ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic examination of A. Dante's work must take into account his early poetry as well as his Comedy and then prose explanations of his poetry. When a psychoanalytic clinician looks at this biographical and literary material, it is critically important to take into consideration that Dante experienced a double parent loss in middle childhood in later adolescence, and young adulthood the loss of his muse and romantic love and his home in Florence. Dante's playful use of allegory and metaphor also is so far removed from anything disorganized as psychotic regression. In summary, Dante's journey is similar to depressed parent-loss persons whose childhood traumas have left them reeling. This turmoil is to be a preparation for the bigger battle that is fought out in the Inferno and Purgatory. In Dante's case, visual unconscious material appears to vary widely in his preverbal preconscious and then playfully is integrated with newly invented words into an ego-syntonic non-neurotic mind with free-flowing associations.
