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One of the most profound moments for an academic publisher is when we lose one of our authors. Their work is a lasting legacy, a reminder of the career and passion they dedicated their lives to. For us, as their publishers, we become the caretakers of that legacy.
This responsibility becomes even more significant when a project is still in production. Fortunately, we often have the honour of working with the author’s family or co-authors to ensure their work continues to reach the global research community.
This is the case with a forthcoming trio of titles: Hope and Despair, Wounded Nostalgia, and The Madness That Is Also in Us—English translations of works by the renowned psychiatrist Eugenio Borgna.
Eugenio Borgna, who passed away the 4th of December 2024, aged 94, was the most prominent Italian psychiatrist of his time. His works have made mental illness comprehensible to the readership and removed the boundaries created by misconception and fear. In his writing he makes acceptable what the society instinctively rejected as different and dangerous. His written work is a complement to Franco Basaglia’s psychiatric revolution.
We are proud to be able to publish these translated texts and continue to raise awareness of Eugenio Borgna’s work and the difference he made in making mental illness better understood.
Each title will feature a preface and we share a small snippet of these here.
“I write as an editor for the publishing house that is bringing Borgna into English for the first time, with a trilogy composed of Hope and Despair, Wounded Nostalgia, and The Madness That Is Also in Us. Again here, one need only glance at the titles to grasp the author’s aims: as a phenomenologist, opposed to any form of biological reductionism of psychiatric disorders and backed by direct clinical experience, the intention is to make madness understandable, acceptable, “normalize” it, in today’s parlance, by demonstrating readers its proximity to us all.”
Ilaria de Seta
“Of Eugenio Borgna, we appreciate his objectivity and composure, the measure that gives his texts, never caustic or brutal, the hushed tone of quiet reflection. Yet this moderation conceals a great radicalism. If there is such a thing as an intimately relational psychiatry, based on listening, “humanistic” and anti-authoritarian, this is precisely the psychiatry to associate with Borgna”.
Michele Dantini
“Eugenio Borgna is, equally with Franco Basaglia, the most important Italian psychiatrist. If Basaglia gave psychiatric patients back their freedom (with his reform that led to the passage of Law 180 in Italy in 1978), Borgna gave psychiatry back its soul.”
Stefano Redaelli
