Dante and the Other brings together noted and emerging Dante scholars with theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, bridging the Florentine's premodern world to today's postmodern context. Exploring how alterity has become a potent symbol in religion, philosophy, politics, and culture, this book will be of interest to many related fields. The book offers a thorough foundation in approaching Dante as proto-phenomenologist. It includes an informative review of literature, historical insight into Dante's poetics-toward-ineffability as alternative to modern scientism, a foray into science fiction, existential elaborations, phenomenological analyses of Inferno's Canto I, and applications to psychotherapy and qualitative research. It also contains a poem from an imagined Virgil retiring in Limbo, and a meditation on Dante's complicated relationship to homosexuality. Dante and the Other presents the mystical passion of apophatic spirituality, the millennia-spanning Augustinianism of radical orthodoxy, Levinas, Heidegger, and many others-all driven by Dante's Labors of Love. It is essential reading for Dante scholars, as well as readers interested in his works.

Dante and the Other brings together noted and emerging Dante scholars with theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, bridging the Florentine's premodern world to today's postmodern context. Exploring how alterity has become a potent symbol in religion, philosophy, politics, and culture, this book will be of interest to many related fields. The book offers a thorough foundation in approaching Dante as proto-phenomenologist. It includes an informative review of literature, historical insight into Dante's poetics-toward-ineffability as alternative to modern scientism, a foray into science fiction, existential elaborations, phenomenological analyses of Inferno's Canto I, and applications to psychotherapy and qualitative research. It also contains a poem from an imagined Virgil retiring in Limbo, and a meditation on Dante's complicated relationship to homosexuality. Dante and the Other presents the mystical passion of apophatic spirituality, the millennia-spanning Augustinianism of radical orthodoxy, Levinas, Heidegger, and many others-all driven by Dante's Labors of Love. It is essential reading for Dante scholars, as well as readers interested in his works.

This study examines how crime scene analysts, or criminal profilers, tacitly apply a synthesis of Jungian interpretations of active imagination and countertransference. This work clarifies this construct, countertransferential active imagination or imaginal work, through the archetypalist concept of image. For its data, the study presents two distinct bodies of literature. The first is an extensive review of Jungian writings and subsequent archetypalist formulations. The second source of literature is the autobiographical texts by two criminal profilers, John Douglas and Robert Ressler."Jungian Crime Scene Analysis" makes use of a range of methodological considerations. Beyond a fundamentally hermeneutic approach, a novel formulation is developed, rhizomic research, which values declaring over answering questions. Utilizing these methodologies, this study presents sexual homicide perpetrators as having disorders of imagination, imagopathy, seen through imaginal deficiencies such as failure of empathy, rigid fantasies, and unresolved projections. This research challenges assumptions that individuation is purely healthful.

This book is for everyone. We all yearn for (and do) magic. We just don't let ourselves see it. Our world is a far wilder, weirder and more mysterious place than we ever admit, yet the magic we perform every day hides beneath the countless explanations we foist onto life. In the face of these convincing yet empty explanations, we displace our hunger for a sense of the magical onto other goals, addictions, and distractions. Left at odds with the very sublimity that animates our every moment, we have turned magic into an exception, a collection of superstitions, a historical backwater, and a cinematic spectacle, rather than the very fabric of life as lived. This book is about recovering the imagination of magic and the magic of imagination. This, the first of two volumes, introduces the landscape of the imaginal and the existential voids. Through illustrative stories and self-assessment exercises, this book brings the often-obscure language of existentialism, esotericism, and imaginal psychology to life.