About the Work
The Art of Loving is a work of psychoanalytic and philosophical social criticism written by Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst and social psychologist. The book was copyrighted in 1956 and printed in the United States, published by Harper & Row in New York. It is a relatively short, non-technical treatise intended for a general audience, though it draws heavily on psychoanalytic theory, religious history, and philosophical traditions. The author explicitly states in the Foreword that the book will disappoint anyone expecting easy instruction in loving, framing the work instead as an examination of the difficulties, prerequisites, and conditions for achieving the capacity to love.
The book is part of the “World Perspectives” series, which includes a lengthy series introduction by Ruth Nanda Anshen. This introduction situates the work within a broader intellectual project concerned with the interrelations of religious, scientific, artistic, political, economic, and social influences on human experience. The series aims to address questions neglected amid spiritual, moral, and political world crisis, and it emphasizes the unity of spirit and nature, the importance of intuition and reason, and the need to rehabilitate faith in the human person. The book itself is organized into a Foreword and four main chapters: “Is Love an Art?”, “The Theory of Love” (with subsections on love as the answer to the problem of human existence, love between parent and child, and the objects of love including brotherly, motherly, erotic, self-love, and love of God), “Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society,” and “The Practice of Love.”
The author acknowledges that the book repeats some ideas from his previous works—Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and The Sane Society—but states that The Art of Loving presents many new ideas and that older ones gain new context and meaning within this focused study of love.
Context
The book emerges from the intellectual and cultural climate of the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by profound anxiety about totalitarianism, world war, and the spiritual and moral crises of modern society. The “World Perspectives” series introduction, written in New York in 1956, explicitly addresses this context, describing a world in which Western democracy, though powerful materially, has never been so threatened morally and spiritually. The introduction speaks of a generation discovering that history does not conform to social optimism, and it diagnoses a crisis in consciousness articulated through a crisis in science, originating in Descartes’ denial that theology could be a science and Kant’s denial that metaphysics could be a science. Positivistic thinking, the introduction argues, has become a quasi-sociological mythology generating a new animism.
Fromm’s work is situated within this broader intellectual ferment. He draws on and critiques the psychoanalytic tradition, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas about sexuality and love he examines at length. Fromm also engages with the philosophical tradition, citing Spinoza, Marx, and Meister Eckhart, and with religious history, including the matriarchal and patriarchal phases of religion as discovered by Bachofen and Morgan in the mid-nineteenth century. The book reflects a post-war concern with the fate of the individual in mass society, the rise of consumer capitalism, and the psychological consequences of alienation. Fromm’s analysis of contemporary Western society as one in which man has become a commodity, alienated from himself, his fellow men, and nature, speaks directly to the anxieties of the era. The book also engages with the religious revival of the 1950s, critiquing the transformation of belief in God into a psychological device for competitive success, as exemplified by popular works like Reverend N. V. Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking.
The book is thus both a product of its time and a critique of it. Fromm writes as a psychoanalyst who has moved beyond orthodox Freudianism, incorporating insights from Marxism and humanistic philosophy. His concern is not merely therapeutic but broadly cultural: he seeks to understand why love is so rare in modern society and what conditions—both personal and social—are necessary for its cultivation. The book’s emphasis on the art of loving as requiring discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern reflects a broader critique of modern industrial society, in which human values have become determined by economic values and machines set the standard for human behavior.
Structure of the Book
The book is organized into a Foreword and four chapters, each building on the previous to develop a comprehensive theory of love and its practice. The Foreword establishes the book’s purpose and its central premise: that love is an art requiring knowledge and effort, and that the capacity to love depends on the total development of one’s personality toward a productive orientation.
Chapter 1, “Is Love an Art?”, addresses the common assumption that love is easy and that nothing can be learned about it. Fromm identifies three errors underlying this assumption: the belief that love is a matter of finding the right object rather than developing one’s own capacity; the confusion between the initial experience of “falling” in love and the permanent state of “standing” in love; and the general cultural attitude that love is not worth learning because it does not earn money or prestige. He concludes that love is an art, like living itself, requiring mastery of both theory and practice, and that it must be a matter of ultimate concern.
Chapter 2, “The Theory of Love,” is the longest and most theoretical section. It begins with a theory of man, arguing that the deepest human need is to overcome separateness and achieve union. Fromm examines various answers to this need, including orgiastic states, symbiotic union (both masochism and sadism), and mature love, which he defines as union preserving one’s integrity and individuality. He then explores love as giving, the prerequisites for loving, and the masculine-feminine polarity. The chapter includes a detailed discussion of love between parent and child, distinguishing motherly love (unconditional) from fatherly love (conditional), and the development of a mature conscience. The remainder of the chapter examines the objects of love: brotherly love (love of all human beings), motherly love (unconditional affirmation of the child’s life), erotic love (the craving for fusion with one other person), self-love (distinguished from selfishness), and love of God (analyzed through the development of religion from matriarchal to patriarchal phases and the logic of paradoxical thought).
Chapter 3, “Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society,” applies the theory to modern culture. Fromm argues that capitalistic society, based on the market as regulator of all economic and social relations, undermines the capacity for love. He critiques Freud’s concept of love as sexual desire and Sullivan’s concept of love as collaboration, presenting both as reflections of the alienated personality of modern capitalism. He identifies two “normal” forms of the disintegration of love: love as mutual sexual satisfaction and love as “teamwork” or a haven from aloneness. He then examines neurotic forms of love, particularly the failure to emerge from infantile attachment to parents, and discusses the disintegration of love of God, arguing that modern religiosity is often a regression to idolatry.
Chapter 4, “The Practice of Love,” addresses the practical application of the theory. Fromm acknowledges that most readers expect “how to do it yourself” prescriptions and will be disappointed, since love is a personal experience each person must have by and for himself. He discusses the general requirements of practicing any art: discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern. He then examines specific qualities necessary for the ability to love: overcoming narcissism, developing objectivity and reason, and acquiring humility. The book concludes with a discussion of faith—both rational and irrational—and its role in love, including faith in oneself, faith in another’s potentialities, and faith in mankind.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
Is Love an Art?
