In this book Stefano Bolognini, a training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, has written a wise, thoughtful, and elegantly clear exploration of one of our basic yet still mysterious concepts: empathy. His chosen path in the book is the exploration of empathy rather than its emphasis. His spare prose succinctly outlines his views in a way that boils down complex arguments to their essentials. I often found myself looking over what I had just read with the question, “Did he really just explain that in three pages?”

Bolognini approaches the task of studying empathy in the following manner: Thus, in one's own private workshop, to produce useful alternatives to Freudian metapsychology, one must first have studied,