A case from “The Sorrows of Love and Psychoses” by Constance Pascal, a pioneer of French psychiatry

During the descent into the underworld, Virgilio draws Dante’s attention to the desperate people who cry out and cry out for lost love. One cannot avoid thinking of these damned of Eros when we listen to the laments of the alienated, overwhelmed by the pain of wounded love”. 

This is the incipit of Chagrins d’amour et psychoses (The Sorrows of Love and Psychosis), by Constance Pascal ¹, edited and translated into Italian by us ². Dedicated “to Morel, who first described the Folie par amour”, Pascal’s valuable essay, besides constituting an important chapter in the history of psychiatry, allows us to reflect in a new way on a condition that is still so frequent in clinical and criminology today: the ‘lovesickness’.

The topos moreover is very ancient and has its roots in the early days of Western medicine. As Pascal reminds us, telling us, not without a touch of irony, the story of Hippocrates and Perdiccas, “It was in the shadow of the plane tree of Kos, around the year 428 B.C. that psychoanalysis was born, this abysmal science that reveals the secrets of love”. The young king Perdiccas, according to Soranus’ account, was suffering from a mysterious φθίσις (a term then denoting not tubercular “consumption” but a general physical wasting away) that consumed him. Hippocrates, called to his bedside, adopts a method not unlike today’s psychotherapies, and discovers that Perdiccas’s φθίσις was nothing more than a πάϑος of ψυχή, a disease of the psyche due to his love for his stepmother Phila. He cured his love sickness by advising him to marry the beloved woman, since his father had died and, “fortunately”, his beloved had been a widow for three years! Hippocrates was considered in the Greek world to be the first theorizer of the physical consumption caused by falling in love, and his followers considered him a specialist in the treatment of such illness ³.

Superimposable, and slightly later (ca. 325 B.C.) is “the illness of Antiochus”, narrated by Plutarch: Antiochus, general of Alexander the Great, falls in love with Stratonice, his father’s new wife. The passion consumes him. The physician Erasistratus is called in and discovers the cause of the illness. The father, Seleucus, renounces his wife and gives her to his son.