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Clara Mucci is a well-known and prolific author who has extensively published in the fields of both literature and clinical psychology. Her profile is unique, embracing different but also complementary competencies. After a Ph.D. in literature and psychoanalysis at the Emory University, she became full professor of English literature in Italy. Later, she studied with Otto Kernberg at the Personality Disorder Institute, and became full professor of Clinical Psychology. Presently, she has the Chair in Dynamic Psychology at the University of Bergamo, Italy. In her first academic life she wrote on Shakespeare and women's life, while in her second she wrote on the Shoah and trauma theory. Some of her best-known books are Extreme Sorrow: Trauma from Freud to the Shoah (2008), Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma: Intergenerational Transmission, Psychoanalytic Treatment, and the Dynamics of Forgiveness (2013); and Borderline Bodies: Affect Regulation Therapy for Personality Disorders (2018). Each one of these books is marked by Mucci's encounter with an author who has had a deep and lasting influence on her: Dori Laub, and his definition of trauma as “the break of the empathic dyad”; Giovanni Liotti, and his claim that only trauma of human agency creates dissociation in the psyche; and finally, Allan Schore, with his view of attachment as based on a right-brain connection between child and caregiver, the same which regulates the unconscious connection between patient and psychotherapist. Her main and original contribution consists in the reorganization of these elements in a unique psychodynamic theory of the progressive levels of interpersonal traumatization: 1. early relational trauma due to misattunement between mother and child; 2. active abuse and maltreatment, leading to the identification with the aggressor; and 3. collective and massive traumatization. Since these progressive levels of interpersonal traumatization usually result in the intergenerational transmis