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    The Art of Loving
    The Art of Loving
    The Art of Loving
    Ebook163 pages3 hours

    The Art of Loving

    By Erich Fromm

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    About this ebook

    The landmark bestseller that changed the way we think about love: “Every line is packed with common sense, compassion, and realism” (Fortune).
     The Art of Loving is a rich and detailed guide to love—an achievement reached through maturity, practice, concentration, and courage. In the decades since the book’s release, its words and lessons continue to resonate. Erich Fromm, a celebrated psychoanalyst and social psychologist, clearly and sincerely encourages the development of our capacity for and understanding of love in all of its facets. He discusses the familiar yet misunderstood romantic love, the all-encompassing brotherly love, spiritual love, and many more.

    A challenge to traditional Western notions of love, The Art of Loving is a modern classic about taking care of ourselves through relationships with others by the New York Times–bestselling author of To Have or To Be? and Escape from Freedom.
     This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erich Fromm including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateFeb 26, 2013
    ISBN9781480402003
    The Art of Loving
    Author

    Erich Fromm

    Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a bestselling psychoanalyst and social philosopher whose views about alienation, love, and sanity in society—discussed in his books such as Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, The Sane Society, and To Have or To Be?—helped shape the landscape of psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Jewish parents, and studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg (where in 1922 he earned his doctorate in sociology), and Munich. In the 1930s he was one of the most influential figures at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. In 1934, as the Nazis rose to power, he moved to the United States. He practiced psychoanalysis in both New York and Mexico City before moving to Switzerland in 1974, where he continued his work until his death.

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    Reviews for The Art of Loving

    4/5

    628 ratings18 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a powerful and enlightening read. It offers a different viewpoint on love and serves as a good reminder of the most important things in life. The book is full of insights and transcends time. It is still relevant today, despite being written in the 50s. The author's observations and comments on capitalist society are acute and hold true in today's information age. Overall, it is a highly recommended and insightful masterpiece.

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      A timeless classic about the nature of love as an attitude and a way of being.
    • 4/5
      A good reminder of the most important things in life.
    • 5/5
      This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You
      Download Full Ebook Very Detail Here :
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      - You Can See Full Book/ebook Offline Any Time
      - You Can Read All Important Knowledge Here
      - You Can Become A Master In Your Business
    • 5/5
      So many Aspects! Really good, love the spiritual side of it as well
    • 5/5
      It was a great book to study a different viewpoint on love.
    • 5/5
      Love, in the nature of human beings. There is no reason to skip this book for anyone
    • 4/5
      Dated in places but still an important book on the nature of love.
    • 4/5
      The Art of Loving by Erich FrommI personally enjoyed this little book, it covers various concepts of love, (brotherly, eros, familial etc,) the drive for love, the unconditional love given by a mother, the masculine connection also the self love, Love that is developed, facilitated, sexual gratification, drug use seeking pleasure, tracing back to God, how love ought to be developed, the social aspect and developmental aspect.
    • 5/5
      A book full of insights! The content transcends time! The ending is powerful and moving.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This was recommended to me so many times, I'm glad to have finally read it. It is a powerful, enlightening read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      From the first pages caught my attention, read it twice already :D. Like how simply he folds out all the social and economical background of our today society in comparison with the only thing that really matters to all of us: love :). It’s a great book!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      2.5 stars. This started out with some really interesting insights that I agreed with, but then gradually went downhill. It was just really dated as a whole, and needs to be updated...

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      "The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety."This is the first work of contemporary philosophy that I've read and the assumptions are interesting. There's no attempt to define separateness, nor to prove that there is any other source of anxiety, but when I read that sentence and the argument that follows it, it rang my bell. Whether it's true or not in all its parts is almost irrelevant as it works for me. Lots of stuff just like this in this book. I would recommend it to other humans.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very insightful. Full of wisdom. The observations and comments of the capitalist society is acute and still holds true in today's information age. Without question a masterpiece and should be read by everyone today.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      If anyone at least took a glympse of this book, there would be no hunger nor suffering in any part of the world. Should be esencial en schools and parents, not to say everyone. Highly recomendable
    • 5/5
      Phantastic read, still very state of the art though written in the 50ies.
    • 5/5
      A new favorite that I intend to reread periodically in order to refresh and renew my understanding of what it means to truly love myself and my fellow humans.
    • 5/5
      Every Fromm title is a masterpiece. This small book is an insight into the psychology of interpersonal relations, that, is relevant to all of us. To look at love as an art, to understand the dynamic of relations, Fromm takes us through amazing insight about marriage, self-love, love for your children and what hard work it is.

    Book preview

    The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm

    The Art of Loving

    Erich Fromm

    Contents

    Foreword

    I. Is Love an Art?

    II. The Theory of Love

    1. Love, the Answer to the Problem of Human Existence

    2. Love Between Parent and Child

    3. The Objects of Love

    Brotherly Love

    Motherly Love

    Erotic Love

    Self-Love

    Love of God

    III. Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society

    IV. The Practice of Love

    A Biography of Erich Fromm

    Foreword

    THE READING OF THIS book would be a disappointing experience for anyone who expects easy instruction in the art of loving. This book, on the contrary, wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. It wants to convince the reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement. Or—anyone can ask himself how many truly loving persons he has known.

    Yet, the difficulty of the task must not be a reason to abstain from trying to know the difficulties as well as the conditions for its achievement. To avoid unnecessary complications I have tried to deal with the problem in a language which is non-technical as far as this is possible. For the same reason I have also kept to a minimum references to the literature on love.

    For another problem I did not find a completely satisfactory solution; that, namely, of avoiding repetition of ideas expressed in previous books of mine. The reader especially familiar with Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and The Sane Society, will find in this book many ideas expressed in these previous works. However, The Art of Loving is by no means mainly a recapitulation. It presents many ideas beyond the previously expressed ones, and quite naturally even older ones sometimes gain new perspectives by the fact that they are all centered around one topic, that of the art of loving.

    E. F.

    He who knows nothing, loves nothing.

    He who can do nothing understands nothing.

    He who understands nothing is worthless.

    But he who understands also loves, notices, sees ….

    The more knowledge is inherent in a thing,

    the greater the love ….

    Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time

    as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.

    Paracelsus

    I.   Is Love an Art?

    IS LOVE AN ART? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one falls into if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.

    Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love—yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.

    This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one’s position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one’s body, dress, etc. Other ways of making oneself attractive, used both by men and women, are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, modest, inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, to win friends and influence people. As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

    A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or to be loved by—is difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of modern society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth century with respect to the choice of a love object. In the Victorian age, as in many traditional cultures, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal experience which then might lead to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was contracted by convention—either by the respective families, or by a marriage broker, or without the help of such intermediaries; it was concluded on the basis of social considerations, and love was supposed to develop once the marriage had been concluded. In the last few generations the concept of romantic love has become almost universal in the Western world. In the United States, while considerations of a conventional nature are not entirely absent, to a vast extent people are in search of romantic love, of the personal experience of love which then should lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.

    Closely related to this factor is another feature characteristic of contemporary culture. Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after. Attractive usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious—today he has to be social and tolerant—in order to be an attractive package. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one’s own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.

    The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of "falling" in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of standing in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being crazy about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.

    This attitude—that nothing is easier than to love—has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do better—or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love—to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.

    The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.

    What are the necessary steps in learning any art?

    The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one—my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art—the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry—and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.

    Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which only profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on? However this may be, the following discussion will treat the art of loving in the sense

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