From its first complete Italian printing in 1872 up to the present day, Domenico Comparetti's Vergil in the Middle Ages has been acknowledged as a masterpiece, regarded by some critics as "a true and ...proper history of European consciousness from antiquity to Dante." Treating Vergil's poetry as a foundation of Latin European identity, Comparetti seeks to give a complete history of the medieval conception of the preeminent poet. Scholars of the time had transformed Vergil into a sage and a seer, a type of universal philosopher--even a Christian poet and a guide of a Christian poet. In the mid-twelfth century, there surfaced legends that converted Vergil into a magician, endowing him with supernatural powers. Comparetti explores the ongoing interest in Vergil's poetry as it appeared in popular folklore and legends as well as in medieval classical scholarship. This great synthesizing work, which has been unavailable for over twenty years, is now back in print, based on E.F.M. Benecke's 1895 translation of the Italian second edition. Comparetti begins with the period in which Vergil lived and goes on to evaluate how the later images, particularly the legends, of Vergil coincide with the more scholarly accounts of his life. The result is a grand sweep of literary history from the first century B.C.E. through the end of the Middle Ages, with implications for the nineteenth century and the rise of Italian nationalism.
The central point in these formulations is that the traumatic experiences of one generation can be transmitted unconsciously to the second, and often third generation, in some fashion, such that ...these children and grandchildren find themselves living out-in their private or professional lives-certain aspects of the original traumata in a way that they cannot recognize or understand because the origins are hidden. It can indeed become an unpleasant impetus toward establishing an early feeling of separate individual subjectivity and responsibility in the small child.\n In the small groups, progress was often very slow, since the participants seemed highly inhibited toward asking for or revealing intimate details of their personal lives.
In this article I will attempt to bring together some of my own personal experiences of working in training programmes that serve to introduce group analysis—or to give it a firmer methodical and ...institutional foundation—in different cultures, political and social systems in other parts of the world. The question that often arises in this work is: what universal standards do we wish to uphold, regardless of where and with whom we are working? Where are we prepared to defer to ingrained cultural norms or other social givens than those in which we ourselves as trainers originally received our own training? In my view this is a delicate matter, since the danger on the one hand is of being excessively Eurocentric and taking our own standards as being universally applicable; on the other hand however, an overly multicultural approach—which may seem at first very accommodating to the various different norms that we are confronted with—may end up by depriving our discipline of its social and emancipatory thrust and ultimately merely confirming such local cultural norms rather than questioning them. I would suggest that one of the most valuable aspects of practical group analysis is its tendency to call into question all manner of social and cultural norms, whether related to age, gender, power, money or any other salient factor that structures social relationships.
