Fromm's The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm was a German psychologist. Among other great works, he wrote The Art of Loving, published in 1956. The central message: love is active, not passive! 

So today I thought I’d reflect a bit on a really important little book by the psychologist Erich Fromm called The Art of Loving. It’s got a pretty incredible message and it’s still as topical as ever, maybe even more so today. Oh and by the way, if you like Fromm, we did do an earlier episode on his other great work, Escape from Freedom. So check that out if you’re interested. Anyway, so well, a little love talk coming up next! 

Ok so before I talk more specifically about Fromm’s view on love, and what it is he thinks is wrong with our conception of love today - because he does think there’s something seriously wrong here - before I get into that, maybe it’s best that I give just a brief overview of the sort of importance Fromm gives to love in human life in general, cause it’s huge. So you see for him the fact of the matter is that we all set off in life lonely and separate. And this is just a consequence of human awareness. That’s to say, we recognize that we’re finite beings, and that, alone, we’re pretty much helpless against the larger world. Now for Fromm this experience of separateness, aloneness and vulnerability arouses great fear and anxiety. In fact, for him, it’s the source of all of our anxiety!

Ok so what do we do about this? How do we overcome the anxiety that this separate and disunited existence of ours produces in us? Well, not surprisingly, Fromm says that we find some sort of way of achieving oneness or unity. And for him, there are a number of ways that people try to do this, to solve this problem of separateness. One way, not surprisingly, is to take drugs or alcohol, and so help to blur the reality of separateness. 

Another way, a powerful way in fact, is to conform to a group, you know where the differences and the space between people is blurred, and so where you feel saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. And, by the way, this particular solution to the problem of separateness seems to be more prevalent today than it has been for some time. And it’s usually not a good thing, to say the least. I mean think about all the tribalism today, and the conspiracy theory groups or the anti-climate change crowd. The political and environmental price we’re paying for conformist belonging and thinking here is absolutely destructive. It’s thoughtless and it’s just, well, it’s just downright terminally stupid!  

Anyway, for Fromm, there is another solution to the problem of separateness and anxiety. That’s to say, apart from drugs and conforming to a group there is another way to achieve oneness and unity with others. And that’s, well, you guessed it, it’s love. Yeah, according to Fromm, love is the best answer to the basic problem of human existence. In other words, love is the best solution to the problem of overcoming the fundamental separateness of human beings from each other and the anxiety that this separateness causes.

Ok but, here’s the thing. Not all loves are equally good or healing. There are forms of love that are pathological and don’t provide reliable solutions to the problem of separation. Now I’m not going to get into detail here about the various forms of love that Fromm runs through, that would take too much time. So what I want to do instead is just to really simplify things and focus in on what I see as one of the most important distinctions he makes when it comes to healthy versus unhealthy love. The distinction is this: it’s love as active on the one hand, and love as passive on the other. 

Ok so where do I start with this? Well, here’s a good place. So Fromm doesn’t like this idea that love is something that happens to us without us being able to control or resist the experience. In other words, what he does is he objects to this idea of love as a falling. You know, the being struck by Cupid’s arrow thing, something, by the way, we discussed quite a bit in one of our earlier episodes on the amazing Greek love poet Sappho! Anyway, no, for Fromm, love is no passive experience or affect, or some merely pleasant sensation, it’s not fundamentally something that just happens to you. Rather, what love is, is an activity; it’s a verb, not a noun. Fundamentally what it is, is an art (hence the title of the book). And so like any other art, it’s not something that just happens, but it’s something that we have to learn to do: to love, in other words, takes practice, effort and work, the same work that any other pursuit of human excellence demands! So to think of love as passive, that is, as being loved is misguided, rather, it’s about loving, it’s about actively harnessing our full capacity for loving. 

But let me say a bit more about this, cause I think it’s important. You see, what Fromm takes to be unhealthy about our conception of love today is that when we say we want love what we often mean is not that we want to love but rather that we want to be loved (which is evidenced by our need to be popular, beautiful or seen). In other words, what we really want is some form of affirmation, we want to be provided with the sense that we are somehow full of worth, or right in our being, or some such thing. Actually Jean Paul Sartre, said something similar. He said that what makes love so enticing is that it gives us the feeling of justifying our existence; it seems to give our very being solidity. But anyway, as I was saying, for Fromm, there’s something unhealthy about this idea of seeing love as being loved rather than wanting to love. Trying to be a lovable object, well, that’s narcissism, and ultimately it’s need-based and so a sign of insecurity and desperation. Anyway, why should we assume it’s our right to be loved in the first place? I mean if we expect to be loved, then we have to love first. It’s a two way street. 

You know this just takes us back to what I was saying earlier. Love just isn’t something we have, it’s not a thing. No, all that exists is the act or the process of loving. To have love implies not only that we literally have some thing, some property or object in our possession, but it also implies something static and finished, as if now that we have it, it’s over, there’s nothing more to do! 

And it’s this kind of view of love, love as having something, that’s really destructive. I mean what often happens in relationships is that early on people give to each other but at some point they stop once they think they have the other. Nobody has to be won over anymore because love as possession has been established. And so what happens? Well, nobody makes the effort to actively produce love and create and so things stagnate. And what happens next? Well, each looks elsewhere for a new partner, someone who will satisfy that yearning they have for that initial feeling of the experience of love. But of course they fall into the same trap again and things soon become boring. Now Fromm would say that the mistake here is an obvious one. This is love as submission or possession and so one destined to wither on the vine. On the other hand, a healthy love doesn’t just want to have love, but it wants to give it and create it. In other words, for genuine lovers, their love is an expression of their bountiful agency, it’s a continuous bringing to life of things. This is a kind of love that can’t die because it feeds life.  

You know, we live in a time of constant ever new stimulation and in a time where endless love relationships are at our disposal. But, here’s the thing, I wonder if this idea of having more lovers is a sign, not of our freedom, but an unhealthy symptom of our inability to love just one single person properly.