Il coraggio di amare : lo scacco delle personalità come se.

The author takes up the psychoanalytic concept of as if developed by Helen Deutsch to describe some clinical cases drawn from his own practice as a psychoanalyst. But more generally, he uses it to describe a type of personality characterized by a lack of courage, and thus the impossibility of truly loving someone or something, since all love implies an act of courage. The as if subject loses the notion of his true desire insofar as s/he does not dare to realize it or even express it to himself. Finally, the author questions to what extent most people are as if personalities; in particular, he analyzes a certain attraction that the psychoanalytic profession exerts on the as if, and why the psychoanalyst appears so attractive a figure to them. [Publisher's text].