A FOUNDING ENCOUNTER AND THE REASONS OF A JOURNEY

C. FORTUNE: Where does the title of your newly published book, Psychoanalysis as a Journey (2007), come from? If I understand it correctly, the title seems to represent a weaving of your journey in psychoanalysis with those of some of your favorite and most beloved psychoanalytic authors, and therefore your journey as a person and a psychoanalyst.

F. BORGOGNO: I am sure that this question indicates the spirit in which this interview will be conducted so I won't worry about getting right to the point in my answer. I will proceed instinctively, more or less inspired by "free associations," which as you know is a classic in the psychoanalytical method, even if today we know "free associations" to be "free" only up to a certain point. In regard to myself, today with you all here, I will use "free associations" in the sense of "taking the liberty" to confront the question at my own pace without feeling pressured, something I'm sure you don't want, and it would make this a barren interview. On the other hand, "free associations" are a kind of deferring to the preconscious and letting an answer emerge from it without immediately determining a response.

To answer your question I will start from a "far distance," from the beginning of my journey as a person and as a psychoanalyst, underlining that the word "far" is a very important parameter for me. It is a useful parameter to evaluate the journey of a discipline or a subject such as a patient, an author or the journey of a thought and so on.

I, like many others, started from a "far distance"; I felt distant from myself, my cultural values, the expectations of my environment and my group of peers. In my adolescent idealization of psychoanalysis (I discovered psychoanalysis when I was about 16–17 years old), I thought I had found a resource that would bring me closer to myself and others. I hoped to find through it something or someone that could help me reconcile with the external and internal community, reducing the dissociation that I felt inside of me. Of course, I did not call it "dissociation" at the time; I simply felt that "my view was blocked." I perceived myself as someone who had worth but, at the same time, I felt like nothing, non existent. I tirelessly searched for a look through which I could feel recognized.

I can explain this further with two very important images. The first one is a personal experience. One morning on vacation, I found myself alone in the middle of a rough sea, not far from shore. The high and violent waves didn't scare me. I felt that I needed to trust without fear and let myself be carried by the sea stream. In this feeling I understood that I was alive and that, even if it scared me, life was a mystery that attracted me.

The second image is a dream. I dreamt that the ground in front of the church, in my father's family's hometown, caved in under my feet. Terrorized, I found myself in a Hindu temple where a Brahman, who was staring at me intently, offered to me—ashamed and like a fish out of water—a green stone in the shape of a rhombus that lit up in my hands and lit the area surrounding me.

In hindsight, those two experiences, which I immediately felt were important, were signs that I was to dive head first into life despite the risk and the fact that I didn't feel completely equipped. Sooner or later I knew I would have met someone or something that would have given me hope of my worth, delivering me from my misery and shame. In other words, they were two experiences of future integration that proclaimed to me that "good things" were soon to come.

And so it was... because I was able to locate the source of those good things in psychoanalysis. I knew very little about psychoanalysis, except that it involved the presence of a wise person who would take you by the hand and listen to you. That was far from my family culture, a refined family of noble roots on my father's side that tended to trust in divine "Providence" more than in the human one, embodied by people.

This was the beginning of trusting, a "blind" trust in some ways, because my first psychoanalyst was absolutely silent. However, I came out of that analysis experience with the sensation that I was breathing much better and that I had inside of me a kind of "sacred fire" that let me venture courageously into life that was to come. So I found myself with an image or, better yet with an idea, that I had been helped, seeing that no one—I mean my first analyst—had "impinged" upon my choices and my journey: so I could, to a large extent, be myself (that's what I mean by "idealization," if it wasn't clear before). But I truly got to be myself only later thanks to the substantial help of a second analysis received from an analyst who right away seemed to talk too much and in a strange way.

He said, for example, in our first session something like "Red Borgogno, Red Bordeaux" in response to a dream I had in which I was buying a red claret "abat-jour" [night lamp] (Bordeaux in Europe is both the claret color and a famous wine). He evidently associated my dream with wine. And I, defending myself from his response, immediately told him that my family did not make wine anymore as they once used to for personal use (Borgogno in Italy is a famous brand of Barolo and Barbaresco wines). Then I added that in the dream, right after that, I found myself at the seaside and "I picked up a seashell that I thought might be useful to me." To which he replied that I was vigorously preparing myself to defend "my balls." In his opinion the seashell represented protection, just like the cup protection that boxers use to defend themselves from "low blows" (in Italian "seashell" and "jockstrap" is the same word).

This was, briefly, despite the initial bewilderment, the beginning of a "great attunement" (remember the Italian song from the 1940s "Abat-jour"? The one that became world famous because of the movies Ieri, oggi, domani (1963) and Prêt-à-porter (1994) as it was the soundtrack to Sophia Loren's striptease in front of Marcello Mastroianni). It was the start of a great interest and wonder toward my analyst who had replied with so much care and sympathy. Without even knowing me he had been able to describe me, with the love of a parent, as a "promising wine." He gave credit to me, I repeat, with the love of a parent. Interesting, isn't it, that Barolo and Barbaresco wine may become better "with age"?

The credit he gave me was well placed and never betrayed. There was never a "closed door" (I often found the door of my first analyst literally closed, not only metaphorically and no one ever warned me or was ever sorry) and from that I learned to recognize with him the "low blows" of my destiny: a father who had entrusted me to God's will, prayer and divine Providence instead of interacting with me (unfortunately in this sense he was a "defector": he defected to stay with me); a mother who used to suddenly disappear "psychically"—without anyone knowing why—even though in many instances she was a very creative, "poetic" and fun person, and who often when I approached her used to sing—shamelessly and disrespectfully—"if anyone touches me, I will break, I'm made of pasta." To make myself more clear: she didn't let me sit on her lap: she was afraid she would break (if you sit on pasta, it will fragment into a thousand pieces).

That, Kit, incidentally is where one of the primary concepts in my book comes from: that of "spoilt children." Not spoilt and tyrannical children like English psychoanalysts interpret it, but children stripped and deprived by their caregivers who put into them (in the children) their own expectations and anxieties (of parents), extracting—along with their projections—something specific that belongs to them.

I am sure, Kit, that you would like to return to this fundamental concept that allowed me to unify many psychoanalysts of the second generation (i.e. Heimann, Bion and Ferenczi, who are indeed my favorite authors) for opposing their voices—often silenced in the past by our community—to some of the Freudian and Kleinian dogmatism. I will leave this topic aside to add still something about the kind of "pasta" (character) my second analyst was made of.

