The Art of Love

Erich Fromm & the Expanse of Love

by Todd F. Eklof
June 27, 2004

Although Erich Fromm’s book, The Art of Loving, was an international best seller, it
was published long enough ago that it is waiting to be rediscovered by many in this
generation. At the same time, Fromm himself died only as recently as 1980, which means
he is probably too modern a figure to look upon as one who has had much to do with
shaping contemporary thought. He was born in Frankfurt Germany, in the year 1900, the
dawning of a new century, to a father he described as moody and a mother he called
depressed. His less than happy childhood, along with the death of a 25 year old family
friend who committed suicide when Fromm was still an adolescent, and the war hysteria
and irrationality of mass behavior he witnessed in Germany during World War I, greatly
influenced him to study psychology and sociology.

In 1922 he received his Ph.D in sociology from the University of Heidelberg, and
completed his psychoanalytical training in Berlin in 1930. Four years later he moved to
New York City and eventually became a United States citizen. In 1950 he moved to
Mexico where he spent the next quarter century working and teaching. In 1974 he moved
once again to Switzerland, where he spent the remainder of what was left of his life. He
died six years later at age 80. During his life, Fromm authored a handful of books,
including his seminal work, Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, Man for Himself:
An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, published in 1947, and, his most popular work,
The Art of Loving, published in 1956. I purchased my own faded paperback copy of this
brief but classic 112 page book for only 50 cents, a dime less than it cost when it was new
in 1963, after its 19th reprint.

When I first read this work a number of years ago, I was surprised to discover the ease
with which Fromm communicated his complex and potentially transforming message. I
also immediately noticed it read more like a religious work than psychology, which was
also surprising since Fromm, although born into an Orthodox Jewish family, considered
himself an atheist. Even so, he often turned to religious texts, particularly the Talmud, to
make a point. He also quoted Rumi, long before the recent rediscovery of this extremely
popular 14th century Sufi poet. Fromm actually described himself as an atheistic mystic.
While this may seem like a paradox, it’s not so strange in light of the overall mystical
tradition which tends to speak more about what God is not than about what God is.
"Look, and it can’t be seen. Listen, and it can’t be heard. Reach and it can’t be
grasped,"1 says the Tao Te Ching. Similarly, the Jewish mystical tradition in Fromm’s
own background, tells us, "Every definition of God leads to heresy," and "definition is
spiritual idolatry."2

Hence, to approach the notion of God from an atheist position is not all that different
from the mystical tradition—so much so, that it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart.
As I have said elsewhere, if an atheist is defined as one who doesn’t believe in God, then
we might define a mystic as one who believes in Not-god. Again, as it is written in the
Tao Te Ching, "The name that can be named is not the eternal Name."3 In The Art of
Loving, Erich Fromm discusses what he views as the human progression away from a
patriarchal conception of God in which, in his words, God is "a despotic, jealous God,
who considers [people] whom he created, as his property, and is entitled to do with
[them] whatever he pleases."4 Over time, Fromm understood this concept to evolve so
that people, at least in the western tradition, entered into a covenant relationship with
God, in which God was also bound to treat human beings justly, not destroying them with
a flood or with fire and brimstone, as long as they behaved themselves, "transforming
God from the figure of a despotic tribal chief into a loving father."5

From here, according to Fromm, people began associating God with the principles God
is suppose to uphold—principles like truth, justice and love. "In this development," he
writes, "God ceases to be a person, a man, a father; he becomes the symbol of the
principle of unity behind the manifoldness of phenomena…"6 He sites the well known
example of Moses who asks God’s name. Concerning God’s response, "I am becoming
what I am becoming," Fromm writes, "the most adequate translation of the sentence
would be: tell them that ‘may name is nameless.’"7 So, in the end, the western notion of
God becomes like the mystical tradition in which nothing positive can be said about God
at all, not even that God is love, or God is Just, or God is Merciful. "the most I can do is
to say what God is not," writes Fromm, "to state negative attributes, to postulate that
[God] is not limited, not unkind, not unjust. The more I know what God is not, the more
knowledge I have of God."8 This is not unlike the saying found in Jewish mysticism,
"With every increase in the negations regarding God, you come nearer to the
apprehension of God."9 Indeed, the Kabbalah itself goes so far as to say, "All the divine
names, whether in Hebrew or any other language, provide merely a tiny, dim spark of the
hidden light for which the soul yearns when it says ‘God.’"10

