Jacqueline Rousseau-Dujardin is a psychoanalyst, based in Paris.

How to remain yourself when you love another? If you want love to last, should you keep a certain distance and choose someone with whom you do not share your daily life? Why are some people afraid of loving? Can mystical love really be qualified as love? Are you truly happy when you are in love? Is it possible to love too much?
Love has been a favourite subject for writers over the ages, and the best portrayals of love and its tribulations are the work of the great novelists. Proust, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Madame Guyon, Madame de Staël and Balzac, all tried in their own way to find answers to the questions it poses.
This book is a psychoanalytic study of love, offering a wide range of examples that will correspond to different readers’ own experiences. In fiction love’s pitfalls are more commonly described than its pleasures. And yet, every love story, each attempt at a relationship, reveals a bit more, and more profoundly, about the incredible gamble that is love: the discovery and acceptance of the other.

• Drawing on a number of great literary texts, the author studies the relationship between two people in love.
• Based on six singular trajectories, a subtle and original analysis of the principal characteristics of love.