"True good pasta from Naples," as I had imagined he came from (but found later to be a fantasy of mine, a fantasy that I now believe could have been linked to my perceiving him—at the beginning of the analysis—as a kind of "big star"; don't forget that Sophia Loren represents for us Italians the "Neapolitan type"par excellence).

"True good pasta from Naples" anyway, because he suited my deepest wishes for a parent who was fair and flexible, strong and sensitive, elastic and authoritative, serious and playful. For example: at the time when my father died, I came to know he was very sick at the hospital just a few minutes before my session. When I arrived at my session in Milan, at once he sent me back home to Torino, to my father, because I needed him more than I needed my analyst. My father was dying (which happened, as a matter of fact) while my analyst was in good health: therefore we would have time later, while I couldn't fail to keep the appointment with my father. When my mother, many years later, had a "transient ischemic attack," a small stroke, and I went to pick her up at the train station (the neighbors had sent her back from the vacation home by the sea, where she was staying),... when we met, and for some days later, she didn't recognize me. Everyone agreed that I was an "exquisite and perfect nurse" in those days until she recovered. When I returned to my analysis two weeks later, while telling him about the latest events and my shock, I found myself taken by an "irresistible stream" of tears that would not stop, and that I didn't want to stop. He waited until I stopped crying, and then he said: "here is the 'blocked view' that you described as a boy and that is where your capabilities as a nurse came from and, consequently, your desire to follow a journey as an analyst."

As I said before, starting from a "far distance" I just gave a first answer to your question about where the title of my new book comes from and my reference to the concept of journey. I just want to add that—as Ferenczi sensibly, and acutely, pointed out (1920 and 1930–1932)—a journey, including a psychoanalytical one, is a journey of life, of "real life events" and not only "lived events." So our history is important for us to understand who we are as people and professionals: which is the history of family relations and affects transmission from one generation to the next. Our history is central to discover our identifications, a part of which are unconscious. My second wise analyst revealed this mystery to me, knowing that the being of a person is woven of this "stuff" and that, if acknowledged and recognized, it is the most important treasure. Keep in mind that it's not relevant if the weave of "stuff" is rich or poor since that in any case—if the self is recognized and individualized—is a treasured asset because we can utilize and put it in circulation in our relationships with ourselves and with others, and we can bear fruit from it.

Therefore, my second analyst "opened up" my dreams and visions, so to speak; he made them meaningful by offering me the possibility to work through myself without remaining "blocked" because of the absence of "the other that everybody needs in order to grow," and because of the preconceptions/prejudices about him/her.

THE FIRST EXPERIENCES: LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

C. FORTUNE: Franco, you have just talked about your background, about how you came to psychoanalysis. Can you reflect on your journey within psychoanalysis a little more, and how you became a psychoanalyst? The last thing you mentioned concerned the possibility of your working through, without being blocked because of the absence of "the other that everybody needs in order to grow," and also because of the preconceptions or prejudices of the other person. What do you mean by that? In your new book, Psychoanalysis as a Journey, you say that you have had to fight to firmly assert yourself in the psychoanalytic debate, to hold a "true self" in the face of the pressure of the psychoanalytical community, and now you have just spoken of the importance of working through the absence of the other and the preconceptions and prejudices of the other person about yourself. I imagine that these two topics are related? Are they?

F. BORGOGNO: To answer you, I will begin with my experience as a post-graduate student interested in mental processes, and as a psychoanalytic candidate interested in understanding people and their specific subjective experiences in order to help them manage their suffering and, if possible, at least in part, to help them handle and overcome it.

Right after specializing in Psychology and while starting my second analysis, inspired by Man's Picture of His World by Roger Money-Kyrle (1961), I began writing The Illusion of Observing (1978), a book on the importance of countertransference in science and in psychology. Briefly, it was about the involvement of ideas and affects especially in regard to psychological observation. I believe the deep reasons that induced me to study this came from my second analysis, during which I was enthusiastically learning and testing myself on how "people, as well as their thoughts, change.""But it takes time," and it is both necessary "to meet an other person" who will take care of you and to be in a "context different from the one you grew up in."

I will do better to explain by clarifying how I grasped this concept. For example, I was verifying the importance of having a "flesh and blood person" close to me who responded to me, who taught me things every time we met and who—with his generous way of listening—made my free associations "creative." Also, my free associations would become creative for me if I learned how to use them in a communicative, and not dissociative, way, reminding me that the Freudian free associations were important only if the individual using them searched for their meaning with reference to the other person present, and to the actual events and context of life involved in that moment. In fact, without working—in the direction that I just highlighted—on the free associations they risk becoming nothing more than "free dissociations," therefore remaining merely a product of narcissism that does not even foster communication with ourselves. I was, in other words, understanding that the internal object of fantasy one relates with is different from the external one with its responses and silences, and, in addition, I was learning that in order to communicate you need to make an effort towards the other, to exit from the "fusional cocoon," leaning forward (see the Heidegger's "projecting forward") towards the external world.

Moreover, my second analyst helped me understand that my fantasies and internal imagos were not crazy—that is "senseless"—but rich in affective meaning to be discovered; that they contained a healthy perception that many times could be mute and voiceless (at least to me). Mute and voiceless because in the past this perception did not receive a response, because it was misunderstood or because—as in Bion's words (1962)—it was not emotionally "alpha-beta-ized" by the person who should have been bound to that task. The psychological task, as I would like to point out, of a parent is to recognize the expressions and needs of a child, to name them, and, if necessary, to provide for them. So, I was substantially being taught to see both myself and others and, as a result, everything in me and around me was enriched. Above all, I was taught—this time more authentically—that I could "be myself."

I will never forget the day my analyst told me: "You continue to feel pressured—in what you say to me and in response to what I say to you—by a sort of rush to change: your problem is 'to be yourself' and not to have 'to become different,' or 'to change.'" It was a radical turn in my perspective. "I was allowed to be myself" and how hard it was gaining the sense of being important for who one is, and what one does, for itself alone. Since up to then I was obliged to try to change in order to live up to the expectations and needs of my parents who used to tell me something like "you must change, you are not fine as you are."

