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Clara Mucci has undertaken a herculean task with her volume on Borderline Bodies: Affect Regulation Therapy for Personality Disorders. Following an introduction by Allan Schore, there are 10 chapters focusing on trauma, the traumatized body, the borderline patient, the dead mother, sexuality, gender, identity diffusion, PTSD, dissociation, narcissistic personalities, suicide, psychosomatic disorders, hypochondria, antisocial traits, and perversions. Mucci integrates the neuroscience as explicated by Schore with a variety of psychoanalytic approaches. In addition to Schore, she has been influenced by many theorists, but in particular by Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Kernberg.
The chapters in the book are as follows.
In the first chapter, Mucci introduces her model, which is similar to Schore's. She stresses the significance of relational trauma and its effect on the brain, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. She stresses that the earlier the trauma the greater effect on the brain and body and the development of personality disorders. She notes that:
All the cases present levels of somatization as a sign of emotional foreclosure or disavowal: we go from bodily symptoms of conversion in the hysteric patient presented first, to the lack of emotion of the narcissist presented afterwards, to the truly psychosomatic and hypochondriac at last. They show how emotions, either by excess or by foreclosure or by isolation (in a sense of defense of isolation), pass through the body, arriving by the lack of emotions felt by the alexythymic and the hypochondriac, where the soma has taken over the entire scene and no relation outside and no self-reflective attitude is possible. (p. 41)
In Chapter 2, Mucci discusses the role of the body between nature and culture. This chapter is reminiscent of Damasio's (2019) latest book in which he discusses the underappreciated importance of affects in the development of culture. There are several chapters in which she discusses the tre