The Art of Loving

Most of us are unable to develop our capacities for love on the only level that really counts--a love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge, and courage. Learning to love, like other arts, demands practice and concentration. Even more than any other art it demands genuine insight and understanding. In this classic work, Fromm explores love in all its aspects--not only romantic love, steeped in false conceptions and lofty expectations, but also love of parents, children, brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, and the love of God.

The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Looking for beautiful books? Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more. Other books in this series. Sex at Dawn Christopher Ryan. The Gift of Therapy Irvin Yalom. Art of Loving Erich Fromm. Animal Liberation Peter Singer.

This responsibility, in the case of the mother and her infant, refers mainly to the care for physical needs. In the love between adults it refers mainly to the psychic needs of the other person. Responsibility could easily deteriorate into domination and possessiveness, were it not for a third component of love, respect. Respect means the concern that the other per- son should grow and unfold as he is.

Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. 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. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom: Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowl- edge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core.

It is possible only when I can transcend the cencern for: Then I know that his anger I' is only the manifestation of something deeper, and I see him I ; as anxious and embarrassed, that is, as the suffering person, rather than as the angry one. Knowledge has one more, and a more fundamental, re- lation to the problem of love. The basic need to fuse with another person so as to transcend the prison of one's separate- ness is closely related to another specifically human desire, that to know the "secret of man. We know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we may make, we do not know ourselves.

We know our fel- low man, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellow man is not a thing.

The further we ,.. Yet we cannot i; help desiring to penetrate into the secret of man's soul, into ' the innermost nucleus which is "he. The ultimate degree of this attempt to know lies in the extremes of sadism, the desire and ability to make a human being suffer; to torture him, to force him to betray his secret in his suffering. In this craving for penetrat- ing man's secret, his and hence our own, lies an essential motivation for the depth and intensity of cruelty and destruc- tiveness.

In a very succinct way this idea has been expressed by Isaac Babel. He quotes a fellow officer in the Russian civil war, who has just stamped his former master to death, as saying: With shooting you'll never get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows itself. But I don't spare myself, and I've more than once trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is, what life's like down our way.

The child takes something apart, breaks it up in order to know it; or it takes an animal apart; cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in order to know it, to force its secret.

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: The other path to knowing "the secret" is love. Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody — and I "know" nothing. Sadism is motivated by the wish to know the secret, yet I remain as ignorant as I was before. I have torn the other being apart limb from limb, yet all I have done is to destroy him. Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man.

The longing to know ourselves and to know our fellow man has been expressed in the Delphic motto "Know thy- self. But inasmuch as the desire is to know all of man, his innermost secret, the de- sire can never be fulfilled in knowledge of the ordinary kind, in knowledge only by thought. Even if we knew a thousand times more of ourselves, we would never reach bottom. We would still remain an enigma to ourselves, as our fellow man would remain an enigma to us.

The only way of full knowl- edge lies in the act of love: It is the daring plunge into the experience of union. However, knowledge in thought, that is psycho- logical knowledge, is a necessary condition for full knowledge in the act of love. I have to know the other person and myself objectively, in order to be able to see his reality, or rather, to overcome the illusions, the irrationally distorted picture I have of him. Only if I know a human being objectively, can I know him in his ultimate essence, in the act of love.

In conventional Western theology the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make state- ments about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of monotheism as I shall try to show later on , the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room — and no need — for knowledge about God.

The experience of union, with man, or religiously speak- ing, with God, is by no means irrational. On the contrary, it is as Albert Schweitzer has pointed out, the consequence of rationalism, its most daring and radical consequence. It is based on our knowledge of the fundamental, and not acci- dental, limitations of our knowledge.

It is the knowledge that we shall never "grasp" the secret of man and of the universe, but that we can know, nevertheless, in the act of love. Psy- chology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate conse- quence of psychology is love. Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up nar- cissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has larity of psychology certainly indicates an interest in the knowledge of man, it also betrays the fundamental lack of love in human relations today.

Psychological knowledge thus becomes a substitute for full knowledge in the act of love, instead of being a step toward it. Thus far I have spoken of love as the overcoming of human separateness, as the fulfillment of the longing for union. But above the universal, existential need for union rises a more specific, biological one: The idea of this polarization is most strikingly expressed in the myth that originally man and woman were one, that they were cut in half, and from then on each male has been seeking for the lost female part of himself in order to unite again with her.

