Romano Màdera stands out for having skillfully woven together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and secular spirituality into a project of education and care dedicated to the search for the meaning of life, responsibility, authenticity, and the conscious construction of self through narration and existential practice, while maintaining a keen interest in the mystical experience within everyday life.

His intellectual journey intertwines the thought of pivotal figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Giovanni Arrighi, Paolo Aite, Jung, Hadot, and Gioacchino da Fiore, blending rigorous theory with clinical praxis, educational commitment, and profound influences from religion – first within the Catholic milieu, later through dialogue with the Waldensian tradition – from his political activism rooted in the workers’ and students’ movements of the ’70s culminating in active participation in the Gramsci Group, as well as from philosophy – through critical reflection on the care of the soul – and psychoanalysis, which provided him with profound tools for self-exploration, inner transformation, and the therapeutic value of storytelling.

Raised in Malnate, a small town in the Varese area, in a community immersed in Catholic culture and nurtured by Combonian missionaries’ educational presence, Màdera experienced religion as a space of meaning, justice, and solidarity. The oratory environment and commitment to Catholic missionary work instilled values of attention to the marginalized, evangelical idealism, and human redemption – motifs that would remain central in his reflections over the following decades.

His youthful religious experience laid the foundation for a vivid imagination, a yearning for enchantment, and a striving toward meaning, which he reinterprets originally in his philosophical and psychological works. Thus, religion offered the initial language of meaning and care, elements that would become key to his thought.

From his early philosophical formation at the University of Milan, Màdera was captivated both by the depths of ancient philosophy – especially the wisdom of Socrates, Plato, and Stoic reflection on the care of the soul – and by the richness of modern critical masters such as Marx and Nietzsche. Their radical interrogation and deconstruction of the social, cultural, and moral foundations of modernity invited him to question meaning, desire, alienation, and morality through a non-dogmatic perspective.

In the ’70s, his critical consciousness matured through active participation in political and social philosophy movements. Central to this phase was the experience of the Gramsci Group, founded alongside Giovanni Arrighi and Luisa Passerini, active throughout Italy as a laboratory of thought and action weaving Marxist theory with direct engagement in workers’ collectives and social movements. Here, analysis of capitalism’s crisis, hegemony relations, and the role of organic intellectuals combined with militant education and the search for new forms of resistance and change.

In the Gramsci Group, the relationship between Màdera and Arrighi takes shape as an intense dialogue between the analysis of the world economy developed by Arrighi and Màdera’s philosophical existential reflection, focused on processes of subjective and collective transformation. Arrighi, drawing on his expertise in economic history and in the processes of globalization, represents the analytical structural pole, while Màdera embodies the drive toward education, critical consciousness, and rootedness in the struggles of workers and students in Milan in the early 1970s.

This theoretical political collaboration reaches its peak in the drafting of the founding theses of the Gramsci Group at the end of 1971, written primarily by Màdera and Arrighi, who are the main theoretical authors even within the collective form in which the text is presented. The theses coherently express their shared thinking on the crisis of capitalism and on the tasks of communists and were published in 1972 by Sapere as the first issue of the Quaderni di Rassegna comunista, under the title Crisi del capitale e compiti dei comunisti (Crisis of Capital and Tasks of the Communists).

Their joint theoretical work thus becomes the programmatic point of reference for the Gramsci Group, marking for both of them a period of intense militancy in which conceptual elaboration and political practice continually nourish one another in factories, schools, and local territories. This phase leaves a lasting mark: for Arrighi, in the subsequent development of the theory of systemic cycles and the world economy; for Màdera, in the attention to the ethico political dimension, to education, and to subjectivity that will permeate his later philosophical and psychoanalytic research.

In the mid-’70s, following profound existential crises caused chiefly by family bereavements, personal experiments, and the collapse of collective political prospects, Màdera distanced himself from Gramscian militancy and turned toward psychoanalysis, and later the Waldensian tradition.

This marked a further maturation stage where foundational influences – Marx and Nietzsche with their critique of alienation, yearning for meaning, and call for redefined subjectivity, alongside Michel Foucault’s exploration of techniques of the self, subjectivity, and power genealogies – remained central to his thought’s future development.

From the late ’70s onward, Màdera transitioned from a Catholic and militant milieu toward a freer, dialogical spirituality. Seeking new roots, responsibility, and freedom of conscience, he embraced the Waldensian Church as a space of dialogue and ethical renewal that accompanied and enriched his personal and philosophical evolution, while remaining open to encounters with other religious and monastic traditions.

In this spiritual quest and openness to multifaceted transcendence, the figure of Gioacchino da Fiore gained particular historical and symbolic significance for Màdera. Known since his university studies, Gioacchino’s prophetic vision of history and humanity’s spiritual evolution – dividing history into three ages and promulgating a Trinitarian doctrine distinct from the official one, prefiguring a new spiritual era marked by inner freedom transcending institutional Church – was condemned for its millenarian character and deviation from dogma. Nonetheless, he remains a borderline figure between prophecy and heresy, profoundly influencing medieval and later religious, philosophical, and prophetic culture.

Màdera values Gioacchino as a model of history open to transformation and the promise of a third age of the Spirit, where Gioacchino’s prophecy becomes a founding myth inspiring a philosophy of waiting, spiritual freedom, and ethical quest, overcoming dogmatic rigidity and fostering intertradition dialogue and an utopia of collective secular spirituality.

On the psychoanalytic path, Màdera encountered Freud through The Interpretation of Dreams, a gift from his sister Rossella at the start of university. He deepened his study during his philosophical formation and personal transition from political militancy.

