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Franco Borgogno, a full professor of clinical psychology at the University of Turin and a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, won the Sigourney Award in 2010. His outstanding contributions to contemporary psychoanalysis are less well known in the United States than are those of his compatriots Giuseppe Civitarese, Antonino Ferro, and Riccardo Lombardi. After reading this enjoyable short autobiographical account of Borgogno's career and delving further into his clinically astute papers, I suspect that the reason is one largely of location and translation. He teaches primarily in Europe, and while some of his work is available in English, much of his corpus remains published only in Italian. Nonetheless, Borgogno is another key figure among those distinguished Italian psychoanalysts whose neo-Bionian perspective offers significant assistance to therapists in rethinking, humanizing, contextualizing—truly revolutionizing—contemporary psychodynamic practice. Along with Alberto Luchetti and Luisa Marino Coe, Borgogno is coeditor of the prize-winning Reading Italian Psychoanalysis (2016).
Borgogno's work deserves to be read and metabolized by practitioners of diverse theoretical orientations because he not only has faith in the capacity of psychoanalysis to bring about lifesaving change, he also has a rare gift for describing what he does in treatment sessions and student encounters. A discerning scholar whose references to and syntheses of classic, and some relatively uncelebrated, papers roll off his tongue, Borgogno's style is refreshingly disarming and magnanimous. He shares his flaws and mistakes openly without pillorying himself and is candid about how much he learns from his patients and students by accompanying them on their journey. He believes that it is incumbent for the analyst to give credit where credit is due. This is particularly true for patients and students. The personal metamorphosis that Borgogno believes is a