The book opens with a direct challenge to a common assumption. Despite the overwhelming human craving for love, most people believe that love is simple and that the difficulty lies only in finding the right object to love. The author identifies three errors that sustain this belief. The first is the conviction that the problem of love is a problem of being loved, rather than of one’s own capacity to love. This leads people to focus on making themselves attractive—through success, power, or charm—rather than on developing their own lovingness. The second error is the assumption that love is a simple matter of finding the right object, a belief that has grown stronger in a culture where arranged marriages have given way to “free” choice, making people think that a good match is all that is needed. The third error is the confusion between the initial experience of “falling” in love and the permanent state of “standing” in love. When two strangers suddenly let the wall between them break down, the moment of oneness is exhilarating, but this type of love is not lasting. As the pair becomes acquainted, the intimacy loses its miraculous character until antagonism and boredom kill the initial excitement. People mistake the intensity of infatuation for proof of love’s intensity, when it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the attitude that nothing is easier than love persists. No activity fails as regularly as love while being started with such tremendous hopes. If any other activity failed so consistently, people would examine the reasons or give up; since giving up is impossible with love, one must examine the reasons for failure and study love’s meaning. The first step is recognizing that love is an art, just as living is an art. Learning any art requires two parts: mastery of theory and mastery of practice. Theoretical knowledge alone does not make one competent; only after much practice do theory and practice blend into intuition—the essence of mastery. A third factor is necessary: the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; nothing else in the world can be more important. In our culture, despite craving love, people consider success, prestige, money, and power more important, spending almost all their energy on these and almost none on learning the art of loving. Perhaps only things that earn money or prestige are considered worthy of learning; love, which profits only the soul but is profitless in the modern sense, is treated as a luxury.
Love, the Answer to the Problem of Human Existence
Any theory of love must begin with a theory of man. Man has emerged from the animal kingdom, transcended nature though never leaving it; once thrown out of paradise—the original oneness with nature—cherubim with flaming swords block his return. Man can only go forward by developing reason and finding a new, human harmony. At birth, man is thrown from a definite situation into one that is indefinite, uncertain, and open. Certainty exists only about the past; about the future, only that it is death. Man is life aware of itself, aware of himself, his fellow man, his past, and his future possibilities. This awareness of separateness, his short life span, that he dies against his will, his aloneness and helplessness before nature and society, makes his existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane without liberating himself and uniting with men and the world.
Separateness arouses anxiety—indeed, it is the source of all anxiety. To be separate means being cut off, helpless, unable to grasp the world actively; the world can invade without one’s ability to react. Separateness also arouses shame and guilt, expressed in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. After eating from the tree of knowledge, after disobeying, after becoming human by emancipating from animal harmony, they saw they were naked and ashamed. This is not Victorian prudishness about genitals; rather, having become aware of themselves and each other, they recognize their separateness and difference of sex, yet remain strangers because they have not learned to love. Awareness of separation without reunion by love is the source of shame, guilt, and anxiety. The deepest need of man is overcoming separateness, leaving the prison of aloneness. Absolute failure means insanity, since the panic of complete isolation is overcome only by radical withdrawal from the world. Man of all ages and cultures faces one question: how to overcome separateness, achieve union, transcend individual life, and find at-onement. The question is the same for primitive cave dwellers, nomadic shepherds, Egyptian peasants, Phoenician traders, Roman soldiers, medieval monks, Japanese samurai, modern clerks and factory hands. Answers vary: animal worship, human sacrifice, military conquest, luxury, ascetic renunciation, obsessional work, artistic creation, love of God, love of Man. Though many answers constitute human history, they are limited in number; the history of religion and philosophy is the history of these answers. Answers depend on the degree of individuation. The infant feels one with mother, cured of aloneness by her physical presence. Only as the child develops separateness does the mother’s presence become insufficient. Similarly, the human race in infancy feels one with nature, expressed through animal masks, totem animals, and animal gods; as it emerges from primary bonds, the need to escape separateness intensifies.
Orgiastic States and Symbiotic Union
One way of achieving union is orgiastic states: auto-induced trances, sometimes with drugs, practiced in primitive tribal rituals. In transitory exaltation, the outside world and separateness disappear; common practice adds fusion with the group. Related is sexual experience; orgasm can produce trance-like states. Communal sexual orgies were part of many primitive rituals. After such experiences, man can go without suffering separateness for a time, until anxiety mounts and is reduced again by ritual repetition. When orgiastic states are common tribal practice, they produce no anxiety or guilt—they are right and virtuous, approved by medicine men or priests. But when chosen individually in a culture that has left these practices behind, alcoholism and drug addiction result.
Another answer to the problem of separateness is symbiotic union, which can be compared to the relationship between a pregnant mother and her foetus. They are “two, and yet one,” living together, needing each other. The foetus receives everything from the mother; she is its world, feeding and protecting it, while her own life is enhanced by it. In psychic symbiosis, bodies are independent but psychologically attached. The passive form of this is submission or masochism. The masochistic person escapes isolation by making himself “part and parcel” of another who directs, guides, and protects him. The power of the one submitted to is inflated; “he is everything, I am nothing.” As part of that greatness, the masochist avoids decisions, risks, and loneliness—but lacks independence, integrity, and is “not yet fully born.” In religious context this is idolatry; the same mechanism operates in secular masochistic love. The active form is domination or sadism. The sadist escapes aloneness by incorporating another person who worships him. Crucially, the sadist is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on him; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadist commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, while the masochist is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. In a deeper emotional sense, both share “fusion without integrity.” Usually a person reacts both sadistically and masochistically toward different objects. Hitler reacted sadistically toward people but masochistically toward fate, history, and nature’s “higher power”; his suicide amid general destruction matched his dream of total domination.
Mature Love as Giving
In contrast to these immature forms, mature love is union preserving one’s integrity and individuality. Love is an active power breaking the walls separating man from his fellow men, uniting him with others while permitting him to remain himself. “Two beings become one and yet remain two.” This requires a redefinition of activity. The modern concept of activity means action producing external change through energy expenditure, ignoring motivation. A man driven by insecurity, ambition, or greed is actually “passive”—a slave to passion, a sufferer, not an “actor.” Conversely, quiet contemplation experiencing oneself and oneness with the world is “the highest activity”—an activity of the soul requiring inner freedom. Spinoza formulated this by differentiating active affects from passive affects. In active affects, man is free, master of his affect; in passive ones, he is driven by unrecognized motivations. Envy, jealousy, ambition, and greed are passions; love is an action practiced only in freedom, never by compulsion.