Well, I will stop here in regard to my personal and private life and move on to my years as a psychoanalytic candidate. My starting point here—which I mentioned at the beginning of my answer—was the concept that "thoughts as well as people change... but it takes time and there must be a different context for this to happen." Unfortunately, however, this concept was not so popular where I was trained even if it appears simple and shared; even if anybody would certainly say: "it is at the centre of the psychoanalytical spirit." But, it was not that way; it was, on the contrary, an unfamiliar tune at the institute where I was trained, because—I will do better to explain—their main "tune" was that Freud had already said everything. There was no need to read other authors, except the more important ones who, in that institute, were essentially Freudian and then Klein, Klein, and Klein and a few others, more or less Kleinian. At that time, in Milan, we were colonized by British colleagues from London who surely brought a new style, less marked by "free dissociation" in the communication between analysts and more careful about the intersubjective context in reading the clinical material, but—unfortunately again—the context they referred to was only the internal one. For them, only the latter was the exclusive source of the transference. In fact if you referred to the "real" context where the patient had lived and grown up (including the analytical context), they would have said you were wrong and, if you persisted in that idea, they would have said: "you must return as soon as possible to analysis."

It wasn't all like that obviously—a kind of refreshing breeze was blowing among some of our teachers—but it was the dominating vision, a vision that contrasted in various ways with my analytical learning, and with how I imagined psychoanalysis to be, both in my practice and my readings. During those years, while teaching, among other things, Freud and Klein in a Tavistock-like school linked to the Neuropsychiatry Department at the University of Torino, I was reading these authors again with my students. In those lectures aimed at studying them "in their journey," putting ourselves in their shoes in order to understand their theoretical and clinical development, I found myself, many times, critical of Freud and even more of Klein.

Obviously, criticism wasn't the goal of those seminars, but to "learn from the experience of those who have come before us," from their initial attempts to understand, from their emotions, ideas, difficulties, in short, from their journey. Notwithstanding in this new reading, oriented in this way, it was impossible not to realize how "our psychoanalytical parents"—even though they desired to introduce a new psychology based on affects and relationships—were somehow "phobic" in regard to relationships and affects, in front of which they often put a sort of diktat, something that years later I defined with the expression "no entry." In that institute there were, rather, things that you could see and hear; likewise, there were other things that were not seen or heard and that you were not allowed to see and hear at all. Most of those things not allowed concerned the infantile emotions, the correct perception of children, the history of their relationships (almost always unhappy), their contribution to therapeutic work and to the work of the analyst and so on.

The offered listening was therefore more or less "one sided" and, in that kind of listening, the analyst and the parents were by definition right, they never made mistakes, they were always right, they knew. And, also, it seemed to me that Freud, and especially Klein, did not make a "distinction between the rights and obligations of children and adults,""of patients and their therapists," and that sometimes they did not have any idea of what a small child is, or what it is to be a good mother or a father.

Consequently, I again felt out of place as I did in my family. I felt like I was being asked to trust "blindly" again, and to give up what I was most authentically feeling. But this time, I didn't remain alone in my pursuit of these secret thoughts that weren't to be expressed to "the adults." In fact, I found attunement inside my group of peers that shared these secret critical thoughts (And what a peer group! Among my classmates of those years were Antonio Ferro, Stefano Bolognini, Parthenope Bion Talamo, and a little older than us, Dina Vallino!). And that is how I learned how important a "group of brothers and sisters" is and how important it is to share with them and to feel acknowledged by them. At the present time, I must say that I was lucky—as often in my life—because if you look back at psychoanalytic history, the group of siblings often used to be without pity, and more ferocious than our ancestors in burying without hindrance—because of jealousy and envy—their companions.

But how did I explain all of this to myself? I tried to explain it with a certain and excessive severity, and too much indifference, as a sort of anti-emotional and anti-relational "coté" (layer) circulating in psychoanalysis and in the psychoanalytical community. A community—during the years of my training, but it still happens nowadays—where if you offer a hand they might let it drop; where you are not always greeted, as if a greeting and being affectionate were an "extra," unnecessary; where it is uncommon to let you know that you are doing well, that you have skills and resources. On the contrary you are always being tested, especially if you want to get ahead. A community, in brief, where the atmosphere is full of superego, "do's and dont's," and, above all, is full of the idea that one grows through pain, which—if tolerated and molded by the individual—is considered the source of thought and of every good thing.

To sum it up, little by little, this atmosphere became intolerable to me because I already had a family that was orientated in that way, and because, through the analytical experience I was in, I became convinced that growth and ideas are not predominantly conceived by pain. But, it occurs if you are acknowledged, if you receive a generous and positive response, if there is another that gives you credit, if the other person, older than you, keeps in his mind what it was like to be a small child, a growing child, a pubescent, an adolescent and so on..., if this person can and knows how to identify with you, with your demands, your anxieties and your pains, if he knows how to speak to you from that point of view, and if he is able to speak to you without scaring you, and to work out through himself the strong tendency to identify with the aggressor when one is in a formative role, and repeats with you—the more disadvantaged person—the experience he himself went through as a child and a teenager.

And, here we are at Ferenczi's ideas (1931, 1932a, 1932b), the ideas he brought forth into the psychoanalytical community. But, before I open that important chapter of my story—which I know you will ask me to say something more about—I would like to add something in regard to Paula Heimann, who is, as I said before, one of my mentors, to outline another important element in my way of seeing things.

When I wrote the Illusion of observing in 1977–1978, during that period of analysis, I considered thoroughly three authors who were trailblazers in giving importance to the analyst's involvement and his emotional response to the patient: Transference and countertransference by Racker (1968), From anxiety to method in the behavioral sciences by Devereux (1967) and the famous research essay of 1949 on countertransference by Paula Heimann (1949). Nevertheless, by chance, a few years later I found out that Paula Heimann, after breaking with Klein over the publication of that paper (for Klein, as I think you know, if one had feelings of countertransference it was probable that they should return to analysis, as she felt they were not trained enough to receive the projective identifications of the patient), went ahead and explored the subjective phenomena that occurred in the analyst in hic et nunc, and the "long wave" of the analyst's relationship with the patient. That is: she progressively went on to modify—in a sensible and decisive way starting from her clinical practice—the vision that she previously had on those phenomena, until she deemed it important to consciously take note of their daily presence. She felt it important not only to understand the patient's various "selves" and intrapsychic world (affects not only subjectively "lived" but also actually induced by the real-life events), but to become aware of the pragmatic aspects of the analyst's interpretations and silences, of what one says and does beyond words and silences, of how, in other words, the analyst meta-communicates.

