Learning To Love According To The Keys Of Erich Fromm
Love, according to Erich Fromm, should be celebrated every day as a liberating and fulfilling act. Whoever manages to learn to love in a mature and conscious way understands that love has nothing to do with possessions or conditions. Love is, above all, the active preoccupation for life; it is the care and the firm desire to foster the development of those we love.
It is possible that Fromm himself never guessed the transcendence that his book The Art of Loving was going to have . It is also likely that many people are unaware of the conditions under which he gave shape to this fabulous work. Those who have been fortunate enough to know this psychoanalyst and humanist philosopher of Jewish origin used to say that few people have given a different direction to their life as he has.
Until the 1950s, Fromm was that great Marxist scholar and psychoanalyst who at one point wanted to move away from the theoretical bases of Sigmund Freud. He was a somewhat taciturn intellectual who moved to the United States at the end of World War II. He left behind a divorce, the suicide of his last wife and the memory of a Europe still fragmented and in ruins.
It was during this decade that he decided to settle in Mexico and become an activist for peace and women’s rights. He wanted to change his perspective on things, to open up to the world, to happiness and to the fight for what he believed was right. He turned into a very influential therapist, befriended President Kennedy, and to make matters worse, found love with a brilliant woman: Annis Freeman.
Even with the bitter memory of his previous wives, Fromm set himself one goal: to learn to love. He wanted to turn this step into the most beautiful of his life and that of Annis Freeman. And wanted the rest of the world to learn to love too. This is where his famous book was born and the happiness he enjoyed during the last decades of his life.
Learning to love according to Erich Fromm
“To love without knowing how to love hurts the person we love”. This sentence by Thich Nhat Hanh sums up a more than obvious reality. We are not often masters in this art, we are rather the neophytes of a reality in which we immerse ourselves by chance, without knowing too much, being full of needs but lacking tools. But if we limit ourselves to loving like children and not like adults, it is because of our culture.
We have been shaped through a series of cultural patterns in which love is seen as a construct of magical and ideal hues. This “courtly love” of the Middle Ages remains present in our social fabric, the one where the knights fell in love with the good ladies. We like to think that we are victims of Cupid’s arrows, that Shakespeare’s Eternal Lovers of Verona only felt passion, and that we are all destined for someone thanks to the red thread of fate.
Erich Fromm, a great social psychologist, made it very clear in The Art of Loving that few dimensions demand as much responsibility and capacity for discernment as love. Because loving is the work of trained artists and not just enthusiastic dreamers. Learning to love takes practice, mastery, and continuous work. Effort and good deeds leave no room for chance or luck.
Let us now see some of the keys offered by Erich Fromm.
Love with an active voice
If there is one thing that we desire for much of our life, it is to be loved. We want to be appreciated, valued, revered and validated in everything we do, are, or have. However, we must understand one thing: love in the “passive voice” is neither useful nor mature.
Love is not a place of rest, it is a place that combines with the present and with an active voice: to love each other, take care of us, respect each other, value each other, create common projects… Good artists enjoy a mastery which consists in participating, giving and receiving, building and being part of a project… An idea of growth is constantly present.
Our eternal concern to find the perfect person
Learning to love also involves being aware of another aspect. We often (and excessively) worry about not finding that ideal person who comes in tune with all of our dreams and desires. We get frustrated because we can’t find the “object” to love, without first thinking about whether we will live up to that love.
Sometimes we are so filled with idealisms and constructions emerging from romanticism that we forget the most important: love requires work. It involves knowing how to face the challenges of an emotional relationship.
Love as a need
Learning to love first involves knowing how to let go of all needs. Because the one who seeks a relationship to relieve his lacks will experience two things: he will never be satisfied and will plunge the other person into a state of permanent slavery.
Erich Fromm reminds us in The Art of Loving that a healthy and happy emotional relationship must above all be a highly productive bond. People must have overcome their voids and their addictions. It is about removing the narcissistic omnipotence, the desire to accumulate and exploit others, to reach the loved one without burdens and without fears and to be able to offer ourselves fully.
Love is an act of creativity
Love, according to Erich Fromm, is energy. An impulse that pushes us to mobilize, to express ourselves, to create… However, and this is linked to what we said previously, this expansive and creative force only emerges when our basic needs are met.
Fromm emphasizes in The Art of Loving that it is not enough to feel this energy. Remember, love shouldn’t just be felt: it should be lived and have a form. Because authentic passion, that which nourishes feelings, maturity and balance, understands that the most beautiful of works requires daily work and dedication.
Love is like music, painting, carpentry, writing or architecture. We need to know the theory in order to then become masters in its practice. Like an extremely creative engineer, we will manage to overcome every difficulty, every challenge, every unforeseen event with imagination and efficiency …
To conclude, learning to love according to Erich Fromm requires leaving aside a large number of infantile visions that often define us (and that we have been taught). We need to stop putting love in the passive voice and seeing it as that spark that at some point unites two people in a magical way. Because love is a substance, a matter, a body. A raw material that allows us to build, if we wish, a great project, the most beautiful of our lives …
Our thoughts The conception of love according to Buddhism is very different from the definition of love that we have in the West.
