Guilt and Forgiveness in Dante and the Therapeutic Journey
“Why do we let our guilt consume us so?”
~Dante, Inferno, VII: 21
Those of us who have taken the therapeutic journey and have been transformed know that our capacity to love can only mature after we have accepted forgiveness. It is forgiveness that makes real love possible. Forgiveness is a gift given to the other freely and in its completeness. It is an acceptance “in-spite-of,” essential for psychic rebirth. The generosity of this gift encounters our woundedness with compassion and can turn negation into gratitude. Forgiveness readmits the outcast and the self-exiled into the human order and ensures they belong. Julia Kristeva puts it this way: “Through my love, I exclude you from history for a while, I take you for a child, and this means that I recognize the unconscious motivations of your crime, and I allow you to make a new person out of yourself. For the unconscious to inscribe itself in a new narrative that will not be the eternal return of the death drive in the cycle of crime and punishment, it must pass through the love of forgiveness.” (1989, Black Sun, p. 204).
For what, then, do we need to be forgiven? Any therapist who has encountered a patient humiliated in the depths of their abjection and cemented to their pain, who offers only a muted cry of unworthiness, can speak of the insidious and life-denying force of guilt. Hardened guilt colonizes the psyche and enslaves us to an existence embedded in ambivalence. It creates an amputated life that constricts, condemns, and punishes. The harsh inner judge, the internalized saboteur, the destructive internal object, the perpetrator introject, or by any other name, seals us tightly in our self-made crypt.
We are guilty, to be sure, for our actual crimes—and, for this, we need forgiveness. But we also pronounce ourselves guilty when, early in life, we are expelled from our most primal relationship--that containing embrace where tenderness, protection, and the willingness to sacrifice on our behalf nourishes the sense of being wanted and confirms our belonging in the world. To assuage the ache of this loss, we blame not the world or others but ourselves. Our guilt takes on cosmic proportions; we are guilty simply for inhabiting the world. We impute wickedness upon ourselves and are left only with the futile task of trying, each day, to justify our existence to the ever-enigmatic and capricious universe. It is for this guiltiness-of-being that we also need forgiveness.
Dante's passage through the Inferno and Purgatorio offers us a bridge between guilt and forgiveness. He teaches us how guilt condemns us to servitude, how it perverts the bonds of desire and dis-orders our loves, and how the pride of the ego hardens our hearts to keep guilt’s sovereignty alive. He also tells us that repentance and mourning are essential for freedom. However, before we can repent and mourn, we must be willing to engage in the most personal of hermeneutical tasks: we must re-member and re-cite our stories. We must bring our unique history to life again—that we re-collect the forgotten, re-connect its fragments, and re-vise its meaning in a new light. If we can do this in humility, Dante contends, not only will the burden of our guilt be lightened, but the truth, once obscured by the lie, will show itself, and by embracing it, we become free.
Join us in Gubbio this summer for a psychoanalytic-existential reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Be part of our conversation as we endeavor to unpack and explore the therapeutic principles masterfully nestled in Dante’s epic poetic gift. Let the courage of Dante, the pilgrim, and the wisdom of Dante, the poet, be sources of inspiration and hope—that we, like Virgil, can courageously accompany our patients along the way and help brighten the dark road through their suffering.
Come join us. Dive deep. Be amazed by the adventure. Don’t miss out!
~Dante, Inferno, VII: 21
Those of us who have taken the therapeutic journey and have been transformed know that our capacity to love can only mature after we have accepted forgiveness. It is forgiveness that makes real love possible. Forgiveness is a gift given to the other freely and in its completeness. It is an acceptance “in-spite-of,” essential for psychic rebirth. The generosity of this gift encounters our woundedness with compassion and can turn negation into gratitude. Forgiveness readmits the outcast and the self-exiled into the human order and ensures they belong. Julia Kristeva puts it this way: “Through my love, I exclude you from history for a while, I take you for a child, and this means that I recognize the unconscious motivations of your crime, and I allow you to make a new person out of yourself. For the unconscious to inscribe itself in a new narrative that will not be the eternal return of the death drive in the cycle of crime and punishment, it must pass through the love of forgiveness.” (1989, Black Sun, p. 204).
For what, then, do we need to be forgiven? Any therapist who has encountered a patient humiliated in the depths of their abjection and cemented to their pain, who offers only a muted cry of unworthiness, can speak of the insidious and life-denying force of guilt. Hardened guilt colonizes the psyche and enslaves us to an existence embedded in ambivalence. It creates an amputated life that constricts, condemns, and punishes. The harsh inner judge, the internalized saboteur, the destructive internal object, the perpetrator introject, or by any other name, seals us tightly in our self-made crypt.
We are guilty, to be sure, for our actual crimes—and, for this, we need forgiveness. But we also pronounce ourselves guilty when, early in life, we are expelled from our most primal relationship--that containing embrace where tenderness, protection, and the willingness to sacrifice on our behalf nourishes the sense of being wanted and confirms our belonging in the world. To assuage the ache of this loss, we blame not the world or others but ourselves. Our guilt takes on cosmic proportions; we are guilty simply for inhabiting the world. We impute wickedness upon ourselves and are left only with the futile task of trying, each day, to justify our existence to the ever-enigmatic and capricious universe. It is for this guiltiness-of-being that we also need forgiveness.
Dante's passage through the Inferno and Purgatorio offers us a bridge between guilt and forgiveness. He teaches us how guilt condemns us to servitude, how it perverts the bonds of desire and dis-orders our loves, and how the pride of the ego hardens our hearts to keep guilt’s sovereignty alive. He also tells us that repentance and mourning are essential for freedom. However, before we can repent and mourn, we must be willing to engage in the most personal of hermeneutical tasks: we must re-member and re-cite our stories. We must bring our unique history to life again—that we re-collect the forgotten, re-connect its fragments, and re-vise its meaning in a new light. If we can do this in humility, Dante contends, not only will the burden of our guilt be lightened, but the truth, once obscured by the lie, will show itself, and by embracing it, we become free.
Join us in Gubbio this summer for a psychoanalytic-existential reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Be part of our conversation as we endeavor to unpack and explore the therapeutic principles masterfully nestled in Dante’s epic poetic gift. Let the courage of Dante, the pilgrim, and the wisdom of Dante, the poet, be sources of inspiration and hope—that we, like Virgil, can courageously accompany our patients along the way and help brighten the dark road through their suffering.
Come join us. Dive deep. Be amazed by the adventure. Don’t miss out!
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