Psychoanalytic Empathy

Over the past twenty years, Stefano Bolognini has concerned himself with empathy, one of the most significant, yet hotly debated and difficult to define concepts in the recent history of psychoanalysis. In this book, the author traces the philosophical origins of empathy and its development, with Freud and the first psychoanalysts, up to its 're-discovery' in the 1950s, in parallel with changing views on countertransference. Dr. Bolognini then offers his observations which take us to the very heart of psychoanalysis, maintaining all the fecundity of the issues discussed while illustrating the real complexity of the empathic experience, the privileged transformative goal of the relationship between patient and analyst.