Paula Heimann, in short, came to say near the end of her journey that the analyst could also allow himself to communicate to the patient some of his thoughts concerning the way through which he came to formulate his interpretation. She suggested this, both in order to invite the patient to collaborate in the formulation of the interpretation (to communicate that the analyst is not omniscient but always dependent on the fundamental help that the patient offers), and in order to indicate to the patient—by being available to live an unknown and unfamiliar experience with him—that ideas and authentic meaning are born thanks to a "working team" (which is based a lot on the contribution of the patient). And, connected to that, how "the patient's nascent subjective mental states" (emotional and cognitive)—if he can use them—extremely enrich his understanding of himself, and "his—partly silent and unexpressed—potential 'selves'" (Heimann, 1942–80, 1978, 1981a, 1981b).

But at this point, besides discovering that more important than the contents in analysis, were the functions the analyst performed in interpreting, and his "unconscious meta-messages," my question became: "why do we remember in psychoanalysis only the beginning of an author's journey and not everything that comes afterwards?" (I am talking about Paula Heimann, but I could mention Bion and Ferenczi, too. The three of them had a similar destiny about this in psychoanalysis. They all received acknowledgement as far as it concerned their classical journey at the beginning of their career while—on the contrary—the remaining part of their work, what we may call the "most mature phase" of their thinking, has been rather ignored, or defined as a "late phase" in a depreciatory way). Why is not a change in position and ideas appreciated? Why couldn't one have been curious about the evolution of our colleagues' journey, as much as they themselves have criticized their own previous clinical steps, and theoretical positions?

But let's go back to the changes that featured Paula Heimann's journey. Exactly at the moment she stopped focusing exclusively on interpretations' contents, she stressed, instead, the functions of the analyst, and the meta-messages that he carries out while interpreting or remaining quiet. In fact, at a certain point of her journey, she started saying that interpretations were, in the patient's eyes, "a call for contact" and "mutuality,""a confirmation and evidence of the patient's desire for, and ability to form, a relationship (however elementary and primitive it may be, with the patient unaware of his active involvement in the ongoing relationship)." She continued that interpretations were a "demonstration of how the analyst tried to understand the patient as the specific unique individual that he is, inviting him to engage and play, to accept novelty (case?) in which any psychotherapy consists" (Heimann, 1970, 1975). However, at this point, she also said, and left intended—while underlining the value of the functions of the analyst—that the analyst, through his interpretations and his silences, may impose limits—like a "no entry"—to the patient. The analyst might tell the patient "get out of the way,""I don't like you like that,""I don't want to hear those things, you shouldn't speak of them,""what you say is not what we should talk about,""if you express yourself in that manner you are bad,""you are exaggerating, things did not happen that way, they are just fantasy, you misunderstood,""you are making me suffer,""you are killing me."

Well, all those observations and stimulations raised by my reading of Paula Heimann started to imprint in my mind, making me think, at the end, that all she highlighted concerning the functions and the meta-messages could be utilized not only with patients but also to read over, in a new way, the several "missing links" that characterize the history of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, to read the history without idealizing it anymore, to understand the peculiar structure of the Oedipal psychoanalytical family that characterizes our institutions, our habits and customs (my point of view is that there are many kinds of Oedipal families, very different one from the other, and not only one kind). To comprehend, in the end, our actual way of behaving as analysts today in our local psychoanalytical communities, we belong to and towards the social and scientific "realities" in which we operate.

Our history, our Oedipal family, our habits and customs in many ways are not praiseworthy, and it is imperative today to make amends, as other disciplines have done in their development and growth. No scientific discipline was born "complete and finished"... but grew only by recognizing its errors, and by accepting modifications to its conceptions through expanding its observations and experiences (Borgogno, 2004).

DISCOVERING AND REDISCOVERING OF AN ESSENTIAL PARTNER

C. FORTUNE: From the direction your comments have taken, Franco, I think that we are now at Sándor Ferenczi, the famous Hungarian psychoanalyst, who has been such an important influence on your development. I know that you are one of the founding members of the recent "International Sándor Ferenczi Foundation" (together with Haynal, Bonomi, Mészáros, Székacs, Kelley-Laine) and that for more than ten years you have been recognized as an influential member of that movement, to which I also belong. How did you originally discover Ferenczi? When and why did he become important to you? What ideas of Ferenczi have had the greatest influence on your thinking, development and practice? What relationship do you see between Ferenczi and Freud today? Can you say something about this, and underline why Ferenczi's work is so relevant today that he has officially returned as a significant figure in present-day psychoanalysis.

F. BORGOGNO: I came across Ferenczi in 1970, when I wrote my degree thesis focusing on aggressiveness and the death instinct. I had only read his 1929 article, The unwelcome child and his death instinct (Ferenczi, 1929a), not knowing how to frame its main theme with the context of the more classic and widespread meta-psychological considerations on which my thesis was based (Borgogno, 1970–1971). I wrote "terrific" in the margin of the article, but I put it aside because I was confused by the fact that in the literature, this paper was cited as an article supporting the Freudian death instinct. But it didn't seem that way to me. At the most, and on the contrary, it dealt with the death instinct of the parents, their passion for death as opposed to living, which furthermore extinguished the life of the child, suffocating him. But, at that time these concepts were revolutionary (I know that it is impolite, but back then in Piedmont we used to say that they were "Arabic", meaning that something was very distant from us). One needed courage to linger over these concepts, but back then I didn't have what it takes as I had just started my analysis, and—more than any other thing—I believe that Ferenczi's words scared me. Ferenczi scared me because he talked about "asthmatic children,""that were sick on a bronchial level,""children that had low body temperatures," that "became pessimists" and "with an inhibition of the wish to live" and that "as adults they suffered from sexual impotence." And, by sheer chance, I suffered, or had suffered, from some of those symptoms: asthma and some bronchial sickness, low and abnormal temperature and—like most adolescents—I also had a sad and stern view of life that I was still fighting against and often. In addition, I felt a bit empty and that something was missing, but I didn't know what it could be. Maybe it was because I was programmed to grow fast and forcedly, and I had used up much of my strength without sparing myself. Consequently, in some moments I didn't have much strength left. I couldn't say then that I wanted to die, that I didn't have the "wish to live," but Ferenczi in that article also talked about the mother's hate and impatience, about being undesired, not welcome. All of this seemed to me quite coincident with my person, my experience, and nevertheless at that time it was difficult for me to believe all that.

When Ferenczi, between the lines of this article, talks about "non-existence," feeling "non-existent," not prepared for life, I must have again recognized myself. In fact, I entered an exclamation mark in the margin of those lines, but following that a question mark. So was it something that in some ways didn't apply to me?

