“The love that moves the sun and the other stars”, narrated the Supreme Poet centuries and centuries ago. But is that still the case today? Love is still that energy that pushes people to create a new life for themselves, to leave their parental home, to meet someone else?
«Today most of my patients tell me about an entirely contemporary way of don’t stay in the bond: tell the story of the suffering caused by ghostingthat is when you are left by your partner without a word, sometimes without even a text message, but also come on serial lover – both male and female – as well as that due to the controlling manipulations of the gas lighter which many do not even know how to give a name. So writes the doctor Laura Pigozzipsychoanalyst, in his latest book Toxic lovespublished by Rizzoli, in which he investigates the roots of emotional addictions that can be generated in couples and families.
Today people seem soaked in what is termed “alexithymia”, or a disorder of awareness that prevents you from recognizing your emotions, and therefore from expressing them in the correct way: «Many very young people are afflicted by anxieties relating to gender dysphoriabut also from an impressive libido dropa kind of sexual asthenia which seems to contradict the drive effervescence one would expect at that age», continues Pigozzi.
The importance of setting boundaries in love
Love is a dance for twoand as such, needs boundaries, or rather of lines to be respectedwhich define the right dance in which you don’t step on each other’s feet, but can continue to dance together in the same rhythm.
«In love, boundaries jump too often – explains Pigozzi – You are willing to do anything as long as you love each other! One is ready to suffer, not to understand, to misunderstand, to depend, to let oneself be used, in order to feel loved in some way, or else one stays away and wary, in the cold of abstention».
All of this could feed a spiral of hatredwhich is usually the counterpart of love, in the duality of feelings: «A border has a double function: as a shelter and as a link. It can have a skilful porosity, be a place of passage, a point of balance, of precious ambivalence, a delicate but decisive exchange zone. There fearwho masters our life in the belief that he actually protects it mobilize hatred, which ignores the double function of the edge, that of oscillation between contact and separation. Hatred does not have the intelligence of the border» says Pigozzi.
The dynamics of toxic love
Fear, which denies boundaries, creates the fertile ground for love defined as toxic. «Toxic love crosses borders, disintegrates them arguing that merging is true love – continues Pigozzi – It modulates on the psychophysical appropriation of the partner, it feeds on her vitality, lives at the expense of the other, who instead dies».
But where it was born and where it is learned this kind of suffocating and lethal love? «The dominant-dominated relationship begins at the dawn of man and, at that time, serves to keep him alive – says Pigozzi – Then slowly the newborn grows and the dependent relationship with the mother, if all goes well, is relativized; if this does not happen, in one way or another, he finds himself involved, in the course of life, in relationships marked by the absolute. And ideal love always is.”
So is too much love harmful? «The excess of love, especially from parents, unleash a excess of hategiven that in every love there is always a share of hatred, as is very explicit in some turbulent passions, even non-pathological ones, between lovers», concludes Pigozzi.
Toxic loves: the serial lover
We are used to hearing about serial killers. In criminology, this can pertain to psychopathyor to that field of psychic disorders in which a violent act is at the center of a scene organized according to a precise ritual: always the same, that is the so-called signature of the maniac, built by the serial killer according to a strategy, often very subtle. In that case, the courts’ problem is whether the individual is one psychotic – and therefore suffers from his condition – or one psychopath free from guilt and sorrow.
And in love there are similar figures? “We can talk about serial lover: they don’t openly commit crimes, though they do not prove any identification to the other (no empathy, we would say today) and manipulate the victim behind a facade not only of normality, but even of manifest success. It often is an integrated psychopath, sometimes even with a social business card of a certain prestige, and it is highly coveted also because of the TV series of which these fascinates abound», explains Pigozzi.
Let’s think about Don Giovanni of Mozartian memory: he doesn’t want to be loved, he doesn’t look for his mother, he is a seducer who doesn’t know how to seduce, he has a truck driver’s approach that speaks of «closing the case». So why is he desired by a woman? “Why women are idealizers, they dream of the angel who has the strength and charisma of a devil. And then why female sexuality is complicated and a woman is never sure of being such: but if you are chosen by the black prince, who can have the most beautiful, it means that then you are!
The description of Don Giovanni is of a figure that allows them to be a woman without being a mother: it frees them from maternal but also paternal control, which makes them feel like women. However, if the seducer is an activator of the female psychosexual imagination, he must remain so, without taking shape in the real ruler, who remains one of the most toxic encounters that a woman (but also a man) can do».
The identikit of the serial lover: the signals
So, what does this serial lover look like? The comparison with its meaner cousin, the serial killer, is shocking but necessary. «The serial lover in the flesh is a pervert attracted, like the serial killer, by a special predisposition for the exploitation of the other, which comes canceled in a series for the enjoyment of one’s boundless ego.
Like the serial killer, the serial lover depends on the excitability that feelings of control over the other give himof psychic and physical manipulation on him, up to killing him – in the case of the serial killer – and perhaps taking a piece of the corpse (in the case of cannibalism) to remember the excitement from which he is addicted. The serial killer, like the serial lover, is not in fact “free” as he believes and leads to believe, but depends on the victim and the degree of ecstasy it can offer them.
We asked Dr. Pigozzi about the signs to identify a serial lover: here they are below.
General identikit of the serial lover
The serial lover, in the repetitiveness of his patterns, he is a conformist more than a creative, a slave to the sequence more than a spirit of free love. Does not tolerate imperfection of life and closes a story before it becomes human.
Serial lovers – sometimes they are women – are people captured by fatal attractions, by love at first sight, addicted to a whole range of sensations of amorous excitement.
Some of them, especially males, always display the same kind of beauty – they love an invariable, fixed image.
They reproduce the same pattern of pick-up, seduction and finally separation, often by evaporation, when the game, in their opinion, is over.
If cannibalism is the most extreme form of assimilation, in the case of the serial lover, this “eats” the other metaphoricallycontrolling it through a deadly practice that strips the victim of his personal characteristics, for better to dissolve it in a series. The excitement is about their ability to maneuver, they are never seduced by each other.
He is never really interested in each other’s dreams, projects or simply hobbies: all useless frills that spoil his enjoyment. His interest in the partner of the moment is always affected, mannered, detached, never participatory.
The seriality of the lovers he “collects” depends on always repeating something he does not reach, but which he believes he can touch. Escape to another prey to eliminate the anxiety of being engulfed by the primordial Other and to have the certainty of being the engulfer. The need to arrive at that absolute ideal leads to attempts again and again which fail in senseless repetition. The other is inserted into the series as rendered dead, symbolically or, in the most extreme cases, materially.
The huge possibility of partners that websites offer him in a continuous stream facilitates interchangeability which he needs in order not to get too attached to the other. In fact, the web is the elective territory of the serial lover’s predation, who, in the fiction on which he builds every possibility of relationship, takes advantage of the virtuality. Here there is some fantasy of perfection, both because it tends to hide the defects of reality, and because the great availability of meeting via the web implicitly promises everyone, even the victim of the serial lover, that you can always find someone better, more beautiful, more suitable, in short, perfect. Chat promotes virtual relationships which, even when resolved in real encounters, always maintain a bit of virtuality eun excess of idealization of the other.
Chris Evans, who has experienced “ghosting” on his skin
The decalogue of dating: 10 terms you absolutely need to know if you use Tinder
Source: Vanity Fair
I’m Susan Karen, a professional writer and editor at World Stock Market. I specialize in Entertainment news, writing stories that keep readers informed on all the latest developments in the industry. With over five years of experience in creating engaging content and copywriting for various media outlets, I have grown to become an invaluable asset to any team.
