Chessick R D
Northwestern University, Evanston Hospital, USA.
J Am Acad Psychoanal. 2001 Summer;29(2):281-304. doi: 10.1521/jaap.29.2.281.17257.
I realize after having gone over this material that I have done a sort of deconstruction of Dante's Divine Comedy which putatively attempts to raise the human vision to transcendent heights and to focus love on the love of God, but which along the way indulges in the very human aspects of pity, compassion, music, poetry, and the other arts, as well as reason and puzzlement. In this sense the poem is also an exposition of the value of the higher human faculties, which contrasts at times rather vividly with the apparently harsh autocratic fates that are assigned to some characters--who do not seem quite deserving of what is inflicted upon them. Here we have a collision between absolute faith in the judgment of God and human reason and compassion which sometimes seems to be unable to justify these judgments. In spite of the fact that Dante is trying to adhere to orthodox theology throughout, it is clear that his poetic soul has great difficulty in avoiding the depiction of characters for whom he has a secret sympathy. The central point of this study of The Divine Comedy is to emphasize how Dante, almost in spite of himself, expressed empathy and understanding for a variety of unfortunates either in the Inferno or in the Purgatorio. Virgil even scolds him for his compassion, arguing that God's justice is always correct and if God is angry at someone and punishes him or her, Dante should also be angry and not compassionate. Dante tries, but he cannot quite manage to do it. Translated into modern terminology, we can learn from this report of a medieval "psychoanalysis" an important lesson in our clinical work. Rigid adherence to rules such as those Freud himself proclaimed (although he never followed them), for instance in his famous demand that one be always opaque to the patient, and/or rigid adherence to one or another psychoanalytic theory, must be understood as a form of countertransference, a character flaw in the analyst. Each case demands its own approach and its own form or forms or channels of understanding, just as Dante offers us in The Divine Comedy. It is because he offers such a perspective almost in spite of himself that his poem transcends the medieval mind and becomes relevant to all ages and cultures. As a rule of thumb, when one finds one's instinctual convictions about how to proceed in conflict with one's theories and set of rules, something is wrong. It is with the greatest trepidation that a well-analysed psychoanalyst should force him- or herself to ignore an instinctual or intuitive feeling of how to respond to a patient because it conflicts with some theoretical principles or official rules of procedure. Such a conflict is a call for further self-analysis, consultation with colleagues, and creative solutions.
在仔细研读了这段材料后，我意识到自己对但丁的《神曲》进行了某种解构。这部作品据称试图将人类的视野提升到超凡的高度，并将爱聚焦于对上帝的爱，但在这个过程中，它也沉溺于怜悯、同情、音乐、诗歌及其他艺术等非常人性的方面，还有理性与困惑。从这个意义上说，这首诗也是对人类高级官能价值的一种阐释，它有时与分配给某些人物的看似严苛的独裁命运形成鲜明对比，而这些人物似乎并不完全应得降临到他们身上的遭遇。在这里，我们看到了对上帝审判的绝对信仰与人类理性和同情之间的冲突，这种冲突有时似乎无法为这些审判提供正当理由。尽管但丁在整部作品中都试图坚守正统神学，但显然他的诗魂在避免描绘那些他暗自同情的人物时遇到了很大困难。对《神曲》的这项研究的核心要点在于强调，但丁几乎不由自主地对《地狱篇》或《炼狱篇》中的各种不幸者表达了同情与理解。维吉尔甚至因他的同情而斥责他，认为上帝的正义永远是正确的，如果上帝对某人发怒并惩罚他或她，但丁也应该发怒而不是同情。但丁努力尝试，但他就是做不到。用现代术语来解释，我们可以从这份中世纪“精神分析”的报告中学到临床工作中的一个重要教训。严格坚持诸如弗洛伊德自己宣称的那些规则（尽管他自己从未遵循过），例如他著名的要求分析师对患者始终保持晦涩难懂，和/或严格坚持某一种或另一种精神分析理论，必须被理解为一种反移情的形式，即分析师的性格缺陷。每个案例都需要有自己的方法以及自己的理解形式或渠道，就像但丁在《神曲》中为我们呈现的那样。正是因为他几乎不由自主地提供了这样一种视角，他的诗才超越了中世纪的思维，变得与所有时代和文化都相关。一般来说，当一个人发现自己关于如何行事的本能信念与自己的理论和一套规则相冲突时，就出问题了。一位经过充分分析的精神分析师应该极其惶恐地迫使自己忽视对如何回应患者的本能或直觉感受，因为它与某些理论原则或官方程序规则相冲突。这样的冲突是进一步自我分析、与同事磋商并寻求创造性解决方案的信号。
