Introduction to Fromm's "The Art of Loving" Reasons for Recommendation

"The Art of Loving" is a book published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2008. The author is a German-American psychologist , philosopher and important member of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm. The following is an introduction to Fromm's "The Art of Loving" that I compiled. I hope it can help you.

Reasons for recommending Fromm's "The Art of Loving"

About what love is, why we need love and other issues, in "The Art of Loving" In this book, contemporary psychoanalyst E. Fromm has a different interpretation of love than ordinary people. The Art of Love is not a love scripture that teaches people how to love, but a spiritual philosophy book that guides people on the meaning of life. This book wants to tell readers that love is not a kind of emotion that has nothing to do with a person's maturity and only requires physical and mental investment. This book will convince the reader that every attempt at love will fail if one does not strive to develop one's whole personality and thereby achieve a creative disposition; if one does not have the ability to love others, if one cannot truly humbly, courageously, Love others sincerely and with discipline, and people will never be satisfied in their own love lives.

"The Art of Love" is an outstanding theoretical monograph that uses psychoanalytic methods to study and explain the art of love. The master of psychology, E. Fromm, sincerely persuades every reader: Love is not an emotion that can be obtained by simply investing your body and mind. If you don't work hard to develop your entire personality and achieve a creative tendency, then every All attempts at love will fail; without the ability to love others, without the ability to love others truly bravely, sincerely, and with discipline, then people will never be satisfied in their love lives. If you don’t believe it, everyone can ask themselves, how many people have you seen who are truly capable of loving?

Introduction to Fromm’s “The Art of Loving”

“The Art of Loving” "Art" is the most famous work of E. Fromm, a German-American psychologist and philosopher and an important member of the Frankfurt School. Since its publication in 1956, it has been translated into 32 languages ??and has been a best-seller all over the world. The most famous work on contemporary art theory of love.

In this book "The Art of Love", Fromm believes that love is not an emotion that has nothing to do with a person's maturity and only requires investment in body and mind.

If you do not strive to develop your whole personality and thereby achieve a creative tendency, then every attempt to love will fail, if you do not have the ability to love others, if you cannot truly humbly, bravely, Love others sincerely and with discipline, and people will never be satisfied in their own love lives.

Fromm further proposed that love is an art, requiring those who want to master this art to have knowledge and efforts in this area. Here, love is not just the narrow love between men and women, nor can it be obtained by honing and improving skills. Love is a manifestation of the overall personality. To develop the ability to love, you need to work hard to develop your own personality and move towards beneficial goals.

About the author of Fromm's "The Art of Loving"

Fromm is a famous German-American psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher. Born in 1900 in a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, he received a doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University in Germany in 1922. He was an important member of the "Frankfurt School" in the 1920s. After the Nazis came to power, he went to the United States in 1934. While engaged in psychological counseling, he lived and lectured in academic institutions such as Columbia University. He successively taught at the National University of Mexico, Michigan State Humanities and other universities. Fromm died of illness in Locarno, Switzerland in 1980. Fromm's research is rooted in Freud's psychoanalytic theory and Marxist philosophical theory. He believes that people are products of their respective cultures. In modern industrialized society, people have become more and more self-alienated. This sense of isolation leads to people's subconscious desire to combine and connect with others.

With his simple and approachable writing style, Fromm created many academic works and popular works, among which the most influential ones include "The Art of Loving", "Escape from Freedom", "Sound Society", "The Crisis of Psychoanalysis", etc. .

Comments after reading Fromm's "The Art of Loving"

I have finished reading Fromm's "The Art of Loving". It is a very good and thin book.

Human loneliness is something that cannot be avoided. One way to overcome it is to create, take the initiative to transform nature, and realize direct connection between yourself and the outside world; the other is to love, share your own vitality, and realize yourself and connections between people. Both creation and love are proactive behaviors; so Fromm advocates "creative personality".

In layman’s terms, love is giving rather than receiving. Love is indeed an expression of inner strength. Of course, most of the time, we would say that love is a feeling for the weak, but a love that is too fragile and interdependent may not be truly healthy and long-lasting. I agree that a person who understands and can enjoy loneliness - being alone without resorting to support from various others (including people and things) - has the real power to love others. In true love, one should be able to achieve both oneself and others. Whether it is love that you blindly ask for, or love that you blindly give based on your own imagination and think the other person needs it, it is unhealthy.