The same idea of the original unity of the sexes is also con- tained in the Biblical story of Eve being made from Adam's rib, even though in this story, in the spirit of patriarchalism, woman is considered secondary to man. The meaning of the myth is clear enough. Sexual polarization leads man to seek union in a specific way, that of union with the other sex.

The polarity between the male and female principles exists also within each man and each woman. Just as physiolog- ically man and woman each have hormones of the opposite sex, they are bisexual also in the psychological sense. They carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrat- ing, of matter and of spirit. Man — and woman — finds union within himself only in the union of his female and his male polarity. This polarity is the basis for all creativity. The male-female polarity is also the basis for interpersonal creativity.

This is obvious biologically in the fact that the union of sperm and ovum is the basis for the birth of a child. But in the purely psychic realm it is not different; in the love between man and woman, each of them is reborn. The 34 THE ART OF LOVING homosexual deviation is a failure to attain this polarized union, and thus the homosexual suffers from the pain of never-resolved separateness, a failure, however, which he shares with the average heterosexual who cannot love.

The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of re- ceiving and that of penetrating. It is the polarity of the earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.

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This idea is beauti- fully expressed by the great Muslim poet and mystic, Rumi: Never, in sooth, does the lover seek without being sought by his beloved. When the lightning of love has shot into this heart, know that there is love in that heart. When love of God waxes in thy heart, beyond any doubt God hath love for thee.

No sound of clapping comes from one hand without the other hand. Divine Wisdom is destiny and decree made us lovers of one another. Because of that fore-ordainment every part of the world is paired with its mate. In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall. When Earth lacks heat, Heaven sends it; when she has lost her freshness and moisture, Heaven restores it. Heaven goes on his rounds, like a husband foraging for the wife's sake; And Earth is busy with housewiferies: Unless these twain taste pleasure from one another, why are they creeping together like sweethearts?

Without the Earth, how should flower and tree blos- som? What, then, would Heaven's water and heat produce? As God put desire in man and woman to the end that the world should be preserved by their union, So hath He implanted in every part of existence the desire for another part. Day and Night are enemies outwardly; yet both serve one purpose, Each in love with the other for the sake of perfecting their mutual work, Without Night, the nature of Man would receive no income, so there would be nothing for Day to spend.

I have spoken before of Freud's error in seeing in love exclu- sively the expression — or a sublimation — of the sexual in- stinct, rather than recognizing that the sexual desire is one manifestation of the need for love and union. But Freud's error goes deeper. In line with his physiological materialism, he sees in the sexual instinct the result of a chemically pro- duced tension in the body which is painful and seeks for re- lief.

The aim of the sexual desire is the removal of this pain- ful tension; sexual satisfaction lies in the accomplishment of this removal. This view has its validity to the extent that the 8 R. Sexual desire, in this concept, is an itch, sexual satisfaction the removal of the itch. In fact, as far as this concept of sexuality is concerned, masturbation would be the ideal sexual satisfaction.

What Freud, paradoxically enough, ignores, is the psycho-biological aspect of sexuality, the masculine-feminine polarity, and the desire to bridge this polarity by union. This curious error was probably facilitated by Freud's extreme patriarchalism, which led him to the assumption that sexuality per se is masculine, and thus made him ignore the specific female sexuality. He expressed this idea in the Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, saying that the libido has regularly "a masculine nature," regardless of whether it is the libido in a man or in a woman.

The same idea is also expressed in a rationalized form in Freud's theory that the little boy experi- ences the woman as a castrated man, and that she herself seeks for various compensations for the loss of the male genital. But woman is not a castrated man, and her sexuality is specifically feminine and not of "a masculine nature. In fact, erotic at- traction is by no means only expressed in sexual attraction.

There is masculinity and femininity in character as well as in sexual junction. The masculine character can be defined as having the qualities of penetration, guidance, activity, dis- cipline and adventurousness; the feminine character by the qualities of productive receptiveness, protection, realism, en- durance, motherliness. Very often if the masculine character traits of a man are weakened because emotionally he has remained a child, he will try to compensate for this lack by the exclusive emphasis on his male role in sex.

