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I take as true and interesting the following statement of Erich Fromm:

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. (4)

This fact once enunciated leads the mind quickly to a series of questions about the nature of love and the nature of failure and success in love, which is the topic of Erich Fromm’s excellent little volume (120 pp.) The Art of Loving.  I imagine we all know failure in love, and since it is always a pleasure to hear things we know well-described, let us hear Fromm describe some of our human behavior:

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 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. (4)

Releasing people from such a wheel of love-reincarnations into love-nirvana is his general purpose.  He does not concern himself much with the thing that seems to concern the entire rest of the world vis-à-vis love, namely finding a spouse (he did not himself have children, for what reasons I do not know, but through his life he seemed more interested in women past childbearing age).  His interest begins where Jane Austen’s ends, in the marriage that begins the day after the wedding.  And he is utterly skeptical of debased spiritless marital technique of the sort you might find in a military handbook for “making your marriage work”:

In any number of articles on happy marriage, the ideal described is that of the smoothly functioning team.  This description is not too different from the idea of a smoothly functioning employee; he should be ‘reasonably independent,’ cooperative, tolerant, and at the same time ambitious and aggressive.  Thus, the marriage counselor tells us, the husband should ‘understand’ his wife and be helpful.  He should comment favorably on her new dress, and on a tasty dish.  She in turn, should understand when he comes home tired and disgruntled, she should listen attentively when he talks about his business troubles, should not be angry but understanding when he forgets her birthday.  All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well-oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a ‘central relationship,’ but who treat each other with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better. (81)

Love, as he states over and over again, is about union (“mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality”); and mechanistic manipulation cannot lead to union, and so is eventually demeaning to all involved.  This is of course why most self-help books, by promising answers in the form of manipulative techniques, are so degrading; and why most of the things people do to make themselves more attractive fail in the end, and are often counterproductive.  In the long run cultivating one’s own beauty and one’s own specific gender-traits makes one more attractive only if they represent real interior discoveries rather than superficial importations.

One of the basic premises of manipulative technique is that a person has certain instincts – “men are from Mars” – which you may not share and hence not understand – “women are from Venus” – and you have to satisfy them.  While of course like everything else it is partially true, it is ultimately bankrupting.  Fromm derives this thought-trend from Freud, whom he (I think quite rightly) handles quite roughly while explaining quite acutely how deeply he appealed to the main stream of Western cultural-economic development:

According to Freud, the full and uninhibited satisfaction of all instinctual desires would create mental health and happiness.  But the obvious clinical facts demonstrate that men – and women – who devote their lives to unrestricted sexual satisfaction do not attain happiness, and very often suffer from severe neurotic conflicts or symptoms.  The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity.  Yet Freud’s idea could only have become so popular in the period after the First World War because of the changes which had occurred in the spirit of capitalism, from the emphasis on saving to that of spending, from self-frustration as a means for economic success to consumption as the basis for an ever-widening market, and as the main satisfaction for the anxious, automatized individual.  Not to postpone the satisfaction of any desire became the main tendency in the sphere of sex as well as in that of all material consumption. (85-6)

In fact, Fromm (who was both psychologist and sociologist, and who studied with Weber among others) is working squarely within the Freudian tradition, putting together observations – which are fascinating – on the nature of monotheism, capitalism, human instincts, sexuality, family psychology, human history and evolution, neurosis, and the like, into his book which is mostly a work of psychology.  I will claim that Fromm’s work far surpasses that of Freud, but Fromm himself would have noted that if he saw further, it was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants.  But since “the sexual theory” was so crucial for Freud – that all human culture is a “sublimation” of our desire for sex – and it is so palpably false, I will let Fromm take him down another peg, attacking the idea that love itself is simply the sublimation of our desire for sex (which goes with an interesting discussion of the attempts in Freud’s lifetime for marriage counseling to focus on improved sexual technique as a cure for marital woe; what was discovered, of course, is that love of the spouse made for good sex, not good sex making for love of the spouse).  Freud saw love, he says, as

