Learning To Love According To Erich Fromm’s Principles
What are the principles for learning to love according to Erich Fromm? Love, according to this psychoanalyst, should be celebrated every day as a liberating and enriching act. Because whoever manages to learn to love maturely and consciously understands that love knows no possessions or conditions. Love is, above all, the active concern for life, it is the care and the firm desire to promote the growth of those we love.
It is very possible that Fromm himself did not foresee the great importance that his book ‘ The Art of Love’ would have. However, it is also likely that not everyone knows the conditions under which this fabulous and always interesting work was developed. Anyone who had the opportunity to meet this Jewish psychoanalyst and humanist philosopher used to say that few people have changed his life in such a significant way as he.
Until the age of 50, Fromm was a great Talmud scholar and a Marxist psychoanalyst who, at one point, wanted to distance himself from the theoretical foundations of Sigmund Freud. He was an intellectual, somewhat taciturn, who settled in the United States after World War II. It left behind the weight of a divorce, the death of his last wife by suicide, and the memory of a Europe still fragmented and in ruins.
It was in this decade that he decided to move to Mexico and become an activist for peace and women’s rights. He wanted to change his perspective on life, he wanted to open up to the world, to happiness and to fighting for what he believed in. Fromm became a very influential therapist, befriended President Kennedy and, best of all, found love in a brilliant woman: Annis Freeman.
Still with the bitter memory of his former wives, Fromm set a firm purpose for himself: to learn to love. He wanted to turn that moment into the best phase of Annis Freeman’s existence and his own. At the same time, he wanted to teach the whole world to love. That’s how he wrote his famous book and enjoyed happiness in 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 very evident reality. Most of us are not a master of this art. We are, in fact, apprentices of a reality into which we immerse ourselves by chance and without knowing it, full of needs but lacking in tools. However, if we sometimes limit ourselves to loving like children rather than adults, this is mainly due to our culture.
We are shaped through a series of cultural patterns that establish love as a construction of magical and ideal dyes. In our social fabric, this “courteous love” of the Middle Ages, in which gentlemen fell in love with ladies, is still present. We like to think that we are victims of Cupid’s arrows, that passion is what Shakespeare’s eternal lovers of Verona feel, and that each of us is destined for someone through the red thread of fate.
Erich Fromm, a leading social psychologist, made it clear in ‘ The Art of Love’ that few dimensions require as much responsibility and discernment as love. Because loving is a task for trained artists, not just wild dreamers. Learning to love requires practice, mastery and continuous work, in which the effort leaves nothing to chance or to luck.
So let’s look at some of the principles that Erich Fromm introduced us to.
love in active voice
If there’s one thing we want most of our lives, it’s to be loved. We want to be cared for, valued, appreciated, venerated and validated in everything we do, are or have. However, there is one thing that we must understand as soon as possible: love “in the passive voice” is not good, it is not mature.
Love is not a resting place. It is a scenario in which the present is combined with the active voice. We love each other, we care for each other, we respect each other, we value each other, we create together, we project together. The love of good artists implies having the mastery of someone who knows how to participate, give and receive, build and be an active part of a project in which the mentality of growth is always present.
Our eternal concern for finding the perfect person
Learning to love also implies being aware of another aspect. We often worry too much about not finding the ideal person to match all our dreams and desires. We look for the “object” of love without first stopping to think if we are up to love itself.
Sometimes we are so infected by idealism and constructions nourished by romanticism that we forget the most important thing: love requires work, it implies knowing how to face the challenges of a relationship.
love as a need
Learning to love involves first knowing how to let go of all needs. Because whoever seeks to have a relationship to alleviate their needs will find two things: they will never feel satisfied and they will lead the other person to a state of permanent slavery.
Erich Fromm reminds us, in ‘ The Art of Loving’ , that a healthy and happy relationship must be, above all, a highly productive bond. A bond in which each person has overcome their emptiness and their dependencies. It is extinguishing from within us the narcissistic omnipotence, the desire to accumulate and explore others, in order to be able to be loved without burdens and without fear, so that we can offer ourselves fully.
Loving is an act of creativity
Love, according to Erich Fromm, is an energy. It is an impulse that encourages us to mobilize, to express ourselves, to create, etc. However (and in relation to what was pointed out above), this expansive and creative force only emerges when we have our basic needs satisfied.
At the same time, one thing that Fromm highlights in ‘ The Art of Love’ is that it’s not enough to feel this energy. Love, we must remember, is not just felt. It is necessary to live it and give it shape. Because true passion, one that is nourished by feeling, maturity and balance, understands that the most beautiful work requires daily work and dedication.
Love is like music, painting, carpentry, writing or architecture. It is necessary to understand the theory to, later, be a master in practice. As an extremely creative engineer, we will also be able to face with imagination and efficiency each difficulty, each challenge, each unforeseen event along the way…
In conclusion, learning to love according to Erich Fromm requires putting aside many of the childhood visions that often define us (and that have been instilled in us). We must stop combining love in the passive voice and seeing it as the spark that, at a given moment, magically unites two people.
Because love is substance, it is body and it is matter. A raw material with which to build a good project, the best of our lives if we so wish and assume responsibility for doing so….