So, it is with the intelligence and integrity of an atheist and the depth and heart of a
mystic that Fromm gave birth to The Art of Loving. He begins this work by warning that
those hoping for an easy instruction manual about love will be disappointed. "This book,"
he writes, "on the contrary, wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily
indulged in by anyone…"11 He goes on to say that most attempts at love "are bound to
fail,"12 no matter how mature one might be. Yet Fromm is an optimist who encourages
each of us to work toward love, which is precisely why he wrote The Art of Loving in the
first place.

To begin with, as the title suggests, he defines love as an art, not as a matter of chance
we might fall into if we’re lucky. His 1956 complaint, that most people hope to become
lucky in love, still seems to hold true today, more than a generation later. "Not that
people think that love is not important..." he writes, "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."3 I am in tremendous agreement with Fromm on this point, which
may be more true today than ever! The modern media portrays love as the chemical
attraction between two people and nothing more. Our love stories are usually about two
people who, against great odds, manage to come together, then the story simply ends. We
are all suppose to believe they go on to live happily ever after. But where, exactly, is it
that they go? Do they ride Prince Charming’s white horse into their stone castle, raising
the drawbridge behind them so that they are never seen or heard from again? Or do they
drive their mini-van into the two-car garage of their new home on Mulberry Street,
locking the windows and doors behind them, turning on the air-conditioner, shutting
themselves in, cutting themselves off from the rest of the world?

The "trashy" love songs our radio stations play and the recording studios choose to
promote are no better than the films we watch and the romance novels we read. They tell
us love is a relationship between two people and that’s it! Once you meet your match, get
inside quick! How different this sentimental idea of love is from the idea of Jesus who
instructed us to love others and love our neighbors, implying that love is about getting out
of the house, out of our habitats and habits, to love those beyond ourselves and our
personal relationships. Yet our consumer driven media, which seems to promote notions
that will shut us off to our sense of responsibility for others and the environment so we
will thoughtlessly consume more and more, no matter who gets hurts in the process,
promotes the twisted idea that we ought to find just one other person to love, then move
in together, coming out only long enough to work so we can earn money to buy more for
the one person we love.

Whatever happened to the love songs of John Denver that talked about getting out of
our homes and loving the earth? Or the songs of the 1960’s that sang about loving one
another and spreading love and peace to the world around us? The media conglomerates
have shut them off at the same time they been encouraging us to shut ourselves in—into
our perfect little romances, closed off from the neighborhood, the world, the universe
around us, as if the whole of reality can somehow be squeezed between the walls of our
small homes and our most intimate relationships. And we call this separation from the
world around us, love! Like anyone who truly understands love, Fromm is convinced we
must learn to overcome this sense of separation. "The absolute failure to achieve this aim
means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a
radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears—
because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared."14

Of course we know very few people who disappear into their happy homes ever really
live happily ever after. Life inside the walls of our homes is never really as perfect as it’s
supposed to be. Still, we’re suppose to put up a good front by pretending that we’re living
the perfect dream life. We’re like those costumed characters at Disney World who are
jolly, colorful and larger than life on the outside, but on the inside their stifled and
sweating and dying to get out. That’s what real love is. It’s the part of us that’s dying to
get out! Dying to get out of the house. Dying to go out into the neighborhood, into the
forests and mountains and streams, out into the world, out into endless space; out into the
urban ghettos to help alleviate poverty; out into Iraq or the Sudan to stop the pointless
bloodshed; out into the rain-forests to blockade their destruction—out, out, out, is the cry
of true love! It is not the candy-coated love of Disney World that tries to block the release
of a socially responsible film like Fahrenheit 911 that shows the extreme and pointless
suffering caused by the diabolical war in Iraq, simply because it is too negative. I can’t
blame people for wanting to stay inside, watching wonderfully colorful, though unreal,
characters like Shrek, Little Nemo and the Nutty Professor on their DVD players, rather
than face the blood and gore in films like Michael Moore’s. But love calls us out of our
fantasies to face the reality of a world that is suffering and to do our part to make the
world a better place for everyone.

