You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Anglophone readers unfamiliar with the writing of Franco Borgogno, the author of Psychoanalysis as a Journey (2009) and an editor of Reading Italian Psychoanalysis (2016), should brace for surprise with this capstone work, One Life Heals Another: Beginnings, Maturity, Outcomes of a Vocation. The surprise is that this is a memoir unique in contemporary psychoanalysis. Modest in length, Borgogno's reflections link three psychoanalytic lecture presentations with a fourth concluding chapter; yet the constructed bijou that is Borgogno's outcome is fastidious and profound, operating upon the reader at multiple levels. Composed as if in direct opposition to his experience of “excessive severity and indifference (a sort of anti-emotional and anti-relational vein running through psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic community…)” (p. 16), Borgogno's deep observations ricochet from beginning to end. They trace personal reflections upon patients, colleagues, supervisors and analytic mentors, exposing the unspoken psychoanalytic omerta of “no entry,” intuited through Borgogno's early recognition,
I could not fail to realize that, although “our psychoanalytic parents” had wanted to introduce a new psychology founded on the affects and on relating, they were quite often “phobic” about relating and the affects, against which they not infrequently imposed a sort of diktat which I some years later called no-entry. (p. 15)
En route, the North American psychoanalytic reader will be struck by the congruence between Borgogno's understanding of psychoanalytic subjectivity and today's contemporary vernacular expression of ‘interpersonal-relational’ psychoanalysis (Stern & Hirsch, 2018). What will further provoke thought is how Borgogno's roadmap varies from the familiar American conjunction of midcentury humanistic psychoanalysis with British Object Relations: in that our familiar figures of Horney, Fromm, Sullivan, and Thompson are largely missing, but for footnotes secondary to Borgogno's