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Stefano Bolognini's new book, Passaggi Segreti: Teoria e Tecnica della Relazione Interpsichica (Secret Passageways: Theory and Technique of the Interpsychic Relationship), can be seen as a continuation of his Psychoanalytic Empathy (Bolognini 2002). In that book Bolognini showed how the intrapsychic unconscious raw material of psychoanalysis can be arrived at only through interpsychic interventions, empathy being one of the crucial ingredients of that collaborative process. In this new book, it is the entire territory of the unconscious that Bolognini claims can be reached only through an interpsychic approach, one that must trace a great diversity of secret passageways to reach its goal. The elaborate system of passageways that Bolognini conceptualizes is constructed by an analysand-architect who has, however, destroyed all blueprints, making access to these subterranean psychic regions almost impossible. The psychoanalyst must with skill and patience enlist the analysand's curiosity and collaboration as the two travelers embark on this journey into the unknown. The irony, of course, is that what now seems foreign to the analysand was once his native land. Bolognini does not quote T. S. Eliot's “We shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (1942, p. 208), but the secret passageways he envisages and helps the “blinded” (in the neurotic sense) analysand reenvis-age and reclaim is a metaphor of exploration not unlike the poet's. Bolognini is not without his own poetic voice as he struggles to word the unconscious that psychopathology has secreted so cleverly and so confoundingly. His fine work on empathy has prepared him no doubt for the equally Herculean task of signposting the uncharted regions of the unconscious.
Bolognini makes it clear that even though the unconscious mind that is being signposted and charted is the unique intrapsychic private property of each in