The Art of Loving
In my last blog post I reflected on some of the ideas in the book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, by A.S. Neill. Erich Fromm wrote the introduction to Summerhill, and that’s what inspired me to read some of his books, starting with The Art of Loving, which I first read in 2013. When I bought my first copy at a used book store in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the owner of the store said that he read The Art of Loving every year. And while my devotion to the book hasn’t been that steadfast, I have re-read it a few times, and I’ve given two presentations—one professional and one more academic—on the ideas it puts forth. I recommend it to others all the time. I think it should be required reading for all humans.
Erich Fromm was was born on March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought. He helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941 to 1949, and taught courses at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1941 to 1959. He went on to live and work in Mexico City, and to teach at Michigan State University and New York University. In 1974 Fromm moved from Mexico City to Muralto, Switzerland, and died at home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday. All the while, he maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.
One of those books, published in 1956, was The Art of Loving. It reiterated many of the ideas Fromm had already expounded upon in his books Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and The Sane Society, but from a different perspective—through the lens of love-as-art.
He begins the book by questioning its very premise: “Is love an art?” If so, then it requires knowledge and effort; it is something we must learn how to do, and practice doing. But Fromm says that people in the main do not look at love this way. Instead we focus on being loved; we focus on the object of love rather than love-as-faculty; and we conceive love as something we just “fall into,” the easiest thing in the world. In our focus on being loved, we try to make ourselves “lovable,” i.e. physically attractive, professionally respectable, socially popular, etc. In focusing on the object of our supposed love, we reduce other people to commodities in a marketplace, for which we must trade in our own supposed assets. Two people fall in love, Fromm says, “when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.” Oh, if he were alive to see dating apps! We’re literally shopping for humans. And in the third instance, taking for granted that love is easily “fallen into,” we focus our attention and energy on those aims we accept as naturally more difficult, such as “being successful.”
But clearly, love is not easy. We fail at it far more often than we fail in our careers. To become masterful at loving means that we must make that mastery our number one priority. It means that nothing is more important to us than this particular art form.
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The first part of The Art of Loving elucidates Fromm’s theory of love, which he calls the answer to the problem of human existence, that problem being our pervasive, nagging sense of being separate from others, of being totally alone. The awareness of our separateness is the source of our shame, guilt, and anxiety.
So how do we overcome this separateness? Well, we try to overcome it via what Fromm calls “orgiastic states,” which in their tribal, communal, ritualistic form can be quite healthy. But in a society like ours, which emphasizes individuality, we typically experience mere proxies of the orgiastic state, namely through drugs, alcohol, and of course, sex. The latter can be a healthy way to experience union and overcome separateness, but only when love is involved, and never when shame or guilt are involved. And I’d venture that many people, due to being raised in a culture that represses and simultaneously fetishizes sex, experience some kind of shame or guilt around the sexual act.
Another, even more common way that we try to transcend our separateness is by conforming with the group. In dictatorships, this conformity is forced on people, while in democracies, it is induced, via suggestion and propaganda. Fromm says that people want to conform more than they are forced to, at least in the Western democracies. To be different means to be apart from the herd, which is a terrifying prospect for many humans. Downright life-threatening. To be like everyone else is to be saved from aloneness.
A third way we try to escape this aloneness is through creative activity. In this approach, according to Fromm, one experiences union with whatever they are creating, thereby transcending their feelings of separateness.
But none of these answers to the problem of human existence are truly sufficient. Orgiastic states are transitory. Conformity too often results in a man forgetting, as Fromm says, “that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness.” And the unity achieved in creative work is not interpersonal, and therefore doesn’t address the most powerful striving in humans: the desire for interpersonal fusion. This desire can only be satisfied through mature love, which Fromm defines as “union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.” Furthermore, “love is an action, the practice of a human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the result of a compulsion.” Real love, in fact, cannot be compelled. Just as genuine interest cannot be compelled, which I discussed in the last blog post when exploring Summerhill.
Fromm takes issue with the phrase “falling in love.” If it’s actual mature love, he says, you’ll be standing in it, not falling in it. And this reminds me of a gorgeous line from Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz: “I did not fall in love. I rose in it.”
