INDIVIDUATION PROCESS IN THE DIVINE COMEDY – A JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. Here, our poet situates himself in relation to a symbolic landscape, the “shadowed forest,” which represents a crisis in the midst of his mortal life. According to Jung, our lives separates into two parts. In the first half of our lives, we separate from humanity. In the second half of our lives, humans reunite with the human race. They become part of the collective once again. This can be attained through a process called individuation, which is a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness to be assimilated into the whole personality. There are three steps of individuation in Jungian …show more content…
Even a moderately comprehensive knowledge of the shadow can cause a good deal of confusion and mental darkness, since it gives rise to personality problems which one had never remotely imagined before. In alchemical terms, this confrontation is called nigredo. Nigredo is the first step of Magnum Opus, the process of working with prima materia to create philosopher’s stone. It also refers psychologically to the mental disorientation that typically arises in the process of assimilating unconscious contents, particularly aspects of the shadow. It could be described as a moment of maximum despair, that is a prerequisite to personal development. For this reason alone, we can understand why the alchemists called their nigredo melancholia, “a black blacker than black,” night, an affliction of the soul, confusion, etc., or, more pointedly, the “black raven.” For us the raven seems only a funny allegory, but for the medieval experts it was a well-known allegory of the