Laura Pigozzi, a leading figure in new psychoanalysis, explains how the hatred and love we experience in childhood determine the degree of independence and balance we will enjoy as adults, freeing us from the toxicity of many claustrophobic relationships.

Toxic love does not arise on its own or because of repeated bad encounters. Bad encounters always come first. This book talks about invasions of the boundaries of the relationships we experience within and outside the family. It talks about husbands, lovers, but also friends, colleagues, superiors, and above all mothers who, in the name of absolute love, prevent the necessary and vital process of separation from their children. It talks about ghosting, serial lovers, and gaslighters. It talks about those bonds that become predatory, that take away our space, that disempower us, that hurt us. But to understand how love can turn into hate, it is important to look back. Because sadists, bullies, and manipulators have an infallible nose for sniffing out and choosing the perfect victim that every former abused child potentially represents. Love is a matter of boundaries, of edges that should remain porous, mobile, soft, and allow the passage of what nourishes, like the membrane of a cell, defined but not absolute, stable but not necrotic. In toxic love, however, boundaries are disrupted: broken down in the symbiotic invasion of absolute love, or stiffened, impassable, and expelling, in abandonment. There is a strange equivalence between symbiosis and abandonment that is experienced in our early family bonds and inevitably reproduced in the love relationships we establish as adults.