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Fromm also defines love as being primarily about giving, not receiving. But giving in this sense does not mean giving anything up, sacrificing anything, or being deprived of anything. On the contrary, the kind of giving Fromm describes is actually an expression of the giver’s potency, or life force, wherein the giver can experience her own strength and wealth. Giving is more joyous than receiving because it is a manifestation of heightened vitality. I think about a gardener who grows more lettuce than he could possibly eat himself, and is truly joyous to give it away and know that it will be eaten by others. But Fromm isn’t talking about giving material things, per se. He’s talking about giving one’s very aliveness, their full personality—one gives their interest, their understanding, their knowledge, even their sadness. Everything genuine about them. Because that is the most precious thing we have to offer others, do you see? No one else is the unique individual that you are, and therefore no one else can share what-all that uniqueness includes. But in order to give of ourselves in this way, we must have achieved what Fromm calls a “productive orientation,” which means that we must overcome dependency, narcissism, exploitative tendencies, and a general lack of trust in our own human powers.
To be truly human, in Fromm’s mind, is to be very powerful, indeed. This outlook reminds me Anthony de Mello’s assertion that no event, situation, or person can disturb or hurt us if we are fully awake or aware, which I talked about a couple weeks ago on the very first episode of Time & Other Thieves. In his book Awareness, De Mello says that when we are not fully awake, we are not fully human; we’re just automatons, controlled by our conditioning. We are unable to truly love in the way that Fromm is talking about.
Other elements comprising the active character of love, according to Fromm, are care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. If we don’t care for—tend to—the things and people we love, we don’t really love them. A person can say she loves plants, but if she doesn’t water them, we probably won’t trust her proclamations of love.
Regarding the element of responsibility, Fromm emphasizes the root of this word—response. To be responsible is to be ready and able to respond to the physical and psychological needs of those we love. We cannot care if we aren’t responsible.
But responsibility must be tempered with respect, lest it devolve into possessiveness or domination. Again Fromm considers the root of this word, the Latin respicere, which means “to look at.” When we respect someone in this way, we see them for who they really are. Anthony de Mello echoes this idea, as well, defining love as the ability “to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be. And to give it the response it deserves.” Fromm phrases it like this: “If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use.” And in a phrase that reminds me of my last blog’s topic, he quotes an old French song in saying that “love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.”
The final element that comprises the active character of love is knowledge, without which care, respect, and responsibility would be blind. We must know a person objectively, apart from our “irrationally distorted” views of that person. And in order to do that, we must know ourselves objectively.
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Fromm delineates five different types of love in The Art of Loving: brotherly love, motherly love, erotic love, self-love, and love of God. In his preface to this section of the book, he explains that "love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person.” He says it is an “attitude, an orientation of character.” How cool is that? And this attitude determines how we relate to the world as a whole, not just to one person. Fromm compares our focus on one “object” of love—which is driven by the belief that we will be good at loving only when we find the right person to love—to an aspiring painter who never practicing painting because he’s waiting for the right object to paint, which will result in him painting beautifully. Nonsense. Love is an attitude we can cultivate, just as painting is a craft we can practice.
While love-as-orientation-of-character affects our every dealing with the world around us, it still manifests in different ways. Brotherly love is what Fromm calls the fundamental type, because it underlies all the other types. It is love for all human beings, based on the experience that we are all one, all equal. “There but for the grace of God go I,” is the humble attitude that brotherly love instills in regards to the downtrodden stranger, coupled with a genuine desire to improve that stranger’s life somehow.
The second type, motherly love, is obviously the unconditional affirmation of a child’s life and needs. Perhaps less obviously, it is instills the child with the feeling that it is good to be alive on this earth, it is good to have been born. The mother must have this genuine love of life (and not merely the wish to keep living) if she is to bequeath it to her child. In other words, she must be a happy person. The necessity of this happiness isn’t always obvious when the child is a helpless infant, since the child’s very helplessness is a great source of gratification for the mother, who can fulfill its every basic need. But when the child starts to individuate and separate from the mother, her true mettle is tested. This most challenging phase of motherly love determines whether the mother is truly loving, or merely affectionate.
