Focus: In dialogue with neuroscience
30 April 2025
Vol. 36 No. 1 (2025)
https://doi.org/10.4081/rp.2025.1010

Affective neuroscience and clinical implications. The drama of the relation in the therapeutic scene

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Relationship, empathy, analytical field, setting, experience
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Ugo Morelli
ugo.morelli@gmail.com
Scholar of Psychology and Cognitive Science; Professor of Applied Cognitive Science at the Federico II University, Naples, Italy.

The relationship is contingent, it precedes and founds every individuation and is the place of the analytical field and the source of effectiveness of the clinic, of psychoanalysis, and of psychotherapy. The relationship has to do with the value of the instant, that is, of the instances that emerge ‘here and now’ and with the ways of dealing with them. As regards empathy, we know with certain evidence that it is not recognition that allows sharing: in an empathic relationship, exactly the opposite happens. It is only thanks to sharing that the recognition of the other as our peer is possible and, therefore, we obtain evidence of the interpersonal world that is natural for us precisely because we resonate with that evidence, it is not alien to us, and it is not a problem to be solved. The other is not an enigma to be deciphered with the aid of a theory. Through the relationship, which is constitutive and is proposed as an embodied simulation, a structural coupling occurs that connects the internal states of the active-perceptive systems with the external states to generate dynamic evolution, while trying to preserve the structural and functional integrity of the system. Internal and external, circularly connected, become a unitary and inseparable phenomenology in the therapeutic relationship.

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Affective neuroscience and clinical implications. The drama of the relation in the therapeutic scene. (2025). Ricerca Psicoanalitica, 36(1). https://doi.org/10.4081/rp.2025.1010
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