THE ART OF LOVING
Erich Fromm
LOVE IN ALL ITS ASPECTS
“Love,” says dr. Fromm, “is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
Yet 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 startling book, Dr. Fromm discusses love in all its aspects, not only romantic love, so surrounded by false conception, but also love of parents for children, brotherly love, erotic love, self-love and love of God.
CONTENTS
Forward 1
I. Is Love an Art? 2
II.The Theory of Love 5
1. LOVE, THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN EXISTENCE 5
2. LOVE BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD 24
3. THE OBJECTS OF LOVE 29
a. Brotherly Love 29
b. Motherly Love 31
c. Erotic Love 33
d. Self-Love13 36
e. Love of God 40
III.Love and its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society 52
IV.The Practice of Love 66
EPILOGUE WORLD PERSPECTI VES 83
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Forward
THE READING of this book would be a disappointing experience of anyone who expects easy instruction in the art of loving. This book, on the contrary, wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. It wants to convince the reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; that, satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement. Or—anyone can ask himself how many truly loving persons he has known.
Yet, the difficulty of the task must not be a reason to abstain from trying to know the difficulties as well as the conditions for its achievement. To avoid unnecessary complications I have tried to deal with the problem in a language which is non-technical as far as this is possible. For the same reason I have also kept to a minimum references to the literature on love.
For another problem I did not find a completely satisfactory solution; that, namely, of avoiding repetition of ideas expressed in previous books of mine. The reader familiar, especially, with Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and The Sane Society, will find in this book many ideas expressed in there previous works. However, The Art of Loving is by no means mainly a recapitulation. It presents many ideas beyond the previously expressed ones, and quite naturally even older ones sometimes gain new perspectives by the fact tat they aer all centered around one topic, that of the are of loving.
E.F.
“He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who an do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees… the more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love… Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as then strawberries knows nothing about grapes.”
—Parcelsus
I. Is Love an Art?
IS LOVE an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one “falls into” if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.
Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love—yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.
This peculiar attitude is base on se