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One life heals another is an autobiography, a “professional biography,” as the author of this book, Franco Borgogno, states in the very first lines of its Preface, and as shown by its subtitle: Beginnings, maturity, outcomes of a vocation.
Franco Borgogno is a full professor of clinical psychology at the University of Turin, a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, the author and editor of several books and a former Associate Editor of this journal. He received the Mary Sigourney Award in 2010 and, together with Alberto Luchetti and Luisa Marino Coe, the 2017 Book Prize of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis for Reading Italian psychoanalysis.
The title One life heals another itself already allows the reader to get to know the author’s idea about a pivotal aspect of psychoanalysis: the psychoanalytic journey is a journey of “real life events” and not merely “lived events” (p. 11). This means that the whole history of a life is needed to understand who one is as a person and as a professional. This entails that, as for the patient, the analyst “comes from afar” (p. 1) – a term that Borgogno coined (Borgogno, 2011) to emphasize Ferenczi’s view that both patient and analyst have been babies, children, adolescents, and so both come from afar into analysis; moreover, the analyst has also been a patient.