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The title refers to a biblical verse4 that expresses an essential aspect of human existence: its evolving over time and its necessary inclusion of a multitude of experiences, in which pain plays a large part. If this need is assumed not simply as ‘fate’ but as history—as the evolving of factual and emotional experiences that the mind can confront and work through—human existence can acquire traits of freedom and richness that liberate it, at least partially, from repetition, compulsion and mortification.
This seems to be the springboard for this book by Tonia Cancrini, a training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. As she does not hesitate to tell us a number of times throughout the book, she comes from a philosophical background with much experience in philosophical research. This provenance can be discerned in her sophisticated skills in theoretical analysis (especially in the ninth chapter, devoted to Freud's Civilization and its discontents) and in her scholarly use of literary and philosophical sources (especially classical Greek philosophy, but also such authors as Hegel, Schopenauer and Jaspers). This book is not, however, a theoretical treatise; it is, in actual fact, many things collected together into a unitary, original whole.
Let us see how the author herself defines it in her Introduction:
In this book I have tried to bring others closer to my pain and to the suffering of those I have attempted to understand, communicating in this way the sense of my life and my profession. This is a book of stories, tales and experiences: my life, the lives of people I have been fortunate to get close to and perhaps sometimes to help. You understand others through your own experiences, as Bettleheim (1967) stated so well, ‘and this is why my story and their stories, the stories of those people who entrusted part of their lives to me, are so closely intertwined’(p. 31).
The reader must not, however, imagine that this is an autobiography—not at all; in spite of th