Surely it did, but in après-coup, I can say that at that time I couldn't and didn't know how to think through some of what Ferenczi said. Practically, it was too painful to think that my parents still wanted me; yet at the same time, they wanted a child that in many ways had to be different from what they first wished for, a child that was supposed to change. And I was different. In the first place, I didn't go to the university that they wanted (law school). Then I didn't write my thesis on what most students were encouraged to. I was virtually following my own "route."

That attitude of mine was a kind of challenge, and turned out to be my way to express to the world that I wanted to exist, and do it my way. But I hadn't yet found "my way." If I have to name in today's terms how I felt back then, I would say that I was "speechless" or, better yet, "that sometimes I spoke even too much," but especially to myself (I used to write poetry!). Ultimately, I didn't know at all where those words rose from, specifically the poetic ones, and why they were mine, and what they had to do with me. I was probably trying to do an autoanalysis, since an analyst was missing for me at the time.

In short, I was an orphan, an "orphan of reverie" looking for something, or someone, that would have been bearer of it so that some day I could also have "reveries" and turn my "poetry"—quite intimate thinking and writing—into "prose" that is a thinking and writing that is more public, and easier to share with others or ourselves.

So it was "a totally different tune," when later I read Ferenczi over again at the beginning of the 1980s, concomitantly with my psychoanalytical training. And, it was even more a "different tune" when I become an associate member, and then a full member, of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society and I started to prepare my seminars for the students of the Milan Section of the Training Institute of my Society. In fact, on that occasion (at the end of the 1980s), I read Ferenczi over and over again, systematically, throughout the "journey" from his first writings to the last, applying to the reading of Ferenczi the psychoanalytical experience I had worked out with my patients. That is a method that I applied—I repeat—also with other authors (first of all with Freud, but also with Paula Heimann and Wilfred R. Bion).

Practically, I discovered two things in those years. First of all how fundamental it was to observe and consider the birth and growth of a thought, how long it takes so that our preconscious ideas become more aware and usable in our profession (which applies to psychoanalytical ideas too), how it is substantial that there is someone that believes in those ideas and gives you credit for that, and finally, how it is essential that the bearer himself of those ideas believes in what he observes and comes to think. When I speak of "how long" I have in mind—I stress it—"very long times"... not short ones: the scientific thought and knowledge move forward like this, as it is with the growth of a person. Thoughts—as Bion (1961) said—are unrefined and rudimentary and to become actual and effective thoughts (thoughts that are capable of being utilized) they need "one who thinks them," that is "a thinker," and this must endlessly re-actualize at every stage of their development. The "thinker" then should not be reduced to a single individual, there is, in fact, a "need for another and for a community," that is another and a community that would confirm you and help you in what you think, giving by (by "porre" then, as quoting Freud in Psychotherapy, dated 1904) what is theirs of course, so that a discipline, and also an individual are fruits of a community and thus not as much exclusively of one person or of ourselves.

There is an environment—we might say in other terms—that is "around you" but also "within you" from the beginning of your life. However, every individual "is born to psychic life," a psychic life that is pre-existent to them and this also happens for every thought that turns to be organized in a discipline. Thought is born in a specific context that pre-exists the thinker and it is then developed in the thinker's contemporary context: a context that may change with time just as with time the potential carriers of that thought may change.

I won't dwell any further on this point, which is the basis of my book, and of many other papers of mine, and that defines my idea of the word "journey." So, I'll move straight on to the second thing I found when I applied this idea of journey to Ferenczi...and that, as you'll no doubt remember, made me suggest "a totally different tune." A completely different tune for two reasons: because if you change method, if you read through the journey, what you'll observe is something very different from what you would observe if you extract a single moment of something or someone, from their wholeness along with time (this is one reason why the "hic et nunc" in psychoanalysis can lead you to the wrong perception if you fail to bear in mind the "long wave" in which "hic et nunc" lies). Because Ferenczi—read in the journey—makes the reader feel, right from the beginning, like Ferenczi's playing a "different tune in psychoanalysis," which is different from the kind of tune Freud played, or that at least is a complement that can be found in Freud's work, but not actually taken any further by him.

I'll briefly try to tell you why this is "another kind of tune." Let's take some of his first works, which are—if you like—his "calling card" in psychoanalysis. The first one, for example dated 1908, on premature ejaculation ("The effect on women of premature ejaculation in men") where, unlike other scholars of the time, Ferenczi studied the subject starting with the physical and mental effects it had in women, bearing in mind that women's pleasure, their physical and mental well-being is not taken into account because the partner, being socially advantaged, makes the most of the situation so his needs and interests prevail. Here, Ferenczi gives voice to a subject that was not given an awful lot of thought at the time: "Women" (as he did shortly afterwards, but already before becoming a psychoanalyst, he gave voice to "social outcasts" and "children"). Furthermore, he shows how his future theoretical and practical work would be directed: emphasizing how analysts tend to "be masturbators and premature ejaculators" since they end up not welcoming "anybody and anything else beside themselves"..., forcing, with their interpretations, something that concerns themselves rather than the other person. Summed up in a nutshell, right from his first psychoanalytical work, Ferenczi's is a call to "listen more to the other person," and for "more consideration of the relationship between the patient and analyst and vice versa" (Ferenczi, 1908).

As regards the last aspect—the need for "more consideration of the relationship between the patient and analyst and vice versa"—to be exact it will be the theme of another of his first works, dated 1912, and entitled On transitory symptom-constructions during the analysis. What is Ferenczi telling us in this work? That the "transitory symptoms" during the session arise from within the relationship between the patient and the analyst, which means that they are a response to something the analyst said and did, or didn't say or did. If the analyst can regard these in this light ... recognizing the interpersonal matrix of the events of an analysis ... then he can understand "en miniature" how the patient's suffering arose in the past, finding out by this way both the inter-psychic environment that, back then, held the patient and accompanied his growth, as well as the patient's reactions of pleasure or displeasure to it, including his subsequent defenses and the resulting conflicts. I think it's evident to everyone how modern this way of thinking is, which explored so patiently, and with such sensitivity, the dialogue between patient and analyst. It was Ferenczi who spoke about "dialogues between the unconsciouses," meaning that in the conversation between one person and another "different dialogues" occur, backed up by words, or even regardless of them, and even beyond them. He observed how the dialogue was full of relatedness, and how the relationship, in any case, stimulated well-being or uneasiness, which has to be immediately intercepted and understood (Ferenczi, 1912). Before becoming a psychoanalyst, I think I should mention that Ferenczi wrote about love—something he considered, alas!, as greatly understudied by science, describing its phenomenology as made up of much "emotional turbulence," and of an extreme "easiness in generating small and not quite so small psychic catastrophes" (Ferenczi, 1901). Ferenczi, even back then, had trauma in mind, his next truly remarkable "cavallo di battaglia" (hobby horse) (Borgogno, 2000)!