Fromm also extensively discussed the issue of whether modern society is conducive to the cultivation of love. He believed that Western society has led to the collapse of love; his main argument is that the way modern society is organized has brought about modern The relationship between man and himself, other people, and nature has been alienated. I agree that after the Industrial Revolution, "things" enjoyed an unprecedented status in human life and were worshiped as never before; but I am not sure that before modern society, love was universal. The arrival of modern society has brought about the collapse of love. It may be true that there are many attacks on the relationship between people in modern times, from literature to philosophy, but it is more likely to be caused by changes in people's beliefs - from worshiping love and beauty to worshiping objects and degrading people. We cannot even say whether we are more sensitive or numb to our own souls before or during the capitalist society. I think the so-called role of collaboration and mutual understanding in getting along is not only required in modern times - people are different, friction is inevitable when getting along, and empathy and concessions are the necessary lubricants. It is not something that a certain social form imposes on people, but whether the mass media will be so honest.

The concession hypothesis says that there is indeed a collapse of love in modern society. This cannot be summarized as the production methods and virtue standards of capitalist society have brought about such a situation. If love - fraternity, motherly love, and sex - can bring pleasure to people, then people will not let go of them easily. They will not rashly suggest that we give up mutual love and use the meaning of collaboration just because society advocates the spirit of collaboration. Let's replace it with the *** above. ——The first reaction of a person when faced with a fish and a bear's paw is not which one of the two should I give up, but the first question is whether I can occupy both at the same time. In addition, if our intention in talking about this topic is to learn to love and gain happiness, then it is irresponsible and unhelpful to generally and lightly put the responsibility on the social form - we can spend our time on a movie The movie is a bucket of popcorn, not a serious thought.

However, we do notice that the organizational form of capitalist society, or the process of industrialization, has indeed changed many of people’s habits and characteristics; such changes in characteristics and habits may ultimately change the way people love in society. status quo.

Indeed, more happiness in modern society comes from consumption - or in other words, people's happiness has always come partly from consumption. Before industrialization, the share of consumption was limited by the total amount of consumer goods. , unable to expand significantly; and industrialization has brought about such a possibility, so people naturally turn to these sources of happiness that are easier to grow, thus forming a scene of mass pursuit of profit; and this situation may have caused everyone to have a negative attitude towards the spiritual level. Vicarious neglect.

To use an inappropriate analogy, perhaps "welfare deteriorating" growth will occur in international trade.

At the same time, modern society has fundamentally changed people’s habits. Fromm mentioned several basic requirements for love in "The Practice of Love": "self-discipline," "concentration," "patience," and "great enthusiasm" (discipline, concentration, patience, passion). However, the material consumption constraints of modern society are indeed not conducive to the cultivation of these virtues, and the status of these virtues in society is far less than a thousand or two thousand years ago. We can say that the evolution of human nature is slow, much slower than the evolution of ideology, and even slower than the improvement of productivity - especially after productivity has experienced exponential or even faster growth. It is impossible to expect that an ideology rooted in human nature can quickly adapt to the increase in productivity while maintaining all the original toughness (or at least the superficial toughness in the absence of external impact). Therefore, love becomes an ability that needs to be learned and paid attention to at all times. The beginning of cultivating such ability is to start from trying to get closer to several requirements made by Fromm.

Comments after reading "The Art of Loving" by Fromm

Recently a friend recommended a book called "The Art of Loving" written by Fromm. I dare not claim to understand the art of love. Here I am just sorting out the art of love with a learning attitude.

1. Knowledge of love

In the eyes of the author Fromm, the definition of love is objective and comprehensive. Objective because his understanding of love is in line with human nature, and comprehensive because he considers love in the context of society. In the book, both the definition of love and the explanation of different types of love focus more on the social dimension. In his eyes, love can be explained as people's understanding of giving and receiving in a specific social environment. I think it is necessary to analyze love from a social perspective. Because it is impossible for everyone to live alone without society. Love is the bond that maintains various social relationships. Fromm's objective description of the evolution process from individual to ethnic group to country to society expresses why people need love. By mastering the knowledge of love, it will be easier for people to get rid of loneliness, fear and their own limitations, and achieve completeness and unity.

2. The giving and receiving of love

Fromm said: "Love is a positive, not a negative emotion. It is something that grows in people's hearts, not something that is suppressed. The emotion of being captured can generally be expressed by another way of saying, that is, love is first about giving rather than getting. "If you read this book, you will find that giving and receiving are full of Fromm's every view on love. This elucidation of the relationship between giving and receiving allows us to distinguish the different principles of innocent love and mature love. As Fromm said: Innocent love follows the principle that I love because I am loved (getting comes before giving), and mature love follows the principle that I am loved because I love (giving comes before receiving). Innocent love is based on need, mature love is based on contribution. Regarding the different objects of love, Fromm takes us through different types of love: universal love for all living beings, maternal love for children, sexual love for lovers, self-love for oneself, and love for gods. God loves.

