Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.
Last update: 15 November 2021
Love, according to Erich Fromm, must be celebrated every day as an act of liberation and enrichment. Learning to love in a mature and conscious way is to banish possession or conditions. Love is first of all concern for life, it is care and desire to encourage the growth of our loved ones.
Perhaps not even Fromm himself had realized the great importance that his book, The art of loving, would have had. Anyone who has had the opportunity to meet this humanist psychoanalyst and philosopher will know that few people have made such a significant change in their lives as he did, as well as valuable lessons to learn to love.
At the dawn of the 50s, Fromm this was a Talmud scholar and Marxist psychoanalyst who at a given moment distanced himself from Sigmund Freud's theoretical foundations. He was a somewhat taciturn intellectual who settled in the United States after World War II. On his shoulders he carried the weight of a divorce, the death of his last wife by suicide and the memory of a Europe still fragmented and in ruins.
It was in this decade that he decided to move to Mexico and become an activist for peace and women's rights. He wanted to change his outlook on life, he wanted to open up to the world, to happiness and to the struggle for what he believed in. He became a A very influential therapist, he befriended President Kennedy and found love in a brilliant woman: Annis Freeman.
Even with the bitter memory of his previous wives, Fromm set himself a goal: to learn to love. He wanted to make that phase the best of his and Annis Freeman's existence. And he was anxious, in turn, to teach others to love. His famous book and the happiness he enjoyed in the last decades of his life will ensue.
Learning to love according to Erich Fromm
“Loving without knowing how to love hurts the person we love”. This sentence by Thich Nhat Hanh sums up a more than evident reality. Most of us have no mastery in this art, we are mostly newborns in a reality in which we immerse ourselves by chance and of which we know nothing, full of needs and without tools. If at times we limit ourselves to loving as children and not as adults, this is mainly due to our culture.
We have modeled ourselves through a series of cultural schemes in which love has the appearance of a construct with magical and ideal colors. In our social fabric, the courteous love of the Middle Ages is in force, where men court women. We like to think that we are victims of Cupid's arrows, that the eternal lovers of Verona have known the true passion, that we are all destined to find our half to whom we are linked by the red thread of destiny.
Erich Fromm, a leading social psychologist, made it very clear in The Art of Love that few dimensions require as much responsibility and discernment as love. Because loving is a task for trained artists, not just for passionate dreamers. Learning to love requires practice, mastery and constant work where effort is judgment leaves nothing to chance or fate.
So let's see some of the advice offered to us by Erich Fromm.
Active love
If there is anything we want, it is to be loved. We want someone to take care of us, appreciate us, value us, worship us and praise us in whatever we do, are or have. However, there is something we need to understand as soon as possible: passive love is useless and is not mature.
Love is not a place of rest, it is a scenario that is combined with the present and in an active voice: love each other, respect each other, value each other, create something together, make common projects. The love of good artists implies the mastery of those who know how to participate, give and receive, build and be an active part of a project where there is always a mentality projected towards growth.
Our eternal concern to find the perfect person
To learn to love, we must also be aware of another aspect. We often worry too much about not finding the ideal person, the one who is in perfect harmony with all our dreams and desires. We have blurred eyes because we are not able to find the "object" to love without first stopping to think about whether we will live up to this love.
Sometimes we are so infected with idealism and constructs nurtured by romanticism that we forget the most important aspect: love requires work, it implies knowing how to face the challenges posed by an emotional relationship.
Love as a need
Learning to love requires first of all knowing how to strip oneself of all needs. Because two things will happen to those who try to have a relationship to alleviate their shortcomings: that they will never be satisfied and that they will bind the other person to a state of perennial slavery.
In The Art of Love, Erich Fromm reminds us that a healthy and happy emotional relationship must first of all be a highly productive bond, where each person has overcome their own voids and addictions. It consists ofextinguish within us the narcissistic omnipotence, the desire to accumulate and exploit others, to reach those we love without burdens and fears and thus be able to offer ourselves in our fullness.
“Childhood love follows the principle: I love because I am loved. Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love. Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you. "
-Erich Fromm-
Loving is an act of creativity
According to Erich Fromm, love is energy. It is an impulse that pushes us to move, to express ourselves, to create… This expansive and creative force only emerges when we have satisfied our basic needs.
But still, it is not enough just to feel that energy. Let us remember that love is not only felt, it must be lived and given shape. Because the authentic passion, the one that nourishes itself of feeling, maturity and balance, he understands that the most beautiful work requires daily commitment and dedication.
Love is like music, painting, carpentry, writing or architecture. It is necessary to understand the theory and, only then, become masters in practice. Like a highly creative engineer, we too will be able to overcome every difficulty, every challenge, every unforeseen event in our path with imagination and effectiveness.
Learning to love according to Erich Fromm requires abandoning many childhood visions that often characterize us (and that have instilled in us). We must stop combining love with the passive and seeing it as a spark that magically unites two people. Because thelove is substance, it is body and it is matter. A raw material with which to build a good project, the best of our lives if we so wish, and take charge of it.
