Abstract

Through a critical reading founded on Carl Gustav Jung's works related to alchemy, the essay aims to explain the well-known ambiguities of the narrative development in Boccaccio's famous novel "Nastagio degli Onesti" ("Decameron", V, 8). By viewing the protagonist as the hypostasis of the personal conscience and the other characters as diegetic masks representing essential psychological concepts as described by Jung (personal unconscious, collective conscience, collective unconscious), the story of Nastagio becomes a clear and coherent literary transcription of an individuation process and acquisition of self-awareness. Through the highly symbolic moment of the wedding, Boccaccio thus draws the path to the reintegration of the unity and totality of the psyche that involve both the protagonist and the reader.