3. The practice of love

If love is an art, then those who want to master this art are required to have this knowledge and make efforts. Yes, people who don't know what love is are pale, and people who don't know how to love are blind. Interpreting the motivation of love from a social perspective is that people want to get rid of separation, loneliness and fear, and achieve unity with society or nature. This motivation is our courage to love, but it is also the limitation of our self-knowledge. Fromm said that love is practice, which is the confirmation of objective recognition of one's own thoughts and emotional experiences. It comes from your emotional experience and is projected into your thoughts. After a series of processing and processing, this thing becomes the love we know. Experience requires objective understanding, and projection requires intellectual confirmation.

4. In the name of love

Love is an art. It sows seeds in everyone's heart. Love is human instinct.

But what makes us sad is that this instinct is gradually degenerating with the changes of society and the times, and is getting further and further away from the essence of our lives. If we reflect on ourselves and the society we live in, it is not difficult to find that almost all moral and benign social relationships are gradually dissolving in the name of love. Love becomes a label, a paradise isolated from the world. Love is the embodiment of our life process, and it is also the way to experience the life process. It is a compulsory course for everyone to learn the knowledge of love and practice the art of love. In the practice of love, we can get rid of the limitations of human nature and society. We love not just because we are worthy, but also because everything is made complete in the name of love.

Classic quotations from Fromm's "The Art of Love"

1. Love is not a taste of life that anyone can easily enjoy, nor is it a matter of reaching a certain level with a person. Things outside yourself that have nothing to do with your self-maturity.

2. Most people regard the problem of love as mainly a problem of being loved, rather than as a problem of taking the initiative to love and the ability to love. Therefore, the problem of love is how to be loved and how to become lovable.

3. People often confuse the initial experience of "falling" into love with the lasting state of "being" in love. They don't understand that their infatuation, that mutual "madness" that proves the depth of their love, may actually just be evidence of their previous loneliness.

4. Mature love is fusion under the condition of preserving human integrity and personality.

5. Love is mainly about giving rather than receiving. It is more joyful to give than to receive, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving the presence of my life is expressed. It is in the act of giving that I experience my power, my wealth, my abilities.

6. Give your own vitality and the ability to love, that is, use your own vitality to stimulate the vitality of the other person, and use your whole-hearted love ability to induce the love of another person. ability.

7. Only those who are deprived of all the minimum necessities for survival cannot enjoy the joy of giving material help. Poverty is therefore also degradation, not just because of the suffering it directly causes, but because it deprives the poor of the ability and joy to give.

8. Giving implies making another person a giver, which means: love is the ability to produce love.

9. If your love as love does not cause the other person to love you, and if you as a lover do not use your own life to make yourself the loved one, then your love is powerless, and This kind of love is unhappiness.

10. Love also includes care, responsibility, respect, and understanding.

11. Love is active concern for the life and growth of the person we love. You love what you work for, and you work hard for what you love.

12. Responsibility is a completely voluntary act, my response to the needs of another person.

13. Respect means being able to see someone as they are and being aware of their uniqueness. Respect means caring about another person so that he or she can grow and develop in accordance with his or her nature.

14. Without understanding, there can be no respect; without the guidance of understanding, care and responsibility will be blind; without the promotion of concern, understanding will be empty.

15. If I really fall in love with someone, then I must love everyone, the world, and life.

16. Love will only begin to show when you love those who are of little help to achieve a certain purpose. In the Old Testament, the central objects of love are the poor, strangers, widows and orphans, and even the enemies of the nation.

17. Children’s love follows this principle: “I love because I am loved.” Adult love follows this principle: “I am loved because I love.”

18. Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

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19. Maternal love is unconditional in its true nature. The mother loves the newborn baby just because it is her child, not because the child has fulfilled any specific conditions or achieved any Specific expectations.

20. Maternal love is heaven. It does not need to be obtained or repaid, but the negative aspect of maternal love is that it cannot be obtained, produced, or controlled. We cannot create maternal love.

21. Father’s love is conditional love. Its principle is: “I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you fulfill your obligations, and because you are like me. ”

22. The positive aspect of father’s love is that because father’s love is conditional, I can get it by doing something, and I can work hard to get father’s love.

23. Mother’s love is the origin of our coming into the world. She is nature, soil and ocean. Father represents the world of ideas, the world of man-made things, the world of law and order, the world of travel and adventure.

24. Finally, a mature person gradually reaches this point. He is his own mother and his own father.

25. The mother's conscience says: "Misbehavior." No act, not even a crime, can make you lose my love and my hope for your life and happiness. "My father's conscience said: "You have done something wrong, and you will inevitably reap the consequences. The most important thing is that if you want me to like you, you must change your ways. ”

26. He bases his mother’s conscience on his own ability to love, and bases his father’s conscience on his own reason and judgment.

27. Maternal love It is necessary not only to protect the life and growth of children, but also to instill in them a love of life: it is wonderful to live in this world, and it is wonderful to be a little boy or girl, not just to live.

