Psychoanalysis as a Journey, Franco Borgogno,  Open Gate Press, London, 2007,  300 pp.

C. FORTUNE: Where does the title of your newly published book, Psychoanalysis as a Journey , come from? If I understand it correctly, the title seems to represent a weaving of your journey in psychoanalysis with those of some of your favorite and most beloved psychoanalytic authors, and therefore your journey as a person and a psychoanalyst.

F. BORGOGNO: I am sure that this question indicates the spirit in which this interview will be conducted so I won't worry about getting right to the point in my answer. I will proceed instinctively, more or less inspired by “free associations,” which as you know is a classic in the psychoanalytical method, even if today we know “free associations” to be “free” only up to a certain point. In regard to myself, today with you all here, I will use “free associations” in the sense of “taking the liberty” to confront the question at my own pace without feeling pressured, something I'm sure you don't want, and it would make this a barren interview. On the other hand, “free associations” are a kind of deferring to the preconscious and letting an answer emerge from it without immediately determining a response.

To answer your question I will start from a “far distance,” from the beginning of my journey as a person and as a psychoanalyst, underlining that the word “far” is a very important parameter for me. It is a useful parameter to evaluate the journey of a discipline or a subject such as a patient, an author or the journey of a thought and so on.

I, like many others, started from a “far distance”; I felt distant from myself, my cultural values, the expectations of my environment and my group of

peers. In my adolescent idealization of psychoanalysis (I discovered psychoanalysis when I was about 16-17 years old), I thought I had found a resource that would bring me closer to myself and others.