“Happiness is (not) a myth. Free yourself from the fear of not making it”, the new book by psychotherapist and popularizer Michele Mezzanotte

“Once one has listened to suffering, crossed the dark forest of the psyche and encountered one’s demons, one can achieve the much desired and sought-after happiness. But is happiness a myth or not? Happiness is a myth because sometimes we can set ourselves obstacles that prevent the search for this complex feeling.” These are the words of the psychotherapist and popularizer Michele Mezzanotte who, after having enjoyed enormous success with True love is (not) a mythhas recently returned to bookstores, again for Sperling & Kupfer, with Happiness is (not) a myth. Free yourself from the fear of not making it.

The Dr. Mezzanotte carefully analyzes what often prevents us from being happy, using stories of patients and many myths which with their wisdom become explanatory to better understand certain situations.

We start from a fixed point: “Pursuing happiness means realizing your own personal myth, that is, the unrepeatable story of life.

This is why, in my opinion, happiness cannot be caged in generalist definitions, or even with more or less universal claims, nor can it be sought and obtained through preconceived ideas”.

Embracing the Hillman teaching, according to which “symptoms are ways of the psyche and ways to find the soul” on what prevents us from being happy, for Dr. Midnight “the path to finding oneself will be the imaginal psychological one, that is, the method that uses metaphor to get to know oneself. To understand madness you need madness itself, to understand the shadows you have to use the shadows, to listen to the symptoms you have to be symptomatic, to understand the images of the psyche there is no other way than to use the images, the daily stories and the myths of psyche.

I will consider every form of suffering, every symptom, as a message from the psyche, as a road to travel woven by the three Deaths, as a possibility to grasp the meaning of one’s life. I want neither to reduce nor to magnify the meaning of the forms of pain, but to give it the right value, so that it is useful to your life”.

Happiness is (not) a myth It’s a pleasure to read, it’s clearly written and it’s a book full of quotes, with a very vast bibliography.

“Totò was right,” underlines the doctor. Midnight – happiness does not exist, and I would add: it does not exist except in its being a driving force. Happiness is the engine, it is the energy, it is the motivation that allows the psyche to move through the journey that leads towards the realization of the personal myth”.

The author was born in 1984 in Chieti, where he lives and works. In 2012 he was co-founder of the first online archetypal psychology magazine L’Anima Fa Arte, which then transformed into the blog of the same name. Since 2020 he has been involved in the dissemination of psychological issues on his social channels.

Rossella Montemurro