Love is primarily giving, not receiving. Giving is misunderstood as “giving up” or sacrifice by receptive, exploitative, or hoarding characters. The marketing character gives only in exchange. Non-productive types feel giving as impoverishment and refuse; some make a virtue of sacrifice, believing painful giving is virtuous. For the productive character, giving is “the highest expression of potency”—experiencing one’s strength, wealth, and power, bringing heightened vitality and joy. Giving is more joyous than receiving because it expresses aliveness. In the sexual sphere, the male’s culmination is giving—himself, his organ, his semen; if he cannot give, he is impotent. The woman gives herself too, opening to her feminine center; in receiving, she gives. If she can only receive, she is frigid. As mother, she gives of herself to the child, her milk, her bodily warmth. In material things, giving means being rich—not he who has much, but he who gives much. The anxious hoarder is psychologically poor. The capable giver is rich. Only one deprived of bare necessities cannot enjoy giving materially. Daily experience shows that the poor give more willingly than the rich. In the human realm, one gives of himself, of what is alive in him—joy, interest, understanding, knowledge, humor, sadness. This enriches the other and enhances both’s aliveness. Giving is itself exquisite joy; in truly giving, one cannot help receiving back. Giving makes the other a giver; both share joy in what they brought to life. “Love is a power which produces love; impotence is the inability to produce love.” Marx is quoted: “Assume man as man, and his relation to the world as a human one, and you can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence… If you love without calling forth love… your love is impotent, a misfortune.” The teacher is taught by students, the actor stimulated by audience, the psychoanalyst cured by patient—when related genuinely and productively, not as objects. The ability to give depends on character development: attaining a predominantly productive orientation, overcoming dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, exploitation, and hoarding; acquiring faith in one’s own powers and courage to rely on them.
The Objects of Love
The need for union between masculine and feminine poles is a specific, biological need distinct from the universal, existential one. This is expressed in the myth that man and woman were originally one, cut in half, and now seek their lost part. The Biblical story of Eve from Adam’s rib contains the same idea, though in a patriarchal spirit making woman secondary. The polarity exists within each person; physiologically, each sex has hormones of the opposite sex, and psychologically, each carries principles of receiving and penetrating, matter and spirit. Union within oneself comes from uniting these poles, which is the basis for all creativity, including interpersonal creativity, where each is reborn in love. The homosexual deviation is a failure to attain this polarized union, a pain shared with the average heterosexual who cannot love. This polarity exists in nature, as in the functions of receiving and penetrating, illustrated by earth and rain, river and ocean, night and day. The Muslim poet Rumi describes Heaven as man and Earth as woman, with desire implanted in all parts of existence for union. The author critiques Freud, arguing his error is not overemphasizing sex but failing to understand it deeply. Freud saw sexual desire as the result of a chemically produced, painful tension seeking relief, making masturbation the ideal satisfaction. Freud ignored the masculine-feminine polarity, an error facilitated by his patriarchalism, leading him to claim the libido has a “masculine nature” and to view woman as a castrated man. The author asserts woman is not a castrated man. Erotic attraction is mainly the need for union with the other pole. Masculine character is defined by penetration, guidance, activity, discipline, adventurousness; feminine by productive receptiveness, protection, realism, endurance, motherliness. A man unsure of his masculinity may become a Don Juan; more extreme paralysis leads to sadism, while weakened feminine sexuality becomes masochism or possessiveness. Freud’s sexual theory was revolutionary around 1900 but is now conformist.
Love Between Parent and Child
The infant feels only warmth and food, not differentiating them from the mother, a state of narcissism. The child eventually perceives things as distinct and experiences being loved unconditionally by the mother—a passive experience. For most children until eight and a half to ten, the problem is being loved. Then a new factor emerges: producing love by one’s own activity, giving something to the parent. Mature love overcomes egocentricity; the other’s needs become important. Infantile love says “I love because I am loved”; mature love says “I am loved because I love.” Immature love says “I love you because I need you”; mature says “I need you because I love you.” The child’s attachment shifts from mother to father. Motherly love is unconditional; fatherly love is conditional, based on fulfilling expectations and obedience. The author discusses the development of a motherly and fatherly conscience within the mature person, built on one’s own capacity for love and reason, not by incorporating parents.
Brotherly Love
The most fundamental kind of love, the one that underlies all other types, is brotherly love. This is the love described in the Bible as “love thy neighbor as thyself.” It is defined as a sense of responsibility, care, respect, and knowledge of any other human being, along with the wish to further his life. Its defining characteristic is its lack of exclusiveness; it is a love for all human beings. If one has truly developed the capacity for love, one cannot help but love one’s brothers, for brotherly love is the experience of union with all men, of human solidarity and at-onement.
This love is based on the experience that we all are one. Differences in talents, intelligence, and knowledge are negligible when compared to the identity of the human core common to all men. To experience this identity, one must penetrate from the periphery to the core; perceiving only the surface reveals differences, but penetrating to the core reveals identity and brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center is what the author calls “central relatedness.” The author quotes Simone Weil to illustrate this: the same words, such as “I love you,” can be commonplace or extraordinary depending on the depth of the region in a man’s being from which they proceed, and they reach the same region in the one who hears them.
Brotherly love is love between equals, but even as equals, we are not always equal. As humans, we all need help at times. Helplessness is transitory, while the ability to stand on one’s own feet is permanent and common. The love of the helpless one, the poor, and the stranger is the beginning of brotherly love. Loving one’s own flesh and blood is no achievement; even animals love their young. In the Old Testament, the central objects of man’s love are the poor, the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and eventually the national enemy, the Egyptian and the Edomite. Compassion implies knowledge and identification, as the Old Testament says: “You know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; . . . therefore love the stranger!”