28. The true essence of maternal love is to care about the growth of the child, that is, to hope that the child will be independent and eventually separated from herself. The mother must tolerate separation, and must hope and support the child's independence and separation.

29. The test of whether she can become a truly loving mother is whether she is willing to endure separation and continue to love after separation.

30. In sex, it is separation. Two people become one; in maternal love, two people who are one are separated into two.

31. The anxiety of loneliness, the desire to conquer or be conquered, vanity, the desire to hurt or even destroy can stimulate. Sexual desire, just like love, can also stimulate sexual desire.

32. If the desire for physical union is not aroused by love, and if sex is not also a kind of fraternity, then the result will be short-lived and debauched. It's just a union. This kind of union can only make the two strangers remain as alienated as before, and sometimes it will make them feel ashamed of each other and even hate each other, because when the illusion of union disappears, they feel more obvious strangers than before.

33. Sex is exclusive, but it loves the entire human race and everything that is alive in another person. Sex is only in the sense of sexual union, in the sense of strongly combining oneself with another person. The sense of a special personal fusion - not the sense of deep fraternity - excludes love for other people.

34. There is only one proof for the existence of love: this. The depth of the relationship, the life and strength of both parties, are how we can tell whether we are in love or not

35. Loving someone is not just an emotion, it is also a decision, a decision. Judgment, a commitment. An emotion appears, but it can also disappear. How can I be sure that this feeling will last forever when my behavior does not involve judgment and decision?

　36 , Love should essentially be an art of will, an art of deciding to commit all my life to the life of another person.

37. Loving and being loved both require courage and courage. The courage to choose those values ??that can be the object of highest attention requires the courage to make the decision to place all bets on these values.

38. The idea that people should part ways and go their separate ways once something goes wrong in a love relationship is just as wrong as the idea that there is no need to dissolve the relationship no matter what, even if the relationship breaks down completely.

39. For children, the tension and unpleasant atmosphere of an unfortunate family is more harmful than an open break, because the latter can at least educate children that people can end an intolerable situation by making brave decisions. living conditions.

40. The thought expressed in the phrase "Love your neighbor as yourself" in the Bible implies people's respect for their own integrity and uniqueness, and their love for themselves. and understanding, which are inseparable from respect, love, and understanding of another human being.

41. Selfish people love themselves not too much but too little. He seems to care about himself too much, but in fact he is just a vain attempt to cover up and compensate for the failure of true self-care. Selfish people are incapable of loving other people, but they are also incapable of loving themselves.

42. There is no difference between the role of a "selfless" mother and that of a selfish mother. To be precise, the former is often worse because the mother's selflessness makes the children reluctant to criticize her. They felt they should not disappoint her; they had been taught a distaste for life disguised as virtue.

43. The love and fear of God are nothing more than a psychological response to human beings’ need for eternal love. They are also a spiritual phantom of people’s inability to realize this kind of love in reality.

44. God has become a symbol, a symbol of the perfection that has been expressed and is being strived for in the early stages of human evolution, a symbol of the spiritual world - the realm of eternal love, truth and justice.

45. In the dominant Western religious system, love for God is essentially the same thing as belief in God, his existence and justice, and belief in God’s love. Love of God is essentially a thought experience. In Eastern religions and mysticism, love for God is an intense emotional experience of oneness, inextricably linked to the expression of this love in every act of life.

Creation background

Western capitalist society since the 20th century has always been a place of constant crisis. Fromm personally experienced two world wars, especially during World War II. He was persecuted because he was a Jew and fled to the United States. Therefore, he almost held a completely negative attitude towards the current situation of Western society.

Fromm began to study Marxist philosophy and Freudian psychoanalytic theory in his youth, and absorbed many essences from them. In his opinion, there are too many unreasonable phenomena in his era (that is, the capitalist era) that deserve criticism. To criticize, one must start from analyzing the nature of capitalist society. "The Art of Love" is based on this It is written under the guidance of this thought and caters to the common social psychology of the West.

Thoughts of the work

The contribution of the book "The Art of Love" is undoubtedly to correct Freud's view that love and sex are closely related, and even to some extent the latter determines the former. erroneous judgment, and at the same time puts forward a person's positive and uplifting view of love. Love is no longer a reproductive impulse wrapped in chocolate and roses, nor is it too narrowly directed at the gender love between men and women.

The author believes that love is the only way to achieve unity between people, and it is also the inevitable way for humans to get rid of interpersonal loneliness. The prerequisite for realizing the unity between people is the ability to love. This ability is the factor that can give full play to the enthusiasm of love, such as dedication, care, responsibility, respect and understanding. As an independent individual, each person seeks another independent individual in the vast sea of ??people