Aldo Carotenuto's analysis falls within the theoretical framework of the psychology of the unconscious, particularly the Jungian stream.

He approaches the phenomenology of the erotic experience with sensitivity and subtlety, attempting to understand the often subconscious causes and tracing the primary experiences where they are rooted.

He pays great attention to the dimensions of individuality, interiority, imagination, and the emotions that such an experience evokes, in which the material and psychic substance of each person is intensely involved.

Carotenuto emphasizes the ambivalence and structural contradictions of the erotic experience: the subtitle of the book, the limits of love and pain, does not indicate two different experiences, but two fundamental and inextricably intertwined dimensions of the same experience.