Motherly Love
Motherly love is the unconditional affirmation of the child’s life and needs. This affirmation has two aspects: first, the care and responsibility for the preservation of life and growth, and second, an attitude that instills a love for living, the feeling that it is good to be alive. These aspects are expressed in the Biblical story of creation, where God creates the world and man, but then says “It is good” after each day, instilling a love for life. The promised land, a mother symbol, is described as “flowing with milk and honey.” Milk symbolizes care and affirmation, while honey symbolizes the sweetness of life and happiness in being alive. Most mothers can give “milk,” but only a minority can give “honey” too, for to do so, a mother must be a happy person. A mother’s love for life is as infectious as her anxiety.
Unlike brotherly and erotic love, which are between equals, the mother-child relationship is one of inequality. The real achievement of motherly love lies not in love for the small infant, but in love for the growing child. Loving the small infant is partly rooted in instinct, but also in psychological factors: the narcissistic element, where the infant is felt as part of herself, and the wish for power or possession. A more universal motivation is the need for transcendence—the need to feel as the creator, transcending the passive role of being created. The mother transcends herself in her infant, just as the male’s urge to create man-made things and ideas stems from his inability to bear children.
The essence of motherly love is to want the child’s separation from herself. In erotic love, two separate people become one; in motherly love, two who were one become separate. The mother must wish and support the child’s separation, which requires unselfishness and the ability to give everything. Many mothers fail at this stage; narcissistic, domineering, possessive women can be “loving” mothers only while the child is small. A woman can be a truly loving mother only if she can love her husband, other children, strangers, and all human beings. The test is the willingness to bear separation and go on loving.
Erotic Love
Brotherly love is among equals, and motherly love is for the helpless; both are not restricted to one person. Erotic love, however, is the craving for complete fusion with one other person. It is exclusive, not universal, and perhaps the most deceptive form of love. It is often confused with “falling” in love, the sudden collapse of barriers between strangers, which is short-lived. Once the stranger is intimately known, there are no more barriers; the loved person becomes as well known as oneself—or as little known.
For most people, intimacy is established primarily through sexual contact, as physical union means overcoming physical separateness. Other factors are taken as overcoming separateness: speaking of one’s personal life, hopes, and anxieties, showing childlike aspects, establishing common interests, even showing anger, hate, or complete lack of inhibition. This may explain the attraction of married couples who seem intimate only in bed or when venting mutual hate. These types of closeness diminish over time, leading one to seek a new person, a new stranger, with the illusion that the new love will be different. Sexual desire aims at fusion, not just physical appetite, and can be stimulated by anxiety and the need for conquest.
Selfishness and Self-Love
The selfish person makes an unsuccessful attempt to cover up and compensate for a failure to care for his real self. Freud holds that the selfish person is narcissistic, as if he had withdrawn love from others and turned it toward his own person. Fromm asserts that while selfish persons are incapable of loving others, they are also incapable of loving themselves. Selfishness is compared to a greedy concern for others, exemplified by an oversolicitous mother. She consciously believes she is particularly fond of her child, but actually has deeply repressed hostility toward the object of her concern. She is overconcerned not because she loves the child too much, but because she must compensate for her lack of capacity to love him at all.
Psychoanalytic experience with neurotic “unselfishness” bears out this theory. This symptom appears in people who typically suffer from other connected troubles: depression, tiredness, inability to work, and failure in love relationships. Unselfishness is not felt as a symptom; it is often the one redeeming character trait on which such people pride themselves. The “unselfish” person “does not want anything for himself,” “lives only for others,” and is proud of not considering himself important. He is puzzled to find he is unhappy despite his unselfishness. Analytic work shows his unselfishness is one of his symptoms, often the most important one; he is paralyzed in his capacity to love or enjoy anything, pervaded by hostility toward life, and behind the facade of unselfishness a subtle but intense self-centeredness is hidden. Cure requires interpreting unselfishness as a symptom and correcting his lack of productiveness at the root of both his unselfishness and other troubles.
The “unselfish” mother believes her children will experience love and learn to love. Instead, children show anxiety, tension, fear of the mother’s disapproval, and anxiety to live up to her expectations. They sense her hidden hostility toward life and become imbued with it. The effect is often worse than a selfish mother’s because her unselfishness prevents children from criticizing her; they are taught, under the mask of virtue, dislike for life. A mother with genuine self-love gives children the experience that love, joy, and happiness are nothing more conducive to than being loved by a mother who loves herself. Fromm quotes Meister Eckhart: “If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man.”
Love of God
The basis for the need to love lies in the experience of separateness and the need to overcome the anxiety of separateness through union. The love of God is psychologically not different; it springs from the same need. The love of God has as many different qualities and aspects as the love of man. In all theistic religions, God stands for the highest value, the most desirable good. The specific meaning of God depends on what is the most desirable good for a person, so understanding the concept of God must start with an analysis of the character structure of the worshiper.
Human development is characterized as emergence from nature, from mother, from bonds of blood and soil. Early man clings to primary bonds, feeling identified with the world of animals and trees. Primitive religions show this: animals transformed into totems, animal masks worn in religious acts or war, animals worshiped as gods. Later, with artisan and artistic skill, man transforms products of his own hand into gods—idols of clay, silver, or gold. Man projects his own powers into things he makes, worshiping his prowess and possessions in alienated fashion. Still later, man gives gods human form, having discovered man as the highest and most dignified “thing.” This anthropomorphic phase develops in two dimensions: the female or male nature of gods, and the degree of maturity man has achieved.
According to discoveries of Bachofen and Morgan in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a matriarchal phase of religion preceding the patriarchal one in many cultures. In the matriarchal phase, the mother is the highest being—goddess, authority in family and society. Mother’s love is unconditional, all-protective, all-enveloping; it cannot be controlled or acquired. Its presence gives bliss; its absence produces lostness and despair. Mother loves children because they are her children, not because they are “good.” Mother’s love is based on equality: all men are equal as children of a mother, children of Mother Earth. The patriarchal phase is the only one of which we have thorough knowledge. The mother is dethroned; the father becomes Supreme Being in religion and society. Fatherly love makes demands, establishes principles and laws; his love for the son depends on the son’s obedience. He likes best the son most like him, most obedient, best fitted to become successor and inheritor. Patriarchal society develops with private property; it is hierarchical; equality of brothers gives way to competition and strife.