exclusively the expression – or a sublimation – of the sexual instinct, rather than recognizing that the sexual desire is one manifestation of the need for love and union.  But Freud’s error goes deeper.  In line with his physiological materialism, he sees in the sexual instinct the result of a chemically produced tension in the body which is painful and seeks for relief.  The aim of the sexual desire is the removal of this painful tension; sexual satisfaction lies in the accomplishment of this removal.  This view has its validity to the extent that the sexual desire operates in the same fashion as hunger or thirst do when the organism is undernourished.  Sexual desire, in this concept, is an itch, sexual satisfaction the removal of the itch.  In fact, as far as this concept of sexuality is concerned, masturbation would be the ideal sexual satisfaction.  What Freud, paradoxically enough, ignores, is the psycho-biological aspect of sexuality, the masculine-feminine polarity, and the desire to bridge this polarity by union.  This curious error was probably facilitated by Freud’s extreme patriarchalism, which led him to the assumption that sexuality per se is masculine, and thus made him ignore the specific female sexuality.  He expressed this idea in the Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, saying that the libido has regularly a ‘masculine nature,’ regardless of whether it is the libido in a man or in a woman.  The same idea is also expressed in a rationalized form in Freud’s theory that the little boy experiences the woman as a castrated man, and that she herself seeks for various compensations for the loss of the male genital.  But woman is not a castrated man, and her sexuality is specifically feminine and not of ‘a masculine nature.’ (33-4)

This idea, that women’s sexuality is not natural to them and is only an imitation of male sexuality, I have heard repeated many a time by defenders of the “old-time religion.”

Rather than putting sex itself at the center of his theory of love, Fromm insists on union – the dissolution of ego-boundaries – as the prime phenomenon, of which sexual love is but an aspect.  He analyzes union of several types, most interesting of which is his discussion of conformity:

In contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness.  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 in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.  The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda.  There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems.  In the democracies non-conformity is possible, and, in fact, by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience.  But in spite of this difference the democratic societies show an overwhelming degree of conformity.  The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer for the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd conformity becomes the predominant one.  One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depth of the need not to be separated.  Sometimes this fear of non-conformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers which could threaten the non-conformist.  But actually, people want to conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies. (12-3)

I find this extremely convincing in helping to explain what is (to me) bizarre – having been born with a stunted “organ of conformity” – how much convention rules the lives of men.  He contrasts this pattern with primitive man’s rituals of orgiastic union:

Union by conformity is not intense and violent; it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness.  The incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide in contemporary Western society are symptoms of the relative failure of herd conformity.  Furthermore, this solution concerns mainly the mind and not the body, and for this reason too is lacking in comparison with the orgiastic solutions.  Herd conformity has only one advantage: it is permanent, and not spasmodic.  The individual is introduced into the conformity pattern at the age of three or four, and subsequently never loses his contact with the herd.  Even his funeral, which he anticipates as his last great social affair, is in strict conformance with the pattern. (15)

Fromm’s attacks on the general stream of modern culture – and his mode of attack is merely to accurately describe – form one of the most interesting parts of the book.  His descriptions of modern love are harrowing:

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. (3-4)

Tolstoy could have turned the above paragraph into a terribly depressing and terrifyingly insightful novel.  Fromm’s recommendation is to participate in this culture minimally if you wish the capacity for love:

People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions; love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society.  Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. (122)

Fromm’s suggested alternative, for a book of this sort, is rather surprising, and as an answer it remains as fresh as the day it was written.  It is to have a personal spiritual practice.  “Fromm saw the central problem of the human being,” as the appendix puts it very well, “not in satisfying his instinctual needs but rather in the human relationship to reality.”  The human relationship to reality is the basic concern of what is called the contemplative life; and Fromm’s book, rather than a guidebook to getting what you want by means of another human being, is more a call to a personal spiritual discipline.  Fromm teaches by example a pattern of drawing on ancient wisdom traditions and modern psychology in order to: develop self-knowledge; see people and events more objectively; attend to the present moment; and act on the knowledge that you yourself are no more important than anyone else.  For him objectivity is the goal; if you see the world objectively, you will acquire the capacity for love, because the main obstacle to love is the narcissistic distortion which disciplined seeing of reality combats.

According to what I said about the nature of love [as union], the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism.  The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one.  The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.  All forms of psychosis show the inability to be objective, to an extreme degree.  For the insane person the only reality that exists is that within him, that of his fears and desires.  He sees the world outside as symbols of his inner world, as his creation. (109)

