ON-DEMAND COURSE

Dante’s Divine Comedy

Jungian Psychology
TEACHER
Dennis Patrick Slattery
TOPIC
Archetypes
Format
9 Class Course
DURATION
13.5 Hrs

Payment options: Credit Card or PayPal.

Follow Dante’s inner map from hell to heaven

Dennis Slattery is a beloved teacher, mythologist and poet himself. In this in-depth course Slattery opens the Divine Comedy to modern ears and eyes. What relevance does Dante’s poem, written early in 14th century Italy, have for us today? What can we learn from its rich poetic analogies, correspondences, and alliances with our mythopoetic lives today? To ask it another way, what is the pilgrimage each of us is on currently that resonates with Dante’s story, his personal myth? Revealing these common currents between our story and Dante’s will offer new revelations of our own mythic destiny today. 

Join Slattery on a journey exploring Dante’s Divine Comedy. Learn how Dante’s sign posts still mark the way. 

Course Description

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This program offers a mythic pilgrimage from isolation to community via knowledge of the heart. 

Dennis Patrick Slattery has been in love with Dante Alighieri’s 14th. century poem ever since he was introduced to it in graduate school at the University of Dallas. Since those days, he has taught it in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program for many years. The ways into this narrative epic are as numerous as the thousands of lines that comprise the three canticas: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. 

Dante’s Divine Comedy is a rich mythic, poetic, psychological, historical, political and spiritual creation by one of the great imaginations in world literature. This course will emphasize reading and participating in Dante’s remembered journey through the corridors of your own personal myth.  

This course will be exploratory in nature. Participants are encouraged to pay heed to their own insights of this classic pilgrimage. 

This course explores some other key themes, including:

  • Dante’s struggle to craft the poem.
  • Our role as readers who are called upon in several instances to complete the poem when Dante reaches his limits of poetic expression.
  • The moral and psychological territories of what the Catholic Church labeled the major dysfunctions of the soul: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. Each has its own terrain, and each is a form of loving gone awry, either in its excess, scarcity or distortion. They reflect psychological attitudes in the soul of every human being as well as in our culture today.
  • A pilgrimage from unconsciousness to consciousness.
  • The instrumental role of the guide, the mentor, the tutor.
  • The creative process that we are made aware of throughout this remembered journey.
  • The power of analogy as a way of knowing by indirection.
  • Learning to ask the right questions as the soul expands out with a heart of compassion.
  • Liberation from the clinging ego to a universal understanding of ourselves within and in relation to our wider world.
  • Dante’s imaginal universe of what he calls “animarum statem post-mortem,” the state of souls after death. The poem transports the reader into the realm of eternals.
  • The terza rima rhyme scheme, what Dante called the third rhyme, is an integral part of his poem’s structure as well as the structure of our lives in time.
  • The nature of our personal stories as we recollect them with the aid of the poem. As with Dante, so do we recollect from who and where we are now, back to who we were then. We lead a double life through two selves, both still in process.
  • We highly recommend Slattery’s book for this course:
  • Day-to-Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth Through The Divine Comedy by Dennis Patrick Slattery (iUniverse, 2011) available in kindle, paperback and hardback.

This book from Slattery is the one he will use as a place of discussion for the poem and then to write occasionally for ten or fifteen minutes. The goal here of this course is to involve you deeply and consistently in the poem and see its analogies with your own life pilgrimage.

Slattery’s book will be a complement to Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of Dante’s Commedia that is cited throughout the course. It contains the entire poem translation by Mandelbaum and is helpful in case you would also like to wrestle with Dante on your own.

This program is ideal if you want to be able to

  • Learn about Dante’s famous poem that is often referred to by Jungians and others, like historians, mythologists, and poets, and why it is still relevant today.
  • Find out what Dante’s Divine Comedy can reveal about your own mythic destiny.
  • Have a greater understanding of your own individuation process.
  • Enjoy learning in a community and take joy in a deep dive into Dante’s work.

Course overview

What you will receive

*You will receive a certificate of completion, but it’s not from an official accrediting body. Please check if it will be accepted by the organization you wish to use it with.
9 videos & 9 audio recordings
Companion Guide
Auto-generated Subtitles
Certificate of completion*
Available in English

ABout the teachers

Dennis Patrick Slattery

Dennis Patrick Slattery Ph.D., has been teaching for more than 54 years, the last 27 of which have been in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Scholarships

We here at Jung Platform want to make these programs available to anyone. If you would love to participate yet can’t pay for the full course, then please send us an email at scholarships@jungplatform.com and describe why you feel you qualify for a scholarship, how much you can pay, and what you will do to help the Jung Platform promote this and other programs.

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