I'd also like to recall one of Ferenczi's other initial works, written between the two I've already mentioned, in 1909, about "introjection" ("Introjection and transference"). This work is also a very "impressive" calling card. According to Ferenczi, introjection is a fundamental psychic process, of equal importance to projection (the process that Freud and the first psychoanalysts studied). However, given the child is not an adult (and this according to Ferenczi should have urgently been taken into consideration by analysts, who failed to do so), introjection is a process—he makes this quite clear from this work—that is much more important than projection, because the child grows up placing things inside that originate from the outside. Therefore, the child's caregivers should have given much more care—in proportion to the huge fragility and infantile permeability—in regard to what they offered: food, care, words, affection. Therefore, what Ferenczi is telling us and stands out in this work—something that he began to support starting from this piece of work, I repeat—is that introjection is a source not solely of life, but also of death. We can—to put it bluntly—right from the first days of life "eat shit" or something poisonous and therefore be starved by our own parents, who are not, like the classic theory ends up sustaining, "good by definition" (Ferenczi, 1909).

Furthermore, a very young child—explains Ferenczi—is "hungry for objects and affects," crucial for his development and, because of his tender age, takes everything in without being able to choose and defend himself in regard to what he has actually taken in. Nevertheless, what does the child take in—reflected Ferenczi? Not just material things, but the way in which these—food and words, for example—were presented. It is from this, according to Ferenczi, that the child's subsequent identifications emerge and his vision of himself and the world. So, carefully minding the inter-psychic communication, Ferenczi—dulcis in fundo—told his colleagues that there was a "pragmatics of communication" to be fully aware of, an ever-important "pragmatics of communication" much more important as regards "developing minds": the minds of children ..., but also those of students and patients. Developing minds that are—I would like to emphasize it—much more susceptible than adult ones to be molded by "unconscious hypnotic commands" of caregivers: "maternal" hypnotic commands—he wisely suggested—if based on fascination, on insinuation and on seductiveness, and "paternal" ones if based on intimidation and on injunctions. Both of the commands that are absorbed by the young child will affect his being and behavior without his being aware of it. Indeed, the child is not even aware of housing them in his mind until he meets somebody who will "free them," by visualizing them and putting them into words.

Now, I'd like to concentrate on the importance of Ferenczi, and on how relevant and modern his theoretical and clinical point of view is, taking the liberty again to add two elements. The first one again concerns the journey. Ferenczi sensed immediately all of this from the beginning of his journey, but it took many, many years in order for him to believe in what he sensed, and consolidate his original version (you can see this in the three volumes of his Correspondence with Freud [Freud and Ferenczi, 1908–1914, 1914–1919, 1919–1933]—unmatchable if compared to the other collections of letters—and the Clinical Diary (Ferenczi, 1932b). As far as the psychoanalytical community is concerned, it took more than 20 years before they slowly started to examine his theory on "the importance of the other and of relatedness" (see also Paula Heimann and Bion. In my view, they are Ferenczi's fellow companions on this journey and destiny), and more than 50 years for his work to re-emerge and be studied with renewed interest and appreciation.

The second element instead concerns "trauma", which was the main topic he centered his reflection on during the last 5 or 6 years of his life, between 1927 and 1933.

What is there to say about "trauma in Ferenczi"? That it is psychic, it regards affects, it is cumulative and not due to a single event. It is a trauma not just because it happened, but because it didn't find an environment able to recognize it and to put it into words, giving help. It is, therefore, essentially a "trauma due to failure to assist": failure to give assistance that should be physiological during the moments of growth, and that often nevertheless is unfortunately not given, and that many times it is even more damaging whether the parents totally deny their non-fulfillment and cruelty, making the child who suffered it feel "crazy,""unreliable,""bad" and, in short, "responsible for it" (Borgogno, 2005).

To conclude, trauma, according to Ferenczi, is not just something that happened, but something that was meant to happen, but never did ... because—owing to the misery and unhappiness of the human condition—the person who caused the trauma is often unable himself of recognizing it, unable to avoid inflicting it and make provision for it. In conclusion, to again name one of the main concepts of my book, trauma is par excellence the originator of "spoilt children." Trauma creates "spoilt children" due to its introducing and, concomitantly, removing (extracting) something "in the soul," or "from the soul," of children and likewise—as Ferenczi pointed out—in and from the infantile soul of "children in adults."

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A SPECIAL CONVERSATION AND A PROGRESSIVE LEARNING FROM EMOTIONAL AND RELATIONAL EXPERIENCE

C. FORTUNE: So, Franco, what is psychoanalysis? You have suggested in your comments today that psychoanalysis, and therapy generally, can be seen as an attempt by a patient to learn to speak, so that the person can understand him- or herself. Could you talk a little more about how you help a patient move from a narcissistic language to a broader, more social, language, which respects, at the same time, the "mutual authentic alterity"? Also, who do you think would benefit from psychoanalysis, and what therapeutic factors would be involved in a psychoanalytic treatment?

F. BORGOGNO: I could start with Freud in answering you, saying with him that psychoanalysis is a "conversation," a "special conversation." But, I'd like to add straight away that, even though words are important, words alone are not enough, since a conversation is made up of much more. There are the "affective transactions" through which our being "of flesh and blood" oozes (an essential point!) and, therefore, what Winnicott (Letter to Melanie Klein 17th November 1952, in F.R. Rodman [Ed.], 1987) defined as the importance of "gestures." By this I mean "gestures of recognition,""gestures of confirmation" and "psychic validation," which prove that "you exist for someone else." I'd like to state beforehand that all of this has nothing to do with being goody-goody. In fact, you can obtain confirmation, recognition and validation even through the expression of a feeling of anger and hate by the other person, if the hate and anger are, in a given moment of the treatment, the feelings involved that urgently need to be recognized. So the psychoanalytical conversation needs authenticity, and not hypocrisy and "false self," since patients unconsciously intercept the therapist's real feelings extremely well, even though—expressing them "cryptically" (as Ferenczi noted in 1919)—the patients hide them from others, and even from themselves.

