Marco Conci Interviews Stefano Bolognini

Stefano Bolognini is one of the most active, competent and well-known Italian psychoanalysts. He is a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. He lives and works in Bologna, where he trained as a psychoanalyst of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI), that is, the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, after having studied medicine in Padua, specialized in psychiatry in Verona and worked as a psychiatrist in Venice. An Associate Member of the SPI since 1985, he became a training analyst in 1998. Between 1997 and 2001, Dr Bolognini was also Scientific Secretary of the SPI and, as such, promoted important international contacts and significant scientific initiatives, for example the anthology Il sogno cent'anni dopo (The Dream, a Hundred Years Later), produced in 2000. He has been a member of the European editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis—currently headed by Dr Antonino Ferro—since 2002, and of the Comité Internationale de Lectoure of the Revue Franc¸aise de Psychanalyse since 2004. Since 2003, Dr Bolognini has been both President of the Centro Psicoanalitico di Bologna—the Bologna Psychoanalytical Center—and European delegate on the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Directive Committee.

With his 2002 publication L'empatia psicoanalitica, promptly translated into German, English (as Psychoanalytic Empathy; Free Associations Books, London, 2004) and Spanish, with translations into French, Brazilian-Portuguese and Russian currently being underway, Dr Bolognini revisited a problematic and important concept in a philologically very accurate way, redefining it in an original, suggestive and useful manner. He also showed how well he can bring about dialogue and integration and how rich are both the stimuli and the debate that have for several years characterized Italian psychoanalysis.

We spoke about all this—and much more—over the course of the summer of 2005, conducting very stimulating and articulate research and dialogue after an initi