Paradoxical Logic and Its Religious Consequences
In Taoist thinking, as in Indian and Socratic thought, the highest step of thought is knowing that we do not know. Lao-tse states that the Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring Tao; the name that can be named is not the enduring name. The ultimate One cannot be caught in words or thoughts. He who knows the Tao does not speak about it; he who speaks about it does not know it. Brahmanic philosophy concerned the relationship between the manifoldness of phenomena and unity (Brahman). This is not dualistic; harmony consists in conflicting positions held together. Brahmanical thinking centered on the paradox of simultaneous antagonisms yet identity of manifest forces. The ultimate power transcends conceptual and sensual spheres—”neither this nor thus.” There is no antagonism between real and unreal in this non-dualistic realization. The perceived pair of opposites reflects the perceiving mind, not things themselves. Opposition is a category of man’s mind, not an element of reality. The Rig-Veda expresses: “I am the two, the life force and the life material, the two at once.” Vedantic thinking postulates that thought is “only a more subtle horizon of ignorance, in fact the most subtle of all the deluding devices of maya.”
Since God represents ultimate reality and the mind perceives in contradictions, no positive statement can be made of God. In the Vedantas, an omniscient and omnipotent God is the ultimate form of ignorance. This connects with the namelessness of the Tao, the nameless name of God revealing himself to Moses, and Meister Eckhart’s “absolute Nothing.” Man can know only the negation, never the position of ultimate reality. Eckhart: “The Divine One is a negation of negations.” Every creature contains a negation. God becomes “The absolute Nothing” for Eckhart, as the ultimate reality is “En Sof,” the Endless One, for the Kabalah.
Paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that love of God is neither knowledge of God in thought nor the thought of one’s love, but the act of experiencing oneness with God. This emphasizes right living—right action, not right belief. This appears in Brahmanism, Buddhism, Taoism, and the Jewish religion, where the Halacha emphasizes right living. In modern history, Spinoza shifted emphasis to right conduct; Marx said philosophers have interpreted the world—the task is to transform it; Freud’s paradoxical logic leads to psychoanalytic therapy as ever-deepening experience of oneself. Paradoxical logic led to tolerance in Indian and Chinese religions, illustrated by the story of men describing an elephant in the dark—one touching the trunk says “water pipe,” another the ear says “fan,” a third the legs says “pillar.” It also led to emphasis on transforming man rather than developing dogma and science. Western thought, seeking ultimate truth in right thought, led to dogma, arguments about formulations, intolerance of heretics, and emphasis on “believing in God.” This led also to science. Paradoxical thought led to tolerance and self-transformation; Aristotelian thought led to dogma and science, the Catholic Church, and atomic energy.
Love as a Central Experience
Love, in its fullest realization, demands that two people communicate from the very center of their existence, each experiencing themselves from this core. This central experience is the only foundation for human reality, aliveness, and love itself. Love thus understood is not a resting place but a constant challenge—a moving, growing, working together. Whether the relationship is marked by harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from their essence and become one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than fleeing from themselves. The only proof of love’s presence is the depth of the relationship and the aliveness and strength it produces in each person; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.
The Disintegration of the Love of God
Just as automatons cannot love one another, they cannot love God. The disintegration of the love of God mirrors the disintegration of the love of man, contradicting any claims of a religious renaissance. What is witnessed, with exceptions, is a regression to an idolatric concept of God that fits an alienated character structure. People are anxious, without principles or faith, having no aim except moving ahead; they remain children hoping for a father or mother to help when needed. In medieval religious cultures, the average person saw God as a helping father and mother but also took God seriously—the paramount goal was living according to God’s principles, making salvation supreme. Today, daily life is separated from religious values, devoted to material comforts and success on the personality market. Secular efforts rest on indifference and egotism, labeled individualism or individual initiative. Truly religious people resemble eight-year-olds needing a father as helper but adopting his teachings; contemporary man is like a three-year-old crying for father when needed but otherwise self-sufficient at play.
Idolatry and Alienated Religion
In this infantile dependence on an anthropomorphic God without life transformation, we are closer to a primitive idolatric tribe than to medieval religious culture. New features characterize contemporary Western capitalistic society: modern man has become a commodity, experiencing his life energy as an investment for the highest profit on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, his fellow men, and nature. His aim is the profitable exchange of skills, knowledge, and his personality package. Life has no goal except moving, no principle except fair exchange, no satisfaction except consuming. The concept of God is transformed to fit this alienated culture of success. In the recent religious revival, belief in God became a psychological device to make one better fitted for the competitive struggle. Religion allies with auto-suggestion and psychotherapy for business purposes. In the 1920s, God was not invoked for improving one’s personality; Dale Carnegie’s 1938 bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People remained secular. Today’s equivalent is Reverend N. V. Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, which never questions whether a concern with success accords with monotheistic religion; belief in God and prayer are recommended to increase success. As psychiatrists recommend employee happiness to appeal to customers, ministers recommend love of God for success. “Make God your partner” means making God a business partner, not becoming one with Him in love, justice, and truth. Brotherly love is replaced by impersonal fairness; God becomes a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.—you know he runs the show, never see him, acknowledge his leadership while doing your part.
The Practice of Love: General Requirements
With the theoretical aspect concluded, the practice of love presents a more difficult problem. Most readers expect “how to do it yourself” prescriptions and will be disappointed. Love is a personal experience each person has by and for himself; nearly everyone has had it rudimentarily as a child, adolescent, or adult. Discussion can cover premises and approaches, but the decisive step must be taken alone. Practicing any art requires discipline. Doing something only when in the mood yields hobbies, not mastery. Modern man has little self-discipline outside work. The wish for laziness reacts against routinization—eight hours daily spent on purposes not his own. Rebelliousness takes the form of infantile self-indulgence. In battling authoritarianism, man distrusts all discipline—both irrational authority and rational self-imposed discipline. Without discipline, life becomes shattered, chaotic, lacking concentration. Concentration is rare in our culture, which leads to an unconcentrated, diffused mode of life. People do many things at once—read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, and drink. The consumer has an open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything—pictures, liquor, knowledge. The difficulty of being alone shows this lack; sitting still without talking, smoking, reading, or drinking is impossible for most. Smoking is a symptom, occupying the hand, mouth, eye, and nose. Modern industrial systems foster quickness. Machines are designed for speed; the machine producing the same quantity in half the time is twice as good. Human values have become determined by economic values—what is good for machines must be good for man. Modern man thinks he loses time when not doing things quickly, yet he doesn’t know what to do with the time he gains except to kill it. The art must be of supreme importance or one remains a dilettante, and the proportion of dilettantes is more heavily weighted in love than in other arts. One learns an art indirectly—the carpentry apprentice planes wood, the piano apprentice practices scales, the Zen archery apprentice does breathing exercises. One’s whole life must be devoted to the art; one’s person becomes an instrument.
