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Is it really possible to help someone who confronts us with a dream in which she “commits suicide and falls to the ground dead and deprived of vitality? Can one be alive if the object is dying and appears to occlude any possible means of reparation?” (Borgogno, 2011, English Translation 2013, p. 189). This is the question central to Franco Borgogno's book, reflecting an anxiety which has distant origins, inasmuch as the clinical case from which the collection of essays takes its name was presented by the author in order to qualify as a training analyst. However, as is often the case with tests that have been passed with flying colors, the specter of this girl who collapses to the ground with her intestines exposed is a corpse that refuses to be buried, a phantasm that can know no peace, and for this reason Borgogno invites the consultation of specialists from all over the world, who examine her, propose diagnoses and discuss the most appropriate forms of care, thus stimulating the author to respond with personal memories and theoretical reflections that touch upon many of the issues which are of crucial importance of contemporary psychoanalysis. These include the issues of the analyst as person, of his/her “theoretical tics,” of the inter/intrapsychic play-off, of agency, working through, “psychic death” and many other matters, to which are added, in the second part, a series of essays that are already well known (on Little Hans, on the concept of spoilt children, on role-reversal, on the affinity between Ferenczi and Winnicott, and on Ferenczi as “introjective analyst”).
The book closes with a brief but dense interview with the author on his own professional and human journey, in which Borgogno reveals that, in his psychoanalytic thought as a whole, he draws his inspiration from the theme of the “omission of help” to another mind, specifying that this constitutes, to his mind, the most fundamental ethical problem faced by psychoanalyst