The result is the Don Juan, who needs to prove his male prowess in sex because he is un- sure of his masculinity in a characterological sense. When the paralysis of masculinity is more extreme, sadism the use of force becomes the main— a perverted— substitute for mas- culinity. If the feminine sexuality is weakened or perverted, it is transformed into masochism, or possessiveness. Freud has been criticized for his overevaluation of sex.

This criticism was often prompted by the wish to remove an element from Freud's system which aroused criticism and hostility among conventionally minded people. Freud keenly sensed this motivation and for this very reason fought every attempt to change his theory of sex. Indeed, in his time, Freud's theory had a challenging and revolutionary charac- ter. But what was true around is not true any more fifty years later.

The sexual mores have changed so much that Freud's theories are not any longer shocking to the Western middle classes, and it is a quixotic kind of radical- ism when orthodox analysts today still think they are coura- geous and radical in defending Freud's sexual theory. In fact, their brand of psychoanalysis is conformist, and does not try to raise psychological questions which would lead to a criticism of contemporary society. My criticism of Freud's theory is not that he overempha- sized sex, but his failure to understand sex deeply enough.

In the further development of psychoanalysis it is necessary to correct and deepen Freud's concept by translating Freud's insights from the physiological into the biological and existential dimen- sion. Even after being born, the infant is hardly different from what it was before birth; it cannot recognize objects, it is not yet aware of itself, and of the world as being outside of itself.

It only feels the positive stimulation of warmth and food, and it does not yet differentiate warmth and food from its source: Mother is warmth, mother is food, mother is the euphoric state of satisfaction and security. This state is one of narcissism, to use Freud's term. The outside reality, per- sons and things, have meaning only in terms of their satisfy- ing or frustrating the inner state of the body. Real is only what is within; what is outside is real only in terms of my needs — never in terms of its own qualities or needs.

His concept of the former eros as a principle of synthesis and unification is on an entirely different plane from that of his libido concept. But in spite of the fact that the theory of life and death instincts was accepted by orthodox analysts, this acceptance did not lead to a fundamental revision of the libido concept, especially as far as clinical work is concerned.

Eventually the child experiences his thirst, the satis- fying milk, the breast and the mother, as different entities. He learns to perceive many other things as being different, as having an existence of their own. At this point he learns to give them names. At the same time he learns to handle them; learns that fire is hot and painful, that mother's body is warm and pleasureful, that wood is hard and heavy, that paper is light and can be torn. He learns how to handle peo- ple; that mother will smile when I eat; that she will take me in her arms when I cry; that she will praise me when I have a bowel movement.

All these experiences become crys- tallized and integrated in the experience: I am loved because I am mother's child. I am loved because I am helpless. I am loved because I am beautiful, admirable. I am loved because mother needs me. To put it in a more general formula: This experience of being loved by mother is a passive one. There is nothing I have to do in order to be loved — mother's love is uncon- ditional. All I have to do is to be — to be her child. Mother's love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. But there is a negative side, too, to the uncondi- tional quality of mother's love.

Not only does it not need to be deserved — it also cannot be acquired, produced, con- trolled. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there, it is as if all beauty had gone out of life — and there is nothing I can do to create it. The child up to this age does not yet love; he responds gratefully, joyfully to being loved. At this point of the child's development a new factor enters into the picture: For the first time, the child thinks of giv- ing something to mother or to father , of producing some- thing — a poem, a drawing, or whatever it may be.

For the first time in the child's life the idea of love is transformed from being loved into loving; into creating love. It takes many years from this first beginning to the maturing of love. Eventually the child, who may now be an adolescent, has overcome his egocentricity; the other person is not any more primarily a means to the satisfaction of his own needs.

The needs of the other person are as important as his own — in fact, they have become more important. To give has become more satisfactory, more joyous, than to receive; to love, more important even than being loved. By loving, he has left the prison cell of aloneness and isolation which was constituted by the state of narcissism and self-centeredness. He feels a sense of new union, of sharing, of oneness.

More than that, he feels the potency of producing love by loving — rather than the dependence of receiving by being loved — and for that reason having to be small, helpless, sick — or "good. The first months and years of the child are those where his closest attachment is to the mother. This attachment begins before the moment of birth, when mother and child are still one, although they are two. Birth changes the situation in some respects, but not as much as it would appear.

