ESSENTIAL READING
Fromm opens with an observation that is nearly seventy years old and has not aged at all.
Almost everybody, he says, treats love as a problem of being loved rather than a problem of loving. People work hard at becoming more desirable and put almost no effort into developing the capacity itself. They assume the ability is automatic and that only the object is in question.
The whole book follows from that inversion.
THE BOOK
The Art of Loving was published in 1956 and is under two hundred pages.
Fromm's argument runs in four movements. He starts with why love is a problem at all, which he grounds in the human experience of separateness. He then distinguishes several kinds of love: between parent and child, between equals, of oneself, of humanity and of God. He turns to what he saw as the disintegration of love under modern conditions, particularly the tendency to treat a partner as a package of features to be evaluated. He ends with the practice, which is the part that gives the book its title.
Because if love is an art, it can be studied. Any art requires discipline, concentration, patience and enough seriousness to make it a priority. Fromm applies those four requirements to loving as literally as he would to playing an instrument.
THE AUTHOR
Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900 and trained as a sociologist and psychoanalyst. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and left Germany in the 1930s, settling in the United States, where he taught and practiced for the rest of his career.
His work sits at the join between individual psychology and social criticism. He was interested in what particular societies do to the people inside them. His earlier book Escape from Freedom asked why people surrender their own autonomy to authority, which is the question a European intellectual of his generation could hardly avoid. The Art of Loving applies the same instinct to private life. He died in 1980.
THE CENTRAL IDEA
Fromm names four elements that must be present for something to count as love: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.
Care is active concern for the other person's life. Responsibility is the readiness to respond to their needs, which he is careful to distinguish from obligation. Respect, and he points at the root of the word, means seeing the person as they actually are rather than as you need them to be. Knowledge means understanding them from their own point of view, not from yours.
Notice what is missing. There is no feeling in that list. Fromm is not saying feeling is irrelevant. He is saying it is not the thing, and that a relationship built entirely on the presence of a feeling has no structure to fall back on when the feeling fluctuates.
The second idea is his critique of the marketplace. Fromm observed people approaching relationships as an exchange in which each party assesses what the other brings and looks for the best available trade. He thought this produced a specific kind of loneliness, because a person being evaluated is not being known.
The third, and the hardest, is his position that the capacity to love another person and the capacity to be alone are connected. Someone who cannot tolerate their own company will attach out of need, and need is not the same as love. That claim has more support in modern attachment research than a 1956 essay had any right to.
WHAT IT IS USEFUL FOR
It is for anybody who keeps arriving at the same place in relationships and has concluded that the problem is selection.
Fromm's reframe is direct. If the ability is a skill rather than a given, then the quality of your relationships is partly a function of something you can develop. That is a less comfortable position than bad luck and a considerably more useful one.
It is also unusually good on the difference between self-love and selfishness, which he treats as opposites rather than degrees of the same thing. His argument is that a person incapable of regarding themselves decently is not thereby freed up to regard others decently. It usually goes the other way.
READ IT WITH THIS IN MIND
Fromm writes like a mid-century European intellectual, which means dense paragraphs and long stretches of theory before he gets practical. The middle sections on the forms of love are the slowest part.
Some of the material on men, women and family roles is clearly of its period and reads that way now. Take the structure of the argument and leave the assumptions.
He also asserts a great deal without evidence. This is philosophy, not psychology, and it was written before most of the research that would test any of it.
IF YOU TAKE ONE THING
Ask what you are actually developing.
Most people spend their effort on being chosen. Fromm's claim is that the return is much higher on the other side.