Narcissism and Objectivity
The main condition for achieving love is overcoming one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation experiences as real only what exists within oneself; outside phenomena have no reality in themselves but are experienced only as useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole is objectivity—the faculty to see people and things as they are, separating this objective picture from one formed by desires and fears. All forms of psychosis show an extreme inability to be objective. The insane person experiences only inner reality—fears and desires—seeing the outside world as symbols of the inner world. All people do this when dreaming, staging dramas that express wishes and fears while convinced dreams are as real as waking reality. All people are more or less insane, or more or less asleep, having unobjective views distorted by narcissism. A woman calls a doctor wanting an appointment that afternoon; when he offers the next day, she responds, “But, doctor, I live only five minutes from your office”—unable to understand that her short distance doesn’t save him time. Parents experience children in terms of obedience and credit rather than the child’s own feelings. Husbands see wives as domineering because attachment to mother makes demands seem like restrictions. Wives think husbands ineffective because they don’t match a childhood fantasy of a shining knight. Regarding foreign nations, objectivity is notoriously lacking: another nation is made utterly depraved while one’s own stands for goodness; the enemy’s good deeds are seen as devilish deception while one’s bad deeds are justified by noble goals. Objectivity is the exception; narcissistic distortion is the rule.
Reason, Humility, and Faith
The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is humility. Objectivity requires emerging from childhood dreams of omniscience and omnipotence. Love requires a relative absence of narcissism, thus requiring the development of humility, objectivity, and reason. Humility and objectivity are indivisible, as is love. One cannot be objective about one’s family without being objective about strangers. Acquiring objectivity and reason is half the road to the art of loving, but it must apply to everyone—reserving objectivity only for the loved person fails everywhere. The ability to love depends on emerging from narcissism and incestuous fixation to mother and clan; it requires growth and a productive orientation. This process requires faith.
Rational vs. Irrational Faith
Faith need not involve belief in God or religious doctrines, nor is it necessarily divorced from reason. Irrational faith is belief based on submission to irrational authority. Rational faith is conviction rooted in one’s own experience of thought or feeling—not primarily belief in something but the quality of certainty and firmness in one’s convictions. Faith is a character trait pervading the whole personality. Rational faith is rooted in productive intellectual and emotional activity. Scientific discovery begins with a rational vision—itself a result of previous study, reflective thinking, and observation. When enough data or mathematical formulation makes the vision highly plausible, one arrives at a tentative hypothesis; analysis and amassing supporting data lead to more adequate hypotheses and eventually a wide-ranging theory. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were imbued with unshakable faith in reason; Bruno was burned at the stake and Spinoza suffered excommunication. Faith is necessary at every step: in the vision as rationally valid aim, in the hypothesis as plausible, in the final theory until general consensus. Rational faith is rooted in independent conviction based on one’s own productive observing and thinking, despite majority opinion.
Faith in Human Relations
In human relations, faith is indispensable to significant friendship or love. Having faith in another means certainty of the reliability and unchangeability of fundamental attitudes, the core of personality, of love—basic motivations remain the same though opinions may change. We have faith in ourselves, aware of a self, a core in our personality that persists through varying circumstances. This core is the reality behind the word “I,” the basis of identity. Without faith in the persistence of self, identity is threatened and one becomes dependent on others’ approval. Only the person with faith in himself can be faithful to others, sure he will be the same in the future. Faith in oneself is a condition of the ability to promise; as Nietzsche said, man can be defined by his capacity to promise, so faith is a condition of human existence. In love, what matters is faith in one’s own love—its ability to produce love in others and its reliability. There is also faith in another’s potentialities: the mother’s faith that her newborn will live, grow, walk, and talk—though these developments are so regular they seem not to require faith. Different are potentialities that can fail: love, happiness, reason, artistic gifts. These are seeds that grow with proper conditions or are stifled without them. A significant condition is that the significant person in a child’s life have faith in these potentialities. This faith makes the difference between education and manipulation. Education (from e-ducere, literally “to lead forth”) means helping the child realize potentialities. Manipulation is based on absence of faith in growth, on the conviction that a child will be right only if adults put in what is desirable and suppress what seems undesirable. There is no need of faith in the robot, since there is no life in it.
Faith in Mankind
Faith in others culminates in faith in mankind. In the Western world this was expressed religiously in Judaeo-Christian religion and secularly in the humanistic political and social ideas of the last hundred and fifty years. It is based on the idea that human potentialities, given proper conditions, can build a social order governed by equality, justice, and love. Since this order has not yet been achieved, faith in its possibility requires a rational vision that transcends the existing state of affairs—a vision rooted in the very potentialities of human nature itself.
Main Arguments
The central argument of The Art of Loving is that love is not a sentiment that can be easily indulged by anyone regardless of maturity, but an art that requires knowledge and effort. Fromm argues that all attempts at love fail unless one actively develops one’s total personality toward a productive orientation. Satisfaction in individual love requires the capacity to love one’s neighbor, true humility, courage, faith, and discipline. In a culture where these qualities are rare, attaining the capacity to love remains rare, but the difficulty must not prevent trying to understand the difficulties and conditions for achievement.
Fromm’s theory of love begins with a theory of man. He argues that man, having emerged from the animal kingdom, has transcended nature though never left it. Once thrown out of paradise—the original oneness with nature—man cannot return; he can only go forward by developing reason and finding a new, human harmony. The deepest need of man is to overcome separateness, to leave the prison of aloneness. This awareness of separateness is the source of all anxiety, shame, and guilt. Fromm argues that the question of how to overcome separateness is the same for all people of all ages and cultures, though the answers vary. He examines several inadequate answers: orgiastic states, which provide only transitory exaltation; and symbiotic union, both masochistic submission and sadistic domination, which involve fusion without integrity. Mature love, in contrast, is union preserving one’s integrity and individuality—an active power that breaks the walls separating man from his fellow men while permitting him to remain himself.
