The Incurable Romantic – And Other Tales of Madness and Desire

Description

Love is a great leveler. Everyone wants love, everyone falls in love, everyone loses love, and everyone knows something of love’s madness. But the experience of obsessive love is no trivial matter. In The Incurable Romantic, psychologist Frank Tallis recounts the extraordinary stories of his patients who are, quite literally, madly in love: a woman becomes convinced that her dentist is secretly infatuated with her; and academic is besotted with his own reflection; a beautiful woman searches jealously for a rival who isn’t there; and a night porter is possessed by lascivious demon. These are just some of the people whom we encounter as Tallis explores the conditions of longing and desire–true accounts of psychotherapy that take the reader on a journey through the darker realms of the amorous mind.

The experience of being in love is powerful enough to change how we feel and how we behave; for millennia, love has been described as a kind of euphoric madness. Drawing on the latest scientific research into the biological and psychological mechanisms underlying romance and emotional attachment, The Incurable Romantic demonstrates that ultimately love dissolves the divide between normal and abnormal.