A Psychoanalytic Study of Psychosexual Signs in Dali’s Adaptive Paintings of Dante’s Divine Comedy

The aim of the present study is to compare Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy with Salvador Dali’s selected paintings. The researchers seek to find differences, similarities, reflections of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, and analyzed the symbols and signs in Dali’s paintings. Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy consists of thirty-four cantos from which the current study has selected images that illustrate the differences, similarities, psychoanalytic theories of Freud, and symbols in Dali’s paintings. The research method of the present study is analytical-comparative method which has used the American school of comparative literature in analyzing the above examples. The corpuses of the current study include Dante’s Inferno and Dali’s adaptive paintings. This study addresses Inferno in that it inspired Dante in the form of dream, and it is the product of the unconscious mind. On the other hand, Dali’s Paintings have been explored because he, as a surrealist painter, portrayed the dreams and the unconscious in his works. The major finding includes the similarity between Dali’s focused on the human’s unconscious and psychosexual symbols in his paintings with Dante’s employment of the unconscious in Divine Comedy, as well as the impact of this medieval work on modern art.