One Life Heals Another by Franco Borgogno

“One Life Heals Another is an enjoyable introduction to one of the most fertile writers in contemporary psychoanalysis who deserves to be better known. The book presents itself above all as an autobiography; that is, a text where the theory, technique, and history of psychoanalysis and its institutions are inextricably entwined with personal history. Borgogno’s example makes it seem more obvious than ever how important personality and disposition are in deciding what type of analyst to be. But One Life Heals Another is also a valuable handbook (its modest scale is a virtue) for starting out in a beautiful but rather complicated profession; a little Baedeker packed with ideas and full of experience and passion. For this reason I hope it will be discovered by all analysts and psychotherapists who are genuinely interested in the healing of psychic suffering.”
—GIUSEPPE CIVITARESE, author of Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis

“One Life Heals Another is a book to be read and re-read, treasured and enjoyed. It offers readers the rich harvest of a lifetime of psychoanalytic thought and experience in the form of a literate, playful, poetic and deeply meaningful professional biography. It is the fruit of an analytic journey undertaken between the poles of tradition and creativity, enriched by the author’s reflections and personal experiences and his extensions of the discoveries of Freud, Bion, Winnicott, Ferenczi, Heimann, and others. It is a ‘dive into life’ viewed from both sides of the analytic couch and animated by the finding, feeling and following of ‘a sacred fire in psychoanalysis.’
Above all, it reflects the compassion and accumulated wisdomof one of the outstanding leaders, teachers—and humanizers—of our impossible profession, a witness, survivor and advocate of the innumerable ways that life erupts into the session in search of discovery, recognition and assistance in the processes of emotional growth and working through.”
—HOWARD B. LEVINE, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge W.R. Bion Studies Series; author of Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry

“Franco Borgogno is one of the most original and profound thinkers in contemporary psychoanalysis. To listen to the stories he tells in his inimitable personal voice is to know that one has found what he himself calls Ferenczi—a ‘fundamental companion’ on one’s own psychoanalytic journey. If, as Borgogno exemplifies, the analytic process is a ‘long wave’ in which ‘one life heals another,’ to immerse oneself in the pages of his book is to undergo a transformative experience.”
—PETER L. RUDNYTSKY, University of Florida and Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, author of Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory

FRANCO BORGOGNO, University of Turin and Italian Psychoanalytical Society, received The Mary Sigourney Award in 2010 and, together with Luche and Marino Coe, the 2017 Book Prize of the American Board and
Academy of Psychoanalysis for Reading Italian Psychoanalysis.