Description

This 150 -page book, published in 1979, has excited great interest all over the world. In Italy alone it has gone through 45 editions and sold over a million copies. Its success depends on the fact of its being the first study on infatuation and falling in love since Stendhal’s famous De l’amour of 1832. For Alberoni falling in love is of the same nature as religious or political conversion. We fall in love when our attempts to save previous relationships have failed, and we are ready to change. At this point a rapid destructuring-restructuring process takes place within us, called nascent state. The previous relationship disintegrates and we rebuild our lives and futures around the loved person. In the nascent state the individual acquires the ability to fuse with someone else and create a new, highly supportive collectivity. Hence the famous definition: falling in love is the nascent state of a collective movement made up of just two persons.It should come as no surprise that the subject of this book is of course infatuation and love. More specifically, Alberoni deals with those all-too-brief and utterly captivating moments when one first falls in love. He attempts to unlock all the rather bizarre, illogical and sometimes completely idiotic forces that drive our behaviour in this frenzied state.