When Freud defined psychoanalysis as a "special conversation," he meant to emphasize how much "putting the unconscious into words" helped broaden the growth of an individual and his self-awareness in the world. Putting things into words, giving a verbal representation of one's unconscious emotional life, was essentially for Freud the main therapeutic factor, the "specific curative factor," which made psychoanalysis stand out in regard to other forms of psychotherapy. Freud viewed that other forms of psychotherapy were satisfied with a favorable result without searching for the reasons that determined the improvement, and without exploring what instead had caused in the past the patients' neurotic suffering, his illness. Despite this, Freud knew that putting things into words was simply not enough—but his personality made him more "friendly" to words rather than feelings, and particularly the most infantile ones that pertain to the young child. (As I wrote in my book, Freud did not have the tools for the "descent to the Mothers," and to get closer to what I call the "world of the nursery." He was so aware of this as to define himself a "conquistador," rather than a first-rate therapist.)

But, looking at Psychotherapy, dated 1904, one can quite clearly see how he did not ignore that words are not enough, and that it is "the generosity of another heart" that after all opens and makes the "mystery of another person" approachable. In the paragraph I'm referring to, in contradiction with his previous statement that psychoanalysis essentially proceeds "per via di levare," and not "per via di porre"—he quotes Hamlet, who, mocking Guilderstein's presumption to understand "the secret of his depression," exclaims: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; ... you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from the lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet you cannot make it speak. "Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me" (Act III, Scene 2). (Freud, 1904, p. 262)

Exactly for this reason, I prefer when defining psychoanalysis to emphasize—and in this I share Ferenczi's view—that it is essentially a learning from a special "emotional experience," in which the Greek motto "know thyself" becomes—in a relational sense—"work with another to discover your self." That is a lived experience—I should add—in which both the patient and the analyst are bearers of their own environment whose features (in both cases) must nevertheless be different because this diversity—the "contrast" between these two worlds, as Ferenczi pointed out (1929b)—is the specific curative factor in psychoanalysis. As you can see, I'm going back to say—as I did in all of my previous answers—how much the "alterity" and the "otherness" are relevant, so that psychoanalysis would not consist merely in a "solipsistic" experience where one grows mainly leaning on themselves. My first experience of analysis—I remember—was partially of that kind.

That is why—on the other hand—the subjectivity of the analyst is—in my view—something you can't give up. I'll explain myself. Right from the first session, the patient brings to analysis the environment in which he grew up as a child and adolescent: he not only brings himself and the various aspects of his self but also the different kinds of objects he has come in touch with during his life, all of which are slowly activated during the session and become crucial. The patient brings what Freud called "transference," even if nowadays—a century after he formulated this concept—we are much more able to understand its intricate expressions, and to imagine by identification the "basic unconscious relational prototypes" on which it is founded. However, I do think—incidentally—that, to understand the manifestations of transference in this sense, the analyst must possess in his theoretical tool-bag the idea that psychic well-being and suffering of a person are not born "in a vacuum," but within particular interpersonal relationships that have been, and are, fundamental as they make up the material of the unconscious identifications. This is a vision I'm not sure everyone follows and has in mind as the main element in their way of working with patients.

Following the main theme of my speech, even the analyst, of course, no different from the patient, brings an environment with him: a "specialized environment" made up not only of what we call setting (the space-time situation in which the analysis takes place, characterized by being, as far as possible, constant and ongoing, and safe from any impingement), but made up of his person too, which is also part of this setting and must be characterized by being constant and ongoing too, as well as by avoiding idiosyncratic impingements, self-pertaining and not aimed towards the understanding and the cure of the patient. However, the analyst, even willing to keep his "being there" in the sense I've just mentioned, brings—"unfortunately"—"his entire person" because it's precisely from his "person in its wholeness" that his understanding arises: I mean from his body, from his stomach, his heart and therefore—but often only later—from his mind. His training—to be more precise for those who don't know, or don't have it clear in their minds—should have prepared him to transform his personal emotional and physical reaction into something that tells him "who the patient is in that given moment" and "who he himself is" and "why does something occur precisely in that moment and not in another.""Who, which, to whom, why and how" (were according to Heimann exactly the questions the analyst must ask himself in order to understand the dynamics of the transference during the session and through the "long wave" of analysis (Heimann, 1955, 1959, 1970).

In other words, the analyst must work through his participation and involvement, distinguishing between what concerns him and what concerns the patient, in order to modulate his emotional answer into an interpretation that is able to inform the patient about himself, his needs, anxieties, history, his inner environment and, essentially, about the type of unconscious relationship in which he is engaging, and about the reasons why he is establishing that kind of relationship and not another. So, we can say that the analyst "uses his specificity to understand the specificity of the patient," and that his "specialization" (earlier I spoke about psychoanalysis as an offer of a "special environment") consists precisely in this operation—affective and cognitive at the same time—based on letting oneself become "pregnant" by the patient, based on vibrating inside with the experience the patient brings in order to reach through a necessary "donation of soul"—at later time and by an emotional learning from the experience itself. This is something that helps the patient better understand who he is and what is happening to him, and—through all that—integrate the various aspects of his personality and history into a meaningful unity.

As I have formulated it so far, the psychoanalytical experience could appear too linear and simple; therefore, at this point I'd like to add what Ferenczi came to understand about it more than 70 years ago giving us a point of view that is particularly attractive and closer to our current sensitivity. In short, I'm saying that the psychoanalytical situation, the psychoanalytical field, must very often "fall ill of the same illness that the patient and his family field fell ill of in the past." If one lets this happen—without placing a "no entry" in front of it (something that often occurs)—the analyst can vividly understand it himself—literally "on his skin"—what actually happened to the patient, which players and forces were involved in his childhood and adolescence, and—on the basis of this lived experience—he would be able to acknowledge it, thus allowing the patient to acknowledge it as well (this is the important analytical function that I call "witnessing"). Thus, the analyst can give an answer different from those given in the past and, as a consequence, show the patient that—as Bion (1992) and Ferenczi (1932b) said on this subject—the analyst is authentically willing to go through the "same emotional crisis" that the patient is suffering and has suffered. However, through it, the analyst reaches an affective response different from the patient's, and a different way of handling the psychic pain involved, a way that points to solutions and compromises of life that are an alternative to those the patient found in the past.

Maybe now after what I added, you have at your disposal another "piece" to understand what Ferenczi meant when he noticed that it's the "contrast between the past and present," the "road to recovery par excellence." However, in order to conclude this topic, I would like to underline how Ferenczi's view anticipated many ideas that came after him, including much contemporary psychoanalytical thought.

