Federica
Cacciola

Whether one looks for it in one’s image like Narcissus or in the apparent calm of a couple’s life, whether one drags it like a boulder in the manner of Sisyphus, or finds it by chance in the lightning bolt of certain glances, all human beings have at least once in their lives come to terms with love. The most universal and discussed sentiment ever and the origin of most of Spotify’s sad playlists. Because Eros is a capricious and fickle god, and that is how we, too, are used to thinking of love: a war, a battlefield, an irrepressible passion that can often turn into unlove, something we basically understand nothing about. Whether golden or leaden, Cupid’s arrows spare no one, and if the nymph Daphne could not escape the pathological narcissist on duty even by turning herself into a shrub, who are we to escape the most exhilarating and destructive feeling of all?
Love and Psycho traces the stages of a relationship through the vicissitudes of Anna and Marco, archetypal protagonists of the book, with the fear, like everyone else, of really loving, and the doubt of not being able to, going through the specific travails of our days, ghosting, gaslighting, love-bombing (and whatever other fashionable term on Instagram). And at the same time, it parallels their story with Greek myths and the sentimental disasters of the gods-ancestral models of our love references.