Eugenio Borgna

Eugenio Borgna (1930 – 2024) was an Italian psychiatrist and essayist.

Quotes

Emotions are boundless; there are strong emotions and weak emotions, emotions that cannot help but expand conversation and dialogue with others. On the other hand, there are emotions that shut down this dialogue, ultimately making our ongoing relationships with others more difficult.
- La solitudine dell'anima, Feltrinelli Editore, 2011

Stefania Scateni, l'Unità, 12 February 2009

Ultimately, and in a nutshell, it is to escape death that we invented language, art, philosophy, and politics.
Graves are made for the living.
Fairy tales teach us that fear should not be locked away in an inaccessible closet inside ourselves, but felt, experienced, and confronted.
The image that lives within us is linked to our conception of life and also to the difference we make between dying and death.
In the term dying, living also remains “alive”; in the word death, life disappears.
Actions only make sense if we try to grasp their meanings.
Italians are, in practice, illiterate. It is an emotional illiteracy that prevents us from understanding others.

Marina Corradi, Avvenire, 12 December 2011

An economic crisis, however serious, never has such a profound impact on the individual conscience as the desolate lack of meaning that characterizes depression.
Some ideals are strong bulwarks, while others fade away, leaving behind an unsustainable backlash.
Nothing gives a person the same strength to resist adversity and pain as Christian, Pascalian hope.
When certainties fail, we can only save ourselves on that raft where solidarity with others gives meaning to our sacrifice.
Only an inner education allows us to look at reality and distinguish what really matters.
Let us take the examination of conscience, a Christian expression that seems so dinosaur-like, so obsolete. In reality, this examination taught us to look inside ourselves every evening, to see what we had done wrong, and therefore our limitations, and then to ask for help to change: which already implied a new hope for the day to come.
The very act of praying every morning introduces us to a day that is more open to hope; which is never just for ourselves, but also for others, and even for those we do not know.
This, after all, is the greatest rationality: knowing that life is much more than all our accounts, than all our reasonable predictions.

Rodolfo Casadei, Tempi.it, 28 June 2015

We must educate ourselves to recognize our inner resonances when we meet others, work, and dream.
The experience of infinity, in all its forms, brings us closer to God.
Depression pushes us to fully grasp what we are experiencing, and thus our ability to understand others also increases.
The category of the future is the one that is most erased today from an existential and psychological point of view.
Where there is an experience of pain, the perception of the insufficiency of external, ephemeral, temporary pleasures immediately grows, and the desire for something that transcends the contingent grows.
If our eyes are wet with tears, eyes that allow us to empathize with the inner life of the sick person, with their pain, to see the wounded soul deep in their eyes, then we will be able to help.