In the encounter with our patients, we are invariably thrust into a story of irreconcilable opposition—that of seeking the truth about one’s life and, at the same time, not wanting to know that truth. We therapists not only become witnesses to this tragic drama, but we soon participate in it. We hear how our patients have been ravaged by their traumas and the malevolence of their world, and how they’ve had to endure the loss of innocence that comes with the wounding of one’s soul. We notice how their lives have been lived in more constricted, insistent, and repetitive ways, and how they’ve had to protect themselves from psychic annihilation by forgetting. Their faded subjectivity has seemingly expelled them from the human world and, with a shattered spirit, they wander in exile searching for what has been forever lost--consigned to what Samuel Becket described as the “abiding feeling of never having been born properly.” Most painful of all, perhaps, is the patient’s tragic recognition that emerges along the way that they themselves have been primary agents in deepening and maintaining their suffering. Guilt subsequently grafts itself onto their being, graceful receiving is obstructed, and the despair of not being oneself circumscribes life.
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This seminar will explore the fractured and demoralized soul’s journey toward greater wholeness—the movement from despair to hope to subjectivity and freedom. We will do so by immersing ourselves in a story of transformation: the story of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy--his personal passage through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Dante’s story is a story of forgetting and remembering, and learning to speak in one’s own voice. It is a story of the tension between despair and hope, estrangement and reunion, guilt and forgiveness, exile and the return home.It is also a story of deep encounter. Self-Awareness and healing ensue as Dante encounters sinners and saints who mirror back to him his own tragic drama and his failed attempts at self-healing. Most of all, however, we experience Dante’s transformation through his relationship with his primary guides (Virgil and Beatrice) who show him the way through the darkness of the Inferno and into the light that begins to appear in Purgatorio. The Divine Comedy is a profound articulation of therapeutic action--what and who contribute to Dante's healing and what are the mechanisms and processes involved. While Dante’s language and images emerge from medieval Judeo-Christian discourse, we’ll seek to distill clinical principles embedded in that discourse that still speak to the work we therapists do in our contemporary world. We will identify archetypal principles that can inform how we think about the therapeutic relationship, the clinical frames we establish, and the poetic movements of the therapeutic process itself. The fundamental question we’ll examine is not so much how we might remove the symptom or restore its structuring power, but how the real “disorder” is not necessarily one’s symptom but the false life the symptom reveals. That is, how is our symptom the stand-in for all that we don’t want to know about ourselves? If the experience of trauma becomes the inaugural event of our subjectivity as it crystalizes a lifetime of buried conflicts and mandates a painful review of our entire life, how might we therapists be better guides for our patients in approaching the truth of their lives? What might we learn from Virgil, Beatrice, and the other guides? How might we help give birth to our patients’ subjectivity and freedom, help them rewrite their relationship to suffering, and become more authentically ‘ensouled’ human beings? Join us in Gubbio, Italy this July as we travel with Dante through his and our own inner spaces for an experience that will enkindle, elevate, and, perhaps, even transform. You'll be challenged and inspired to broaden your understanding of the therapeutic passage and deepen your participation in the renewal of your patients’ lives.
Come Join Us. Dive Deep. Be Amazed by the Adventure.
"The Commedia expresses the heights and depths of what a human being can be." ~T. S. Eliot