Bianca Garufi (1918–2006)

Bianca Garufi was born into an aristocratic Sicilian family, and spent long summer holidays near Taormina and Syracuse. She studied the humanities and philosophy at the University of Messina. During World War II, she joined the Italian Resistance and the Communist Party (which she quit following the repression of the Hungarian uprising against the Russians in 1956). From 1944 to 1958, Garufi worked at the publishing house Einaudi, where she met Cesare Pavese, the noted anthropologist and psychoanalyst. They collaborated on various works in anthropology and psychoanalysis and co-wrote her first novel Fuoco grande ("The Great Fire") in 1959. After his death, she published the novels Il fossile ("The Fossil") in 1962, and Rosa cardinale ("Cardinal Pink") in 1968. Her verses were collected into a single volume as Se non la vita (1992). Bianca Garufi went on to study psychoanalysis under the Jungian analysts Ernst Bernhard and Robert Grinnell, and established herself in private practice. She wrote articles for such publications as Spring, the Journal of Analytical Psychology, and Anima, and supervised the translations of various analytical texts into Italian.