ABSTRACT
This book is about love, about how we fall in love and why we fall in love, and about how much we suffer if unable to love or be loved. The need to love and be loved can be read as the prototype of every human need and every relationship between human beings. To be loved is wishing to be seen, known, recognised for what we are in our deepest and most hidden inner self, in our wildest desires to live and be free. It is a need for knowledge, gratefulness and recognition. Literature, cinema and our very experience of life tell us about it. By listening to love, can psychoanalysis add anything further and new to what has already been said by culture, art and by our life experiences? In psychoanalysis, the events of love can be understood by going back to the most primitive forms of human relationships, that is, to the earliest childhood experiences.