A key argument is that love is primarily giving, not receiving. Fromm distinguishes the productive character, for whom giving is the highest expression of potency, from non-productive types who experience giving as impoverishment. Giving is more joyous than receiving because it expresses aliveness. In the human realm, one gives of oneself—joy, interest, understanding, knowledge, humor, sadness—and in truly giving, one cannot help receiving back. Fromm quotes Marx: “Assume man as man, and his relation to the world as a human one, and you can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence… If you love without calling forth love… your love is impotent, a misfortune.”
Fromm argues that love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person but an attitude, an orientation of character toward the world. If one loves only one person, it is a symbiotic attachment or enlarged egotism. The belief that love is constituted by the object is a fallacy. If one truly loves one person, one loves all persons and the world. This argument underlies his discussion of the objects of love: brotherly love is the most fundamental kind, the sense of responsibility, care, respect, and knowledge of any other human being; motherly love is unconditional affirmation of the child’s life and needs; erotic love is the craving for complete fusion with one other person, exclusive but not universal.
Fromm argues that the capacity to love depends on culture. In contemporary Western society, love is relatively rare; pseudo-love forms are really the disintegration of love. Capitalistic society, based on political freedom and the market as regulator of all economic and social relations, produces an alienated character structure. Modern man has become a commodity, experiencing life energy as investment for highest profit on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, fellow men, and nature. His aim is profitable exchange of skills, knowledge, and his “personality package.” Life has no goal except moving, no principle except fair exchange, no satisfaction except consuming. In such a society, love as mutual sexual satisfaction and love as “teamwork” are the two “normal” forms of the disintegration of love—the socially patterned pathology of love.
Finally, Fromm argues that the practice of love requires discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern, as well as the overcoming of narcissism and the development of objectivity, reason, humility, and faith. Rational faith—conviction rooted in one’s own experience of thought or feeling—is indispensable to love. Faith in oneself, faith in another’s potentialities, and faith in mankind are all conditions of the ability to love.
Key Concepts
Separateness and Union: Fromm’s foundational concept is that man’s deepest need is to overcome the unbearable prison of aloneness. Separateness arouses anxiety and is the source of all anxiety; it also arouses shame and guilt, as expressed in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, who, after becoming aware of themselves and each other, recognized their separateness and difference of sex yet remained strangers because they had not learned to love. The deepest need of man is overcoming separateness, leaving the prison of aloneness. Absolute failure means insanity.
Symbiotic Union: This concept describes immature forms of union that lack integrity. In masochism (passive symbiosis), the person escapes isolation by making himself part and parcel of another who directs, guides, and protects him. In sadism (active symbiosis), the sadist escapes aloneness by incorporating another person who worships him. Crucially, the sadist is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on him; both share “fusion without integrity.”
Mature Love: In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union preserving one’s integrity and individuality. Love is an active power breaking walls separating man from fellow men, uniting him with others while permitting him to remain himself. “Two beings become one and yet remain two.”
Giving: Love is primarily giving, not receiving. For the productive character, giving is the highest expression of potency—experiencing one’s strength, wealth, power, bringing heightened vitality and joy. Giving is more joyous than receiving because it expresses aliveness. One gives of oneself, of what is alive in him—joy, interest, understanding, knowledge, humor, sadness. “Love is a power which produces love; impotence is the inability to produce love.”
Active vs. Passive Affects: Fromm distinguishes between active affects, in which man is free and master of his affect, and passive affects, in which he is driven by unrecognized motivations. Envy, jealousy, ambition, and greed are passions; love is an action practiced only in freedom, never by compulsion. This concept draws on Spinoza’s philosophy.
Masculine-Feminine Polarity: Fromm argues that the desire for union between masculine and feminine poles is a specific, biological need distinct from the universal existential need. The polarity exists within each person; each sex has hormones of the opposite sex, and psychologically, each carries principles of receiving and penetrating, matter and spirit. Union within oneself comes from uniting these poles, the basis for all creativity.
Motherly vs. Fatherly Love: Motherly love is unconditional; the mother loves the child because it is her child, not because it is “good.” Fatherly love is conditional, based on fulfilling expectations and obedience. The mature person develops a motherly and fatherly conscience within himself, built on one’s own capacity for love and reason, not by incorporating parents. Failure in this development causes neurosis.
Brotherly Love: The most fundamental kind of love, underlying all types. It is the sense of responsibility, care, respect, and knowledge of any other human being, and the wish to further his life. It is love for all human beings, characterized by its lack of exclusiveness. It is based on the experience that we all are one; differences in talents, intelligence, and knowledge are negligible compared to the identity of the human core common to all men.
Milk and Honey: Fromm uses these symbols from the description of the promised land as “flowing with milk and honey.” Milk symbolizes care and affirmation; honey symbolizes the sweetness of life and happiness in being alive. Most mothers can give “milk,” but only a minority can give “honey” too; to do so, a mother must be a happy person.
Transcendence: The need to feel as the creator, transcending the passive role of being created. The mother transcends herself in her infant. The male’s urge to create man-made things and ideas stems from his inability to bear children.
Paradoxical Logic: Fromm contrasts paradoxical logic (found in Taoist, Indian, and Socratic thought) with Aristotelian logic. Paradoxical logic holds that the ultimate One cannot be caught in words or thoughts; the highest step of thought is knowing that we do not know. Since God represents ultimate reality and the mind perceives in contradictions, no positive statement can be made of God. This leads to tolerance and emphasis on self-transformation rather than dogma.
Idolatry: The worship of things of one’s own making, projecting one’s own powers into objects. In religious context, idolatry is the submission to an inflated power; the same mechanism operates in secular masochistic love. In contemporary society, God has become “a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.”—a business partner rather than a being with whom one becomes one in love, justice, and truth.
Narcissism and Objectivity: The main condition for achieving love is overcoming one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation experiences as real only what exists within oneself; outside phenomena have no reality in themselves but are experienced only as useful or dangerous. The opposite pole is objectivity—the faculty to see people and things as they are, separating this objective picture from one formed by desires and fears.