The third type of love that Fromm delineates is erotic love, which he calls the most deceptive of all. The experience of “falling in love,” so highly fetishized in our society, is not true erotic love; it is fleeting; the excitement of learning about the other person and letting them learn about us—the thrill of that intimacy—inevitably fades, and we come to feel we’ve learned everything there is to learn. Fromm says this wouldn’t be the case if each person knew more about themselves, going in. But it is a rare human who can experience the “infiniteness of his personality.” And the less we know ourselves, the less we can know others. This type of pseudo-erotic love is also driven by a sudden and intense feeling, and since it is the nature of feelings to change, to come and go, it is no wonder that such “love” never lasts.
But true erotic love is not built on such shifting sands. It is primarily an act of will, a decision to maintain the same attitude—the same orientation of character, as you’ll recall—to the same person, perhaps for one’s entire life. To love someone in this way is more than just a strong feeling—it is a decision, a judgment, a promise. But Fromm also acknowledges that such a view of erotic love might lead some people to conclude that it doesn’t even matter who they commit to, or if that person ever engendered the spontaneous feeling of love in them; he says that true erotic love is both something that is unique between two specific persons, and an act of will.
The next type of love he delineates is self-love. When Fromm was writing The Art of Loving in the 1950s, people conceptualized self-love much differently than we do today, and they certainly didn’t talk about it as much. According to Fromm, they saw self-love as selfishness, and adhered to the logical fallacy that the more self-love a person had, the less love they had for others. But Fromm contends that these two types of love are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. We can’t love others if we don’t love ourselves, and if we only love others—as is the case with neurotically unselfish people, who take pride in considering themselves unimportant—we can’t love at all. He says that selfishness and self-love are actually opposites. Selfishness is caused by a lack of self-love. The selfish person cares only about the usefulness of things and people in fortifying his socio-economic role—of which his “self” has become a mere appendage—and furthering his aim to compensate for his failure to care for his real self.
But what does it mean to love oneself? For Fromm, it means to know oneself first and foremost, so that one can then show care and respect for oneself, and be responsible towards oneself, in the sense that we respond to our own physical and psychological needs. It doesn’t necessarily mean “treating” oneself, unless the treat in question would affirm one’s own life, happiness, growth and freedom. Sometimes self-love means not doing what we want to do—not having that third or fourth drink, not getting a second helping of dinner, not having sex with someone. And it can also mean doing what we don’t want to do—taking that walk even though we’re depressed, making that nutritious meal even though we’re tired, going to bed even though we’d like to keep watching Netflix, broaching difficult conversations even though it’s easier to stay silent. Self-love isn’t all lavender and bubble baths and “plinky-plunky music,” to quote Phoebe from Friends. And it also doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the concept of self that most of us identify with.
When I say I love myself, I don’t necessarily mean that I love the way I look, and I love my personality, and I love my talents. It doesn’t even necessarily refer to the respect I might have for myself, for all the challenges I’ve faced since being born, or for the struggles my ancestors overcame so that I might be born in the first place. Self-love is a love for the unique expression of life that I am, which I actually have very little to do with. So in my mind, self-love is not terribly different from the love of God, which is the fifth and final type of love that Fromm addresses in The Art of Loving.
As far as I can tell, Fromm would agree that self-love is practically synonymous with God-love. He tracks a kind of evolution of God, as it coincided with mankind’s own evolution. All of these phases of God conception are still present, varying by culture and, Fromm would argue, by the maturity of the conceptualizer. Mankind’s first notion of God was a maternal one—the goddess, the essence of motherly love. This eventually turned into a paternal notion of God—the stern father who insists on obedience and whose love is conditional. And finally there was what Fromm terms the monotheistic principle, in which God is neither mother nor father, nor comparable to any type of person at all. As God itself says in its revelation to Moses, “I am becoming that which I am becoming.” God is nameless, an “inexpressible stammer,” the ground of all existence, infinite, and also the “absolute Nothing.” God represents the principles of truth, love, and justice. Within a person, God stands for that person’s attainment of their full capacity to love—“of an ever fuller unfolding of [their] human powers.”