The lack of this kind of love, according to Fromm, is due to our sense of separation
from ourselves, from others and from God, which is the source of human shame, guilt
and anxiety. Our deepest human need, writes Fromm, "is the need to overcome [our]
separateness, to leave the prison of [our] aloneness."15 Unfortunately, we too often
attempt to leave this prison by adopting greater isolationist tendencies. This happens
when we trade our identification with our family for a group, so that our gang, our
neighborhood, our church or our country is the only group that deserves to be loved. This
is precisely why, in recent years, our media has allowed a few patriotic songs to slip into
the romantic mix, but not one song that protests the group consciousness. "Even the poor
Roman felt pride," writes Fromm, "because he can say ‘civus romanus sum’; Rome and
the Empire were his family, his home, his world."16 Identification with the cult, the
culture, the group, is, according to Fromm, the prevalent way of overcoming separation,
particularly in Western society. "It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a
large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If I am like everybody else, if I
have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if I conform to custom, dress,
ideas, to the patterns of the group, I am saved; saved from the frightening experience of
aloneness."17

This pattern of conformity is particularly difficult to overcome in democratic systems

because, as Fromm explains, "people want to conform to a much higher degree than they
are forced to conform."18 Under such a system, conformity to the group mentality stems
from unseen forces as subtle as the unconscious fear of being alone, or as blatant as the
music and films the mass media chooses to promote. At least, in openly totalitarian
systems, people know they’re being forced to conform. But most people in western
democracies, explains Fromm, "are not even aware of their need to conform. They live
under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are
individualists, that they have arrived at their own thinking—and that it just happens that
their ideas are the same as the majority."19

The main problem with such a system, in which even those who are exploited by it
would rather conform than be alone, like the disenfranchised Roman who proudly
proclaims, "I am Roman," is that everyone is expected to be the same. Hence, only those
who are the same deserve justice. As Fromm complains, "Equality today means
‘sameness,’ rather than oneness."20 This is why it is impossible for true mystics to live
unjustly, because, within the mystical tradition, all is one—we are each a part of the
whole. But when we confuse oneness with sameness, then we are only one with those we
think are the same as us. Those who are different, however, like the people of Iraq, or
those being butchered in the Sudan, or those poor black folks in the West End, don’t
deserve justice because they’re not the same.
 I suppose this is ultimately the beauty and importance of The Art of Loving for me;
namely that true love, mature love, as Fromm puts it, is about unity, not conformity;
oneness, not sameness; openness, not isolation; togetherness, not separation; activity, not
passivity. "Love is an activity," he writes, not a passive affect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a
‘falling for.’ In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by
stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving."21

Erich Fromm’s important book goes into the meaning, and purpose and workings of
love much deeper than I can give justice to here. So, suffice it to say for now, that love is
the gift life gives each one of us, and it is, likewise, the gift each of us is expected to offer
in return. But to do so, we must be willing to sacrifice our familial habits and our cultural
paradigms, that we might truly know what it is to be included.
___________________________
1 Mitchell, Stephen, translator, Tao Te Ching, Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1988, #14.
2 Matt, Daniel C., The Essential Kabbalah, Quality Paper Back Book Club, New York,
NY, 1 1995, 1998, p.32.
3 Mitchell, ibid., #1.
4 Fromm, Erich, The Art of Loving, A Bantam Book, Harper & Row, New York, NY,
1956, 57.
5 Ibid., p.58.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Matt, ibid., p.7.
10 Ibid., p.32.
11 Fromm, ibid., p.vii.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p.1.
14 Ibid., p.8.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p.11.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., p.12.
21 Ibid., p.18.