Insanity and immaturity are defined as the inflation of the sense of self; which necessarily destroys the possibility for breaking down the ego-barrier and uniting with something outside yourself.  This makes sense, but it is impressive how much Fromm equates objectivity and love – not a typical viewpoint.  Having achieved objectivity, love will come naturally – for life, I suppose, is naturally in love with life.  It is the limitations our minds put on our love’s extent which cause the problems.  This position (which explains the unusual scientific prose Fromm lavishes on this topic) reminds me of Pauline ethics, which sees ethical rules as unimportant in themselves, because if you do the necessary spiritual work of dying to your ego, your behavior will be ethical almost without effort.  And if you have not done that work, the rules will only turn you into a hypocrite, for “the Law is powerless to combat the flesh.”Most of Fromm’s practical advice, consequently, is almost precisely the same as for undertaking any other kind of spiritual practice.  He recommends most of all the capacity to be without distraction and to concentrate:

To be concentrated in relation to others means primarily to be able to listen.  Most people listen to others, or even give advice, without really listening.  They do not take the other person’s talk seriously, they do not take their own answers seriously either.  As a result, the talk makes them tired.  They are under the illusion that they would be even more tired if they listened with concentration.  But the opposite is true.  Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake (although afterward natural and beneficial tiredness sets in), while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy – while at the same time it makes it difficult to fall asleep at the end of the day. (105-6)

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done, while I am doing something right now.  Needless to say this concentration must be practiced most of all by people who love each other.  They must learn to be close to each other without running away in the many ways in which this is customarily done.  The beginning of the practice of concentration will be difficult; it will appear as if one could never achieve the aim.  That this implies the necessity to have patience need hardly be said.  If one does not know that everything has its time, and wants to force things, then indeed one will never succeed in becoming concentrated – nor in the art of loving.  To have an idea of what patience is one need only watch a child learning to walk.  It falls, falls again, and falls again, and yet it goes on trying, improving, until one day it walks without falling.  What could the grown-up person achieve if he had the child’s patience and its concentration in the pursuits which are important to him! (106)

Self-knowledge becomes an important part of this practice:

One cannot learn to concentrate without becoming sensitive to oneself…. One is aware, for instance, of a sense of tiredness or depression, and instead of giving in to it and supporting it by depressive thoughts which are always at hand, one asks oneself, ‘What happened?  Why am I depressed?’  The same is done by noticing when one is irritated or angry, or tending to daydreaming, or other escape activities.  In each of these instances the important thing is to be aware of them, and not to rationalize them in the thousand and one ways in which this can be done; furthermore, to be open to our inner voice, which will tell us – often rather immediately – why we are anxious, depressed, irritated. (107)

These describe any spiritual practice at all, and it is affirming to hear Fromm – who was in the end successful at love – consider the capacity for love to be one of the fruits of spiritual practice.  Nor does this seem impossible to believe – the people I have known who are most spiritually developed, it is easy to conceive as lovers – there is something so entirely present in them.

Fromm’s book thus comes summa cum laude, as it is both brief and excellent.  His side-observations about life are worth a great deal in themselves; Fromm, who was born in 1900 as a Jew in Germany, lived for decades in the United States and Mexico, and died in Switzerland in 1980, saw a great deal of the good and evil of modern life and writes about it with great wisdom.  Some examples follow.

On what psychological maturity means:

Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father.  He has, as it were, a motherly and fatherly conscience.  Motherly conscience says: ‘There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness.’  Fatherly conscience says: ‘You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and most of all you must change your ways if I am to like you.’  The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has built them up inside. (41)

On selfishness masquerading as unselfishness:

The nature of unselfishness becomes particularly apparent in its effect on others, and most frequently in our culture in the effect the ‘unselfish’ mother has on her children.  She believes that by her unselfishness her children will experience what it means to be loved and to learn, in turn, what it means to love.  The effect of her unselfishness, however, does not at all correspond to her expectations.  The children do not show the happiness of persons who are convinced that they are loved; they are anxious, tense, afraid of the mother’s disapproval and anxious to live up to her expectations.  Usually they are affected by their mother’s hidden hostility toward life, which they sense rather than recognize clearly, and eventually they become imbued with it themselves.  Altogether, the effect of the ‘unselfish’ mother is not too different from that of the selfish one; indeed, it is often worse, because the mother’s unselfishness prevents the children from criticizing her.  They are put under the obligation not to disappoint her; they are taught, under the mask of virtue, dislike for life.  If one has a chance to study  the effect of a mother with genuine self-love, one can see that there is nothing more conducive to giving a child the experience of what love, joy, and happiness are than being loved by a mother who loves herself. (57-8)

And a proper sense of what teaching really is, and what he himself seems to offer in his writing:

While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.  In previous epochs of our own culture, or in China and India, the man most highly valued was the person with outstanding spiritual qualities.  Even the teacher was not only, or not primarily, a source of information, but his function was to convey certain human attitudes. (108)