Fromm says the monotheistic notion of God ultimately emphasizes right living, as opposed to focusing on right thought. It puts greater importance transforming mankind—i.e., the way mankind behaves— than on developing dogmas or new ways of thinking, or even on “believing in God.” It doesn’t matter if you believe in God; what matters is that you live God. Fromm asserts that in most Western religions, loving God is equated with believing in God, which he reduces to nothing more than a “thought experience.”
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Up to now I’ve been talking about Fromm’s theory of love. In the next part of the book he addresses the “disintegration” of love in modern Western society. He begins this part of the book by describing modern man as an automaton, alienated from himself, from others, and from nature. I’d say that since 1956, we’ve become even more alienated in these ways, and this alienation, according to Fromm is at the root of our inability to really love ourselves, our fellow humans, and the natural world.
Fromm goes on to critique the different forms that love’s disintegration takes in Western society. He says the two “normal” ones of these are love as mutual sexual satisfaction and love as teamwork. But satisfaction—the result of effective knowledge and technique—is not the same as happiness. Sexual happiness requires a falling away of the inhibitions that make love impossible. As for teamwork, the idea reduces love to a well-oiled machine, the cogs of which—the people in the “team”—remain strangers. A neurotic (as opposed to normal with air quotes) form of the disintegration of love is when people are still attached to their parental figure(s) and transfer their feelings for those figures to their romantic partners.
Other neurotic forms include idolatrous love (i.e. the “great love,” in which the loved person is idolized, thereby robbing the lover of all power—in this type of disintegrated love, you lose yourself in the other person instead of finding yourself there); sentimental love (which is not based in present-moment reality, but rather a fantasy rooted in the past or imagined in the future); love that uses projective mechanisms (accusing one’s partner of things for which oneself is guilty, to provide a basic example; and parents project things onto children all the time); and love as the absence of conflict. Fromm says that what most people think of when they hear the word “conflict” is actually just the attempt to avoid the real conflict, which is happening on a deep level of inner reality. Real conflict doesn’t function to hide or project one’s feelings, but as a path to clarification, catharsis, knowledge and strength. For this reason, real love can only occur when people communicate from the center of their being. When such communication is happening, love is not the absence of conflict, not a resting place, but a constant challenge. The fruits of engaging in that challenge are a real depth of relationship, and the aliveness and strength of the people thusly engaged.
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The final section of The Art of Loving discusses the practice of love. Though the cover of the book (at least of the edition I own) describes it as “the world-famous psychoanalyst’s daring prescription for love,” Fromm explicitly states in this final chapter that anyone expecting a prescription in its pages with be gravely disappointed. He begins by explaining what the practice of any art requires: discipline, concentration, and supreme concern for mastering the art.
Regarding discipline, Fromm says that we cannot expect to excel at something if we only practice it when the mood strikes; we must practice even when we don’t feel like it. And he recommends cultivating self-discipline by getting up at about the same time every morning, and spending about the same amount of time each day meditating, reading, listening to music, and walking, and restraining from overly escapist activities like mystery stories and movies. If he were writing in 2021 instead of 1956, he could provide few more examples of escapist activities. Scrolling through social media comes to mind. And video games. He also recommends we don’t overeat or overdrink. But he emphasizes that to live this way should feel pleasant, not like drudgery or like anyone other than your own loving self enforcing such boundaries. Of course, you’ll probably have to overcome some resistance at the beginning, if this lifestyle is new to you. But soon enough you will see that that which is good for your body and soul is also quite agreeable in practice.
Even more difficult than discipline, at least in our culture, is the practice of concentration. Fromm says that everything in our modern environment is essentially acting against our ability to concentrate on one thing for any extended period of time. Again, he was writing this in 1956! What was so distracting in 1956? It’s laughable when compared to what we’re working against now. From equates concentration with being able to be alone with oneself—without reading, listening to the radio, smoking, drinking, eating, or doing anything. He’s basically recommending meditation. Twenty minutes each morning and evening, to be exact. And otherwise, when engaged in some activity, Fromm emphasizes the importance of concentrating on that activity, giving one’s fully attention to it. He says that such focused attention on one thing can be energizing, while our usual, more divided ways of giving attention (what we might call multi-tasking) is incredibly draining, but not in a way that makes us pleasantly tired at the end of the day and results in a good night’s sleep. Fromm asserts that our inability to really concentrate on anything (and this of course includes other people, when they’re talking to us) is the reason why most people aren’t fully awake when they’re awake, nor fully asleep when they’re asleep.