Rational vs. Irrational Faith: Irrational faith is belief based on submission to irrational authority. Rational faith is conviction rooted in one’s own experience of thought or feeling—not primarily belief in something but the quality of certainty and firmness in one’s convictions. Rational faith is rooted in independent conviction based on one’s own productive observing and thinking, despite majority opinion.
Education vs. Manipulation: Education (from e-ducere, literally “to lead forth”) means helping the child realize potentialities. Manipulation is based on absence of faith in growth, on conviction that a child will be right only if adults put in what is desirable and suppress what seems undesirable. There is no need of faith in the robot, since there is no life in it.
Themes
A recurring theme in the book is the critique of modern industrial and capitalistic society as fundamentally hostile to love. Fromm argues that in contemporary Western culture, human values have become determined by economic values—”What is good for machines must be good for man.” Modern man has little self-discipline outside work, lacks concentration, and cannot bear to be alone. The consumer has an “open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything—pictures, liquor, knowledge.” This cultural critique extends to the religious sphere, where belief in God has become a psychological device for competitive success, and brotherly love is replaced by impersonal fairness.
Another theme is the relationship between individual psychology and social structure. Fromm argues that the capacity to love depends on culture’s influence, and that the nature of one’s love for God corresponds to the nature of one’s love for man, which is determined by the structure of society. He critiques Freud for failing to see that basic reality lies in the totality of human existence and the practice of life determined by society, and he praises Marx’s “historical materialism” for using the total life process of man, his “practice of life,” rather than the body or an instinct. The book thus weaves together psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives to argue that personal transformation and social transformation are inseparable.
The theme of maturity and growth runs throughout the book. Fromm describes human development as emergence from nature, from mother, from bonds of blood and soil. The child must shift attachment from mother to father, and the mature person must free himself from both, establishing motherly and fatherly principles in himself. The history of the human race shows the same development: from mother Goddess, through fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power and man incorporates love and justice into himself. Neurosis results from failure to complete this development, whether through incestuous attachment to mother, clan, or nation, or through childish dependence on authority.
The book also explores the theme of alienation. Modern man has become a commodity, experiencing life energy as investment for highest profit on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, fellow men, and nature. This alienation extends to religion, where God is transformed to fit the alienated culture of success. The theme of alienation is connected to Fromm’s critique of both Freud and Sullivan: Freud’s concept of love describes the patriarchal male of nineteenth-century capitalism, while Sullivan’s describes the alienated, marketing personality of the twentieth century. Sullivan’s concept of love as collaboration is an “egotism a deux” of two people pooling common interests against a hostile world.
A further theme is the distinction between genuine love and its counterfeits. Fromm identifies pseudo-love forms that are really the disintegration of love: love as mutual sexual satisfaction, love as “teamwork” and a haven from aloneness, and neurotic love based on infantile attachment to parents. He also examines the “unselfish” person, whose unselfishness is a symptom of paralysis in the capacity to love or enjoy anything, pervaded by hostility toward life, and hiding a subtle but intense self-centeredness. The “unselfish” mother, who believes her children will experience love and learn to love, instead produces children who show anxiety, tension, and fear of her disapproval, imbued with her hidden hostility toward life.
The theme of faith is central to the book’s conclusion. Fromm argues that faith is a character trait pervading the whole personality, and that rational faith is rooted in productive intellectual and emotional activity. Faith in oneself is a condition of the ability to promise; as Nietzsche said, man can be defined by his capacity to promise, so faith is a condition of human existence. Faith in another’s potentialities is what makes the difference between education and manipulation. Faith in mankind is based on the idea that human potentialities, given proper conditions, can build a social order governed by equality, justice, and love.
The Author’s Conclusions
Fromm concludes that love is an art that can be learned only through the total development of one’s personality toward a productive orientation. The ability to love depends on overcoming narcissism and incestuous fixation to mother and clan, requiring growth and a productive orientation. This process requires faith—rational faith rooted in one’s own productive observing and thinking, not submission to irrational authority.
The practice of love requires discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern. Modern man lacks these qualities because his life is dominated by the values of industrial society, in which speed, consumption, and the personality market determine human worth. The practice of love also requires overcoming narcissism and developing objectivity and reason. Objectivity requires emerging from childhood dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, and it must apply to everyone, not only to the loved person. Acquiring objectivity and reason is half the road to the art of loving.
Fromm concludes that love is “a constant challenge”—not a resting place but “a moving, growing, working together.” Whether harmony or conflict, joy or sadness exists is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from their essence and become one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than fleeing from themselves. The only proof of love’s presence is the depth of the relationship and the aliveness and strength in each person—”this is the fruit by which love is recognized.”
The book ends with a discussion of faith in mankind. In the Western world, this faith was expressed religiously in Judaeo-Christian religion and secularly in humanistic political and social ideas of the last hundred and fifty years. It is based on the idea that human potentialities, given proper conditions, can build a social order governed by equality, justice, and love. Since this order is not yet established, faith in mankind remains a challenge and a task rather than an accomplished fact.
Significance
The Art of Loving is significant as a work that bridges psychoanalysis, social criticism, and philosophical ethics. Fromm’s synthesis of Freudian and Marxist perspectives, his engagement with religious history and paradoxical logic, and his critique of modern capitalism as hostile to love have made the book a lasting contribution to the literature on human relationships. The book’s central argument—that love is an art requiring knowledge and effort, not a sentiment easily indulged—challenges both popular assumptions and professional orthodoxies.
The book is also significant for its critique of contemporary Western society. Fromm’s analysis of the alienated character structure of modern capitalism, the transformation of God into a business partner, and the reduction of love to mutual sexual satisfaction or teamwork anticipates later critiques of consumer culture and the “therapeutic” turn in religion and psychology. His distinction between rational and irrational faith, and his argument that faith is a condition of human existence, offer a humanistic alternative to both religious dogmatism and secular nihilism.
The book’s influence extends beyond psychoanalysis to popular discussions of love and relationships. Its emphasis on love as giving, on the distinction between “falling” and “standing” in love, and on the importance of discipline, concentration, and patience in the practice of love has entered the common vocabulary of self-help and relationship literature.