For example, Winnicott—in close assonance with Ferenczi regarding the way a "good enough analysis" works—wrote in Fear of breakdown in 1963 that the trauma (he didn't call it that in this work, even if actually he talks about the breakdown as a kind of trauma that in my opinion particularly concerns "spoilt children") has to happen again in the present, it has to be repeated and reactualized in the analysis. He argues that—when the trauma happened in the first period of life—the parents were not there (that is, they were psychically absent), and the premature and too fragile Ego of the child was not able to experience and afford it, so it turned out ruined and annihilated, in a real state of sheer psychic agony. Here, Winnicott believed, just like Ferenczi (1932b), that quite often the trauma, in order to be remembered and recalled by the patient, must be re-enacted during the analytic sessions starting from something improper and painful that occurs in the analytic relationship. Furthermore, it is the analyst, being moreover the involuntary author of it (the "soul murderer," as Ferenczi said), who must recognize and identify it before the patient does. To sum up—as Winnicott pointed out—the analyst can't refrain from being traumatic, but unlike the objects of the past—when this happens—he does not deny his failings and mistakes, but makes provision for them, thus offering the patient the opportunity to consciously perceive the trauma, understand it and share it with someone else, who assumes his part of responsibility (Winnicott, 1963).

As you have been able to ascertain, pointing out the closeness between Ferenczi's and Winnicott's ideas, I have again put in the spotlight in my speech the "spoilt children,""the importance of, in a manner of speaking, a favorable and provident environment" (a "providing," and not only "facilitating," environment), the long and complex time necessary to come to understand the analytical events and the patient's self-history. However, in the addition I just made I also wanted to let emerge another element I seem to have less insisted on, so I want to resume it again so you won't miss it. It deals with the fact that, in the vision of psychoanalysis I'm putting forward, each analytic experience—to be effective and successful—involves what today we call "enactment" (a concept focused on, and slowly made popular, by the Americans—Jacobs, Ogden, Renik), which is the impossibility of an analytic understanding without a part of "unconscious interpersonal action," unknown to the analyst himself while he is carrying it out. In these terms (Ferenczi anticipates the contemporary sensitivity in this as well), the understanding occurs thanks to the analyst's skill in intercepting the patient's psychic scars (Freud and Ferenczi, 1919–1933) from subtle and little signs in the analytic encounter (these signs can be detected from something that concerns the patient's body, his style of speaking, his contribution to the relationship's atmosphere, as well as from signs that the analyst feels inside and in his own body, without being able to explain it) and, above all, thanks to the analyst's availability to immerse himself generously in the field, "nel vivo" (in the thick) of the session (both operations are essential in order to steer the analyst towards recognizing the quality of the pain present in a given moment or in a period of the analysis and towards understanding the dynamics of transference and countertransference that coincide with that kind of pain). Consequently, the understanding, as I was saying, is not an instant and foregone result but it is the product of an "emotional working through in progress," which must accept the non-understanding and also the feeling of being "tangled-entangled" by the present events and therefore—to go straight to the core—it can only be reached later, and après-coup, thanks to a "transformation" in the analyst himself and not while the experience is taking place, like many psychoanalysts used to wish for a long time, and still do nowadays.

In conclusion, what do I want, and what can I still tell you? I'll simply restate what psychoanalysis is to me and, therefore, I'll tell you a short tale, the Little Bear tale, which poetically seems to me to condense a lot of what I have just said about the usefulness of psychoanalysis as a form of therapy.

The first point is that psychoanalysis is essentially a form of education, an education in life and living that can, in part, "make oneself immune"—as Ferenczi claimed (1929a)—if it is able to contain the suffering without duplicating it, if it is able to tolerate fear without turning it into terror, if it is able to keep up hope even during dark and hard moments helping to foresee a future—even when in seed—for the patient and his life and, of course, for the analysis experience he's doing with us. In other words, it is a learning from the experience in emotions and relationships, which when it works will generate a "new trust" and a "new beginning" encouraging the re-awakening and the integration of "dissociated and alienated parts of the self" (a topic that will be picked up later by Michael Balint, 1933, 1968).

It could also be a way to make our thinking more playful and free, if the patient can find in the analyst a person who is honestly and sincerely committed to fighting, and abstaining from, the oppressive element of "super-ego-rity," which can make us even more phobic and frightened in our deep emotional involvement with life, with others and ourselves. Finally, it may be the way through which we recover our dissociated parts, especially the child ones (the role-reversal and the dissociation of the self will be the theme of my work for the IPA Congress in Berlin at the end of July 2007), if the analyst can host and "interpret" them for a long time. In the sense—I mean—of the analyst being the bearer of those dissociated parts, until the patient—disidentifying from the adult figures he was compelled to identify with in his life (sometimes as the only way to survive)—is able to regain them, recognizing that, in the past, he had to exile and drive them away from his awareness, sometimes even without ever getting in touch with them. Until now, these parts could in fact not have found a mental space that welcomed and gave them the right of citizenship by offering a name, a value and a meaning.

I'll now move on—to draw things to a close—to the tale of Little Bear of which I want to tell you the antecedents. This story was told after a considerable period of analysis to an analysand who was still frightened of living life to the full without being compelled to adapt his private self to others, an analysand who, as a child, suffered from asthma and various types of hives connected with a dismeasured and anxious invasion of commands and rules (narcissistic and often projective) by his parents, themselves lacking in parents capable to call them to grow up without any fear. The story goes like this: Once upon a time there was a small bear who was always cold, always suffered from a cold and a continuous sore throat and bronchitis. His mother and father, more and more worried about his weak health, had urged him (sometimes "by fair means", sometimes "by foul means") to wear a woolen pullover, a plush shirt, a string vest, a thick sweater, mittens, a warm hat, mountain socks, lined boots and so on. A "sort of crescendo" that seemed to make things better very quickly. But, still Little Bear continued to be cold and was often in bed with a bad cold, a temperature and full of catarrh. Until one day—on the advice of some neighbors—he went to see Dr. Bear, a specialist of the respiratory tract of small growing bears, who started him on a new cure. "Little Bear—said Dr. Bear—this is my medicine: 'Take off the woolen pullover. Take off the plush shirt. Take off the string vest and thick sweater, and along with these things say goodbye to the mittens and soft hat and, don't forget, say the same goodbye to the socks and thick boots, because in life you have to play and walk.'" Little Bear, astounded at first, protested and complained because like this he would be colder and even more ill since he'd have no protection. Dr. Bear, however, sure of his medicine, didn't give in to his complaints and replied with a smile: "You're wrong, Little Bear, because now, even if you don't realize it, you're wearing your own real fur coat."

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