While mastering the art of loving involves many of the same skills that any art would require, it also necessitates a few that are unique to it alone. The primary condition that’s needed for mastering love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. You may have heard the adage, “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” It’s been attributed to Anaïs Nin, H.M. Tomlinson, Steven Covey, and others, and it was spoken by Zoë Kravitz on the show Big Little Lies. The first time I came across it, though, was in Anthony de Mello’s Awareness, which I talked about in the first episode of this show, two weeks ago. Regardless of who coined the phrase, it’s a pretty spot-on definition of narcissism: seeing things not as they are, but as we are. Fromm insists that we must remove our me-glasses, if you will, and try to see things objectively. De Mello would add that giving things thusly seen the response they deserve is the definition of love. And in order to see things—and of course, people—objectively, we must have humility. We must be able to trust that our perceptions are not always trustworthy, but are actually most often quite distorted.
Another huge piece of the practice of the art of loving is faith, and more specifically rational faith, which is not the result of submission to irrational authority, but is rooted in one’s own cognitive and emotional experience, regardless of what the majority opinion might be. This type of faith does not apply to a specific belief, but is rather a character trait that pervades the whole personality.
What resonates the most with me about the idea of faith, is that it’s a choice. It’s something we must choose to have when we can’t know something for sure. I think people tend to equate faith with a total lack of doubt, an unshakable certainty, but faith is actually borne of doubt, and it can be a pretty uncomfortable thing to practice. Fromm says that faith necessitates courage. A person who is not willing to take risks, and who prioritizes safety and security above all else does not have faith, and therefore cannot truly love.
The final aspect of the practice of love that Fromm discusses is activity. Love is an active thing. But not so much in the sense that we’re always doing something, but that we are always—except when sleeping—active in thought, feeling, and sensory awareness. He talks about actively relating to others, about being productive in the sphere of love. How often do people “actively relate”? And what does that even mean? I think it means being honest, and noticing and acknowledging how we feel (even if only internally) and how we think others might be feeling, in real time, and making eye contact, and eschewing small talk, and listening with our complete attention, and apologizing for behavior we feel sorrowful for, and not apologizing when we’re only doing it to make ourselves feel better. And much more, I’m sure. Fromm says that such activity cannot occur in the relational sphere, though, if it’s not also occurring in every other sphere of a person’s life. He’s pretty all-or-nothing about it.
Fromm ends The Art of Loving by acknowledging how exceptional they are, those people who are capable of the kind of love he’s talking about, especially in our capitalistic system. He says that the principle underlying capitalism and the principle underlying love are incompatible. But within the complex phenomenon of capitalism, there are ways to practice and prioritize love. One must have the spirit of a non-conformist in order to keep from succumbing to the greed and materialism that capitalism both depends upon and creates. For love to become the norm and not the exception, radical changes in our social structure must occur. To quote Fromm, “If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it.”
Today, sixty-five years after Fromm wrote those words, this problem of the economic machine has not been solved; indeed, it has only gotten worse. Consider social media, where people actually turn themselves into commodities for advertising companies to buy. If we continue in this way—as I’m pretty sure we will—and if Fromm is right, then our society “must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.”
Fromm ends the book on a less than optimistic note regarding the way events might unfold for the human race, as a result of how we’ve behaved thus far. But he clearly has faith in the human race, emphasizing the rationality of that faith right up to the book’s final sentence. Like A.S. Neill, the author of Summerhill, Fromm knows that to be human is a profound opportunity, and our role on this planet, as God becoming aware of Itself—is a truly powerful one. The more we practice the art of loving, the more human we become.
But it’s hard. Love requires discipline, concentration, supreme concern, faith, humility, courage and near-constant activity (but again, not activity in our typical, production-centered way of thinking). Basically, if you want to be the best painter you can be, practice painting. If you want to be the best human you can be, practice loving. And you can also do both!
