ABSTRACT
Dante features the regressive psycho-linguistic tendencies, dramatizing them in certain passages of the Paradiso. Behind the paradisiacal images of infancy lurk imponderable ethical, psychological, and theological questions about the nature of self-love. The contradictions between self-love and other-directed love, however, prove more intransigent and disturbing in the view of Franciscan spiritualities, as is emphasized by Ernesto Buonaiuti. Saint Bernard, well before Thomas, shows self-love to be ineradicable in our nature and shows it to be the basis of a transcendent love. The understanding of narcissism follows from the Lacanian troping of psychoanalysis by formal linguistics. Narcissism can be connected psychoanalytically with a regression to the oral stage, where the infant becomes what it puts into its mouth. For the Franciscans, self-love and love of other were opposed and even incompatible. A kind of reconciliation might be found, nevertheless, in divine folly.
