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The first and perhaps most striking impression of Borgogno's book is his writing style. There is a remarkable absence of metapsychological discourse in favour of more pragmatic, experience-near terms that facilitates the reader's identification with the concepts alluded to. Terms such as “the long wave of the analysis,” “spoilt children,” “introjective analyst,” “role reversal,” “omission of assistance,” “bearing witness,” and “unconscious meta messages,” among others, provide a descriptive framework of the actual experience of the transference and countertransference in the analytic space. This is a unique writing style that is both colloquial and profound, transmitting a lively and enlivening sense of making Borgogno's acquaintance, sharing his enthusiasm for his work, and learning about dynamic concepts and technique from a master clinician and theoretician.
The overarching guiding principle of his praxis is described in his title: One Life Heals Another, locating the work of analysis in a relational context. The lived experience of the analysand flows into the analytic space and is received by an analyst with negative capability, resulting in mutual reveries that become the dreamwork of the analysis.1 This is a dynamic