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In this collection of essays and lectures spanning his professional career, Italian analyst Franco Borgogno invites the reader to accompany him on what he views as his journey as a psychoanalyst, through his readings of the journeys of other psychoanalysts whose ideas have been most important to him. Further, he aims to use this journey to argue for the idea of an approach—both to the analytic engagement and to life as an analyst—that emphasizes movement, change, and growth, rather than the mastery of a set of ideas and techniques.
Both the content and the form of this difficult but rewarding book are worthy of note. The content is deceptively straightforward in appearance. Borgogno's essays are mostly structured around close readings of selected works of several psychoanalytic pioneers. Aspects of the work of Freud, Heimann, Bion, and Ferenczi (progenitor of the relational school, in his view, and as such an unequaled hero for our field) are revealed to contain unarticulated insights, unnoticed themes, and fleeting glimpses of ideas that were not to be developed in the field until decades later. Borgogno reveals himself to be a master of a kind of archaeology of psychoanalytic theory, dusting off the minor early writings of the likes of Ferenczi to bring their astonishingly prescient features to light, and plowing steadfastly through the most difficult and off-putting of Bion's works, his irritated and befuddled reader's transference leading him to new understandings of the development of the theory and the theorist.
Over and over in this volume, Borgogno demonstrates and celebrates the perspicacity and power of the preconscious. In parallel with his own developing sense of the psychoanalytic process—that is, as a process that works by way of bringing affective experiences into a shared arena where they can be transformed and made understand-able—so he sees the development of each theorist's work individually and the development of theory across generations of analys