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Franco Borgogno, in his 1999 book Psychoanalysis as a Journey (translated into English in 2007), elaborated on the metaphor of the psychoanalytic vocation as journey through a close examination of his own clinical and intellectual development and the influence of several psychoanalytic pioneers, particularly Freud, Heimann, Bion, and Ferenczi, on that development. In The Girl Who Committed Hara-Kiri and Other Clinical and Historical Essays, Borgogno continues the narrative of his journey, this time focusing on his own clinical work and the development of his theoretical and technical thinking as he engaged in dialogues about this clinical work with numerous contemporary psychoanalysts and deepened his thinking about the work of his intellectual forebears.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section revolves around a single case, M., the patient to whom the title refers. This is a case Borgogno treated relatively early in his career, and the original paper describing the work—included more or less unchanged as the first chapter in the book—was the paper he presented in order to be appointed as a training and supervising analyst at the Italian Psychoanalytical Society in 1994–1995. The ensuing chapters in this section consist of a series of “dialogues” with other prominent analysts of varying theoretical persuasions commenting on this clinical material—Neil Altman, Allina Schellekes, Theodore Jacobs, Carlos Nemirovsky, Jonathan Slavin, Dina Vallino, Jonathan Sklar, and Giovanna Goretti Regazzoni—and, finally, a brief chapter summarizing some of the conclusions Borgogno came to as he contemplated this case. This section allows for a close
dissection and detailed comparative theoretical consideration of a single case that is unusual in our psychoanalytic literature.
The second section consists of four theoretical chapters; two of these chapters are theoretical elaborations of themes that emerged in the dialogues. The others return to two of Borgogno's in