THE ART OF LOVINGErich FrommLOVE IN ALL ITS ASPECTS“Love,” says dr. Fromm, “is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”Yet most of us are unable to develop our capacities for love on the only level that really countsa love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge and courage.Learning to love, like other arts, demands practice and concentration. Even more than any other art it demands genuine insight and understanding.In this startling book, Dr. Fromm discusses love in all its aspects, not only romantic love, so surrounded by false conception, but also love of parents for children, brotherly love, erotic love, self-love and love of God.CONTENTSForward1I. Is Love an Art?2II.The Theory of Love51.LOVE, THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN EXISTENCE52. LOVE BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD243. THE OBJECTS OF LOVE29a.Brotherly Love29b.Motherly Love31c.Erotic Love33d.Self-Love1336e.Love of God40III.Love and its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society52IV.The Practice of Love66EPILOGUE WORLD PERSPECTI VES83ForwardTHE READING of this book would be a disappointing experience of 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 ones 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. Oranyone 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 familiar, especially, with Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and The Sane Society, will find in this book many ideas expressed in there 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 tat they aer all centered around one topic, that of the are of loving.E.F.“He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who an 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 then strawberries knows nothing about grapes.”ParcelsusI. 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 loveyet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.This peculiar attitude is base 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 ones capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to 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 ones position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating ones 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 means 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 a