The Descent into the Unconscious as Unauthorized Self-possession: The Recovery of the Lost and Dying Self

This chapter discusses Dante in order to develop further a notion of a spiritual descent into hell, albeit one under the guidance of Virgil rather than of Freud. Certainly the notion of a spiritual descent into hell became literary. In the case of the classical descent into hell, the loss of this form of spiritual inquiry into the soul's underlying foundations would have been the result of a wide range of policies and processes in the years of Constantine and in centuries following. The chapter suggests that the dreamer and visionary are at the place where one might recover aspects of the soul that have long been lost. To recover that self requires a spiritual journey to one's past, in which one may encounter the primitive in the form of the bizarre and ghoulish, or the merely vacuous and pretentious aspects of a long-forgotten self.