From What to How: A Conversation with Stefano Bolognini on Emotional Attunement

Among the pivotal shifts occurring in psychoanalysis during the last half century is undoubtedly the progressive shift of attention from the patient’s internal psychic contents to relational levels involved in the psychoanalytic process. This shift has highlighted the importance to psychoanalytic treatment of interpersonal and intersubjective components. In an original, scholarly, and integrative way, Stefano Bolognini has been at the forefront of contributions to this shift, beginning with his studies on psychoanalytic empathy—a highly specific concept often misunderstood and rarely explored in the history of psychoanalysis (Bolognini 2002).

Many contributions to contemporary analytic theory have provided those trained at the analytic institute in Bologna, Italy, with an unmistakable conceptual, stylistic, and humane imprint. Among these, I believe that we cannot ignore contributions that accurately and vividly describe the relationships between the patient’s and analyst’s ego and self. Additionally, creative revitalization of concepts pertaining to the preconscious and the self, experienced as centers of human experience and

vectors of psychic change, have been productively examined. More recently, exciting explorations of interpsychic and transpsychic phenomena have come to the fore (Bolognini 2004, 2010).

The following conversation is intended as a carefully considered excursus into Bolognini’s psychoanalytic thinking during the last two decades. It focuses particularly on the essays comprising his two comprehensive volumes (Bolognini 2010, 2019), which collect contributions of extraordinary theoretical-clinical interest and rare technical utility.

The conversation recounted in this article, which occur