The Art of Loving in 3 Minutes
Highlights from The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
Love as the answer to the problem of human existence
When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, [he comes face to face with the fact] that without his will he is born and against his will he dies. [He is alone, separated, and helpless] before the forces of nature and society. … The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. … He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.
[Man longs for two things: to bridge the gap between his separateness, and to know the ‘secret of man’. There are two paths to this secret. One way] is that of complete power over another person. [To transform] him into a thing, [to make him suffer], to force him to betray his secret in his suffering. … The other path to knowing “the secret” is love. … The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love.
The experience of union, with man, or religiously speaking, 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 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.
Masochism and sadism as a substitute for love
The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel of another person who directs him, guides him. … He loses himself in the loved one instead of finding himself. [He] does not have to make decisions, does not have to take any risks; he is never alone — but he is not independent; he has no integrity; he is not yet fully born. … The sadistic person wants to escape from his aloneness and his sense of imprisonment by making another person part and parcel of himself. … In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. … In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
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. … If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody 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.” Saying that love is an orientation which refers to all and not to one does not imply, however, the idea that there are no differences between various types of love.
Mother and father as the two poles of love
[Mother represents nature and her love as being loved simply because one exists — unconditional love. Father represents the world of thought and his love as being loved for what one does — conditional love.] Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. … If he would retain only his fatherly conscience, he would become harsh and inhuman. If he would only retain his motherly conscience, he would be apt to lose judgement and to hinder himself and others in their development.
Overcoming narcissism as a necessary condition for love
The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself. … The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears. … The insane person or the dreamer fails completely in having an objective view of the world outside; but all of us are more or less insane, or more or less asleep.
Highlights from Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, 1956