Integrating many Freudian theories in an original way, partially blending them with other philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches, Màdera affirms Freud’s true revolution lies less in theory than in creating the analytic dialogue space – a protected place where individuals can recognize and voice their unpresentable parts – and unveiling the symbolic worth of dreams, gestures, and images. This unintentionally opened philosophy as a way of life to new expressive space, questioning biographical meaning beyond traditional, now voiceless paths.

Freud’s meeting marked the first step of a passionate journey Màdera pursued, expanding its scope nationally and internationally. A fundamental role was played by his personal and later didactic analysis begun in the late ’70s with Paolo Aite, renowned Italian neuropsychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst.

In Jungian analysis, Màdera discovered a horizon of intrapsychic transformation and work on unconscious images.

Carl Gustav Jung is essential for Màdera – not only clinical Jung but also the philosophical and visionary Jung of the Red Book. Jung allowed him to integrate themes like myth, Self-transformation, and secular spiritual quest, reactivating these perspectives in the contemporary world.

His research decisively orients toward the psychoanalytic horizon, which has become fundamental to his theoretical, clinical, and existential approach.

From his encounter and relationship with Aite – with his nuanced research on unconscious and symbolic – Màdera assimilated the complex psychology lessons and the significance of the imaginal dimension. Clinical dialogue, relationship care, and respect for lived complexity – central in Aite’s practice – became crucial also for Màdera in developing clinical practice and theorizing his original form of analysis: Philosophically Oriented Biographical Analysis, Analisi Biografica a Orientamento Filosofico – hereinafter referred to by its acronym ABOF – attentive both to psychic depth and philosophical, narrative openness of existence.

Still in the analytic realm, Ernst Bernhard, Aite’s teacher, represents for Màdera a bridge between Jungian psychology and European culture, an example of openness, interdisciplinarity, critical listening to subjectivity, and a founding model for intercultural dialogue – between East and West, myth and history – and for valuing narrative and myth within psychic dynamics.

Bernhard’s work – among the first to bring Jung to Italy and to practice a secular and intercultural interpretation of his work – is for Màdera a compass to think psychology as shifting sands of symbols, narratives, cultural genealogies, often invoked in his writings reflecting ABOF roots and biographical narration’s therapeutic and philosophical function.

From Ernst Bernhard, Màdera took the concept of Mythobiography, where personal narration projects onto grand mythological archetypes that make one’s story intelligible, defining a self-narrative that transcends mere facts and opens to symbolic, universal dimensions.

It was a chance encounter with Bernhard’s Mythobiography writings that sparked Màdera’s interest in psychoanalysis. Crucial was the role of the essay’s editor, Hélène Erba-Tissot, who directed him to Paolo Aite, marking the beginning of his analytical path.

For Màdera, myth is no longer merely an archaic story but a texture of meaning structuring individual and collective existence, offering an universal map of life’s passages and experiences.

Narration thus becomes the means by which myth actualizes and is continually reinterpreted: it heals individual history by lending profound sense to events, helping one reconcile wounds and find meaningful guiding threads.

In this, narrated myth is not merely effective fiction but a condition for constructing truth – not as correspondence to facts but as truth founded on metaphor and symbol: a truth fostering personal transformation and growth, promoting reconciliation with self and others, thus composing meaning.

For Màdera, this process of searching for narrative truth involves recognizing the performative value of words and imagination in order to promote not only personal growth through narratives that heal and give meaning to individual experiences, but also collective growth, since each person’s biography cannot divorce from relationships, life contexts, and history.

ABOF integrates this process, where myth, mythobiographical narration, and truth converge in a therapeutic, transformative practice that grounds and transforms biography as capable of healing, reconciling, and giving meaning to individual experience through universal narratives.

From the more strictly philosophical point of view, a decisive influence expanding and refining Màdera’s view comes from Pierre Hadot, the eminent French philosopher rediscovering ancient spiritual exercises and philosophy as a way of life that Màdera reworks, offering them as practical tools for personal growth and existential transformation.

Epicurus also holds a central place in Màdera’s thought as a model of therapeutic philosophy and conscious pleasure practice. Especially in the essay Il nudo piacere di vivere – first published in 2006 by Arnoldo Mondadori and reissued by Lindau in 2025 – Màdera extols therapy of passions, interpreting pleasure not as unbounded hedonism but sober and authentic experience. For Màdera, Epicurean pleasure links to absence of disturbance, serene joy of affections, nature, relations, and living the present free from needless fears. From this perspective, true Epicurean pleasure, according to Màdera, coincides with self-mastery, desire limitation, and care of the soul, shaping a philosophy aiming at inner serenity and reconciling philosophical thought with existential practice.

Màdera positions philosophy as philosophical care central in ABOF, intersecting lifestyle – with daily work on self-transformation, emotions, behavior – and search for meaning – with exercise of freedom, awareness, and ethical openness to the world and others.

Thus, Romano Màdera’s personal journey, in constant dialogue with reference authors and masters, crystallizes into original and dynamic thought integrating Jungian imaginal depth, ancient care praxis, social-philosophical critique, and secular spirituality, forging a philosophical-analytical style combining transformation, relation, awareness, and quest for meaning in individual and collective life.

His original development, ABOF, promotes Philosophically Oriented Biographical Analysis as a new fertile vision: therapy for existential care and meaning, weaving deep analysis, ancient philosophy, and narrative-biographical practice in a transformative approach recognized well beyond Italian borders.

Moreover, Màdera proposes a secular spirituality idea – aligned with the Compagnia di Spiritualità Laica active for over three years – as a pathway weaving inner depth and ethical commitment fostering transformative, dialogical philosophy capable of bringing meaning, care, and responsibility into daily life, dialogue among individuals, and intercultural encounters.