The child, while now living outside of the womb, is still completely dependent on mother. But daily he becomes more independent: In order to understand this shift from mother to father, we must consider the essential differences in quality between motherly and fatherly love. We have already spoken about motherly love. Motherly love by its very nature is uncondi- tional.

Mother loves the newborn infant because it is her child, not because the child has fulfilled any specific condi- tion, or lived up to any specific expectation. Of course, when I speak here of mother's and father's love, I speak of the "ideal types" — in Max Weber's sense or of an archetype in Jung's sense — and do not imply that every mother and father loves in that way. I refer to the fatherly and motherly principle, which is represented in the motherly and fatherly person. Unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe 42 THE ART OF LOVING I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that — there is always a fear that love could disappear.

Furthermore, "deserved" love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analy- sis, not loved at all but used. No wonder that we all cling to the longing for motherly love, as children and also as adults. Most children are lucky enough to receive motherly love to what extent will be discussed later. As adults the same longing is much more difficult to fulfill. In the most satisfactory development it remains a component of normal erotic love; often it finds expression in religious forms, more often in neurotic forms.

The relationship to father is quite different. Mother is the home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean; father does not represent any such natural home. He has little con- nection with the child in the first years of its life, and his importance for the child in this early period cannot be com- pared with that of mother.

But while father does not repre- sent the natural world, he represents the other pole of human existence; the world of thought, of man-made things, of law and order, of discipline, of travel and adventure. Father is the one who teaches the child, who shows him the road into the world. Closely related to this function is one which is connected with socio-economic development. When private property came into existence, and when private property could be in- herited by one of the sons, father began to look for that son to whom he could leave his property.

Fatherly love is conditional love. Its principle is "I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because fyou do your duty, because you are like me. The negative aspect is the very fact that fatherly love has to be deserved, that it can be lost if one does not do what is expected. In the nature of fatherly love lies the fact that obedience becomes the main virtue, that disobedience is the main sin — and its punishment the withdrawal of fatherly love.

The positive side is equally important. Since his love is conditioned, I can do something to acquire it, I can work for it; his love is not outside of my control as motherly love is. The mother's and the father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs. The infant needs mother's unconditional love and care physiologically as well as psychically. The child, after six, begins to need father's love, his authority and guidance. Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

In the ideal case, mother's love does not try to prevent the child from growing up, does not try to put a premium on helplessness. Mother should have faith in life, hence not be overanxious, and thus not infect the child with her anxiety. Part of her life should be the wish that the child become independent and eventually separate from her. It should give the growing child an increasing sense of competence and eventually permit him to become his own authority and to dispense with that of father.

Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were, a motherly and a fatherly conscience. In contrast to Freud's concept of the super-ego, however, he has built them inside not by incorporating mother and father, but by building a motherly conscience on his own capacity for love, and a fatherly conscience on his reason and judgment. Fur- thermore, the mature person loves with both the motherly and the fatherly conscience, in spite of the fact that they seem to contradict each other.

If he would only retain his fatherly conscience, he would become harsh and inhuman. If he would only retain his motherly conscience, he would be apt to lose judgment and to hinder himself and others in their development. In this development from mother-centered to father- centered attachment, and their eventual synthesis, lies the basis for mental health and the achievement of maturity. In the failure of this development lies the basic cause for neurosis.

One cause for neurotic development can lie in the fact ithat a boy has a loving, but overindulgent or domineering phother, and a weak and uninterested father. In this case he Ityfiay remain fixed at an early mother attachment, and de- fcivelop into a person who is dependent on mother, feels help- Mtess, has the strivings characteristic of the receptive person, ptliat is, to receive, to be protected, to be taken care of, and pvho has a lack of fatherly qualities — discipline, independ- ence, an ability to master life by himself.

If, on the fether hand, the mother is cold, unresponsive and domineer- ng, he may either transfer the need for motherly protection: Further exami- P nation may show that certain types of neurosis, like obses- Sional neurosis, develop more on the basis of a one-sided 46 THE ART OF LOVING father attachment, while others, like hysteria, alcoholism, in- ability to assert oneself and to cope with life realistically, and depressions, result from mother-centeredness. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.

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In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. This is the same fallacy which we have already mentioned above. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object — and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to some- body else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself. Brotherly Love The most fundamental kind of love, which underlies all types of love, is brotherly love.

By this I mean the sense of responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further his life. This is the kind of love the Bible speaks of when it says: Brotherly love is love for all human beings; it is characterized by its very lack of exclusiveness.

If I have developed the capacity for love, then I cannot help loving my brothers. In brotherly love there is the experience of union with all men, of human solidarity, of human at-onement. Brotherly love is based on the experience that we all are one. The differences in talents, intelligence, knowledge are negligible in compari- son with the identity of the human core common to all men. In order to experience this identity it is necessary to pene- trate from the periphery to the core.

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If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences, that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center — instead of that from periphery to periphery — is "central relatedness.

And this manner depends on the depth of the region in a man's being from which they proceed without the will being able to do anything. Thus the hearer can discern, if he has any power of discernment, what is the value of the words. Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplessness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one's own feet is the per- manent and common one.

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Yet, love of the helpless one, love of the poor and the stranger, are the beginning of brotherly love. To love one's flesh and blood is no achievement. The animal loves its young and cares for them. The helpless one loves his master, since his life depends on him; the child loves his parents, since he needs them. Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold. Significantly, in the Old Testament, the central object of man's love is the poor, the stranger, the widow and the orphan, and eventually the national enemy, the Egyptian and the Edomite.

By having compassion for the helpless one, man begins to develop love for his brother; and in his love for himself he also loves the one who is in need of help, the frail, insecure human being. Compassion implies the element of knowledge and of identi- fication. Putnam's Sons, New York, , p. Kaufmann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, , p.

Motherly Love We have already dealt with the nature of motherly love in a previous chapter which discussed the difference between motherly and fatherly love. Motherly love, as I said there, is unconditional affirmation of the child's life and his needs. But one important addition to this description must be made here. Affirmation of the child's life has two aspects; one is the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preser- vation of the child's life and his growth.

The other aspect goes further than mere preservation. It is the attitude which instills in the child a love for living, which gives him the feeling: These two aspects of motherly love are expressed very succinctly in the Biblical story of creation. God creates the world, and man. This cor- responds to the simple care and affirmation of existence. But God goes beyond this minimum requirement. On each day after nature — and man — is created, God says: The same idea may be taken to be expressed in another Biblical symbolism. The promised land land is always a mother symbol is described as "flowing with milk and honey.

Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, the love for it and the happiness in being alive. Most mothers are capable of giving "milk," but only a minority of giving "honey" too. The effect on the child can hardly be exaggerated. Mother's love for life is as infectious as her anxiety is. Both attitudes have a deep effect on the child's whole personality; one can distinguish indeed, among chil- dren — and adults — those who got only "milk" and those who got "milk and honey. It is for this altruistic, unselfish character that motherly love has been considered the highest kind of love, and the most sacred of all emotional bonds.

It seems, however, that the real achievement of motherly love lies not in the mother's love for the small infant, but in her love for the growing child. Actually, the vast majority of mothers are loving mothers as long as the infant is small and still completely dependent on them. Most women want chil- dren, are happy with the new-born child, and eager in their care for it.

This is so in spite of the fact that they do not "get" anything in return from the child, except a smile or the expression of satisfaction in his face. It seems that this atti- tude of love is partly rooted in an instinctive equipment to be found in animals as well as in the human female. In order to be able to truly love another person, one needs first to love oneself in this way.

The current belief is that a couple should be a well-assorted team, sexually and functionally, working towards a common aim.

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This is in contrast with Fromm's description of true love and intimacy, which involves willful commitment directed toward a single unique individual. One cannot truly love another person if one does not love all of mankind including oneself. The book includes explorations of the theories of brotherly love , motherly and fatherly love, erotic love , self-love, and the love of God pp.

To be able to fully comprehend the ideas illustrated in Fromm's book, one must understand the concept of paradoxical thought, or the ability to reconcile opposing principles in one same instance. Fromm himself explains paradoxical thought in the chapters dedicated to the love of God and erotic love. Fromm begins the last chapter "The Practice of Love" saying: I am afraid that anyone who approaches this last chapter in this spirit will be gravely disappointed".

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the Polish sexology guide, see Sztuka kochania.