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In Borderline Bodies: Affect Regulation for Personality Disorders, Clara Mucci has set herself a monumental task: the integration of neuroscience, attachment theory, infant research, and psychoanalysis in one volume that comprehensively addresses psychodynamic work with borderline patients. This impressive book is complex, scholarly, dense, and multi-layered, and offers much that a relational psychoanalytic reader will find useful and thought-provoking.
The overused word “interdisciplinary” is unavoidable when talking about Mucci’s work. Mucci has an intimidating resume: having reached the rank of full professor of English literature and Shakespeare studies at the University of Chieti (by way of Atlanta, where she earned a PhD in literature and psychoanalysis), she later retrained in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, earning a second doctorate and becoming a faculty member in Chieti’s department of psychology, as well as a practicing psychoanalyst and supervisor. Currently, she is full professor of psychology at the University of Bergamo, where she heads the doctoral program. The author of several monographs on Shakespeare, psychoanalysis, and literary theory, she has more recently published widely on trauma, mourning, and forgiveness. In a previous volume, Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma: Intergenerational Transmission, Psychoanalytic Treatment, and the Dynamics of Forgiveness (Mucci, 2013), she offers a synthesis of contemporary approaches to the understanding and treatment of trauma, and she has also co-edited, with Giuseppe Cravaro, a collection of essays on Mauro Mancia’s notion of the “unrepressed unconscious” and implicit memory. Borderline Bodies, like her
previous work, ambitiously synthesizes a vast amount of information from various fields, to focus on relational trauma in borderline disorders and its expression through, in, and on the body.
Mucci has studied with Otto Kernberg and Alan Schore, whose research she draws on extensively in this