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Giorgio Sassanelli's latest book, Itinerari e figure della passione [Itineraries and Figures of Passion], investigates in depth the experience of passion - both loving and vindictive passion - highlighting its aspects which are vital to psychic life. Passion is recognized as a catalyst for projects of change and development, even those which are liable to fail. It is “understood both as a specific and unique type of relationship between the subject and the object, and as a new and complex restructuring of experience, which has a totalizing character and is capable of giving new meaning to existence” (p. 281):
In this sense, real passion is an experience which organizes the life of an individual, that is to say his thoughts, affects and behaviour, in relation to a desired or loathed object, an other to the self, who becomes the essential and unifying theme of the person, defining not only his identity but also his vision of the world. In passion, the dominant force of desire (erotic or aggressive) activates an emotivity, multifaceted and rich with fantasies, defined by its intensity and by its high level of arousal.