The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

It seems like there was a lot of confusion regarding my chosen book. Some misunderstood a FLAWED secondhand account of my presentation and believed my book to be a Chicken Soup for the Soul Book. Others sat through the entire presentation (no names of course) and for some reason thought that my entire presentation was on sex. Just to clarify that my book was neither a Chicken Soup book or the Kama Sutra, I have edited my slides and added material to give an overview of my book and my presentation.


Theory
• Man has emancipated himself from nature
• Separation causes anxiety
• Must find a new harmony, a new union, uniquely human.
• Alternative Unions

Alternative forms of Union
• Orgiastic union
o Many primitive tribes attempt to maintain their ties to nature through
religion and ritual
o When these ties weaken they are often replaced by orgiastic experiences (drugs and/or orgies)
o Inhibits uniquely human cognitive thought
o When practiced within a group creates unity
• Problems with Orgiastic Unity
o Only acceptable in select societies
o In our society cause shame which then causes further alienation
o Regardless of the society in which orgiastic unity is practiced it is only a transitory form of unity.
• Conformity
o Dominant solution to separation anxiety has been conformity
• Problems with Conformity
o Sameness v.s. Oneness
o Loss of the individual
o It is pseudo-unity
• Creative unity
o Unites man with his work (artist, musician, writer, etc)
• Problem with Creative Unity
o Lacks an intrapersonal aspect which is the goal of unity


Fromm’s Solution…
LOVE

Intro: Love as Art
• Problems with Love
o Commodities
o Delusions about “falling in love” (First love)
• Love as an Art (Love must be practiced as an art)
o Mastery of theory
o Mastery of practice
o Ultimate concern

Immature forms of Love
• Symbiotic Union (Ex: mother and child)
• Passive Union
o Attempts to escape separateness by making oneself a part of another
• Active Union
o Attempts to escape separateness by making another a part of oneself.

“If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word “activity”….One concept of activity, the modern one, refers to the use of energy for the achievement of external aims. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for.” In the most general way the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving,” (Fromm 20).

Aspects of Love
• Care
o Ex: Jonah and the Whale
o God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to “labor” for something and “to make something grow,” that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors, and one labors that for which one loves,” (Fromm 25)

• Responsibility
o Ex: Cain
o Am I my brother’s keeper? The loving person responds. The life of his brother is not his brother’s alone, but his own. He feels responsible for fellow man, as he feels responsible for himself,” (Fromm 25).

• Respect
o “Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect therefore implies a lack of exploitation and is only possible if I have achieved independence,” (Fromm 26).

• Knowledge
o To fuse with another person and transcend all components that cause a separateness.

Brotherly Love
• The most fundamental type of love upon which all other forms of love are built.
• Love for each other as a member of the human race, as part of mankind.

Love Between Parent and Child
• Motherly love (passive): “I love you because you are.”
• Fatherly love (active): “I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me.”
• As a child, the relationship with the mother gradually becomes less and less important.
• Mothers teach children to be secure, fathers teach children to cope with society

Self-Love
• Love “is not an ‘affect’ in the sense of being affected by somebody, but the an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love,” (Fromm 54).
• Cannot be achieved without first achieving self-love.
• Self-love is not narcissism and should not be confused with selfishness.
• “Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself…It is true that the selfish person is incapable of loving others but he is not capable of loving himself either,” (From 55)
• Selfishness is an overcompensation for a lack of self-love.

Erotic Love
• Polarities (pg 31)
• Rejects Freud
• “Erotic love is the craving of complete fusion, complete union with another other person,” (Fromm 49).
• Often confused


Sex without Love
“If the desire for physical union is not stimulated by love, if erotic love is not also brotherly love, it never leads to union in more than an orgiastic, transitory sense. Sexual attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of union, yet without love this “union” leaves strangers as far apart as they were before- sometimes it makes them ashamed of each other because when the illusion is gone they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before,” (Fromm 50).

Erotic Love without Love for Mankind
“The have experience of overcoming aloneness, yet, since they are separated from the rest of mankind, they remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves; their experience of union is an illusion. Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves the other person in all of mankind, all that is alive,” (Fromm 50)

Erotic Love as an Action (Non-Sexual)
“To love somebody is not just a strong feeling-it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision,” (Fromm 57).

The Practice of Love
Requirements
1.Discipline
2.Concentration
3.Patience
4.Supreme concern
5.Practice

Conclusion
• Overall: Fromm believes that most human anxiety or conflict is the consequence of man’s separation from nature. In order for man to rectify this situation he must create a new union formed by love.
•
• “To analyze love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social institutions which are responsible for its absence.”

• “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, (and) any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish in its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human existence,” (Fromm 120).