Key word: love, psychopathologies, motivational systems, emotions-affections
Cupid and Psyche, in the mythological tale by Apuleius, meet and unite passionately only at night, in the dark, since Cupid forbids her to see each other.
In the same way, human, earthly love deeply nourishes psyche, but this doesn’t permit it to illuminate its face, to discover what love is.
So, in the diagnostician criteria of all mental disorders proposed by Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders-5, the word love very rarely appears and without a particular significance, while the vicissitudes of those who embark on a psychotherapy are full of amorous sufferings. In the attempt of overcoming this apparent incompatibility among love, psyche and psychopathology, the Author goes through a review of the literature about love psychology and a presentation of some clinical cases to get to propose a theory of amorous affection that becomes part of a model of the mind illustrated in previous contributions.