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When we think of the journey that psychoanalysis has, both voluntarily and involuntarily, made during its first century, we usually have in mind a well-known itinerary: from Vienna first to Zurich, Budapest, and Berlin, then to England and France, and finally spreading to the four corners of the world. But despite being able to boast of pioneers such as Edoardo Weiss (or even Italo Svevo, for that matter), and leading contemporary figures including Antonino Ferro, the Mediterranean, the cradle of the Old World, is, for reasons difficult to fathom, too often missing from the list of possible destinations for the peregrinations of psychoanalysis. I can only hope that the oversight will be remedied by Franco Borgogno's erudite and brave book, Psychoanalysis as a Journey. Professor Borgogno is a clinical psychologist and a training analyst from Turin, whose work should by now have become familiar to those who follow the development of relational perspectives in psychoanalysis or who have a special interest in Ferenczi. While Borgogno has presented and published many papers in English, this is the first translation of an entire book of his from Italian.
When I first approached the book, I was puzzled by its title. What kind of a journey could psychoanalysis be, I wondered? Although in the volume itself Borgogno offers explicit definitions only in passing, it now seems to me that the whole book is indeed about journeys. I think that one can discern at least three different meanings of this concept.
First, since it contains papers spanning almost twenty years, this is an honest book about Borgogno's own progress, on the one hand, toward theoretical and clinical mastery, and, on the other hand, toward personal maturity during his two experiences of analysis and in his current analytic work. However, although I admire and like this thread of the book, I will here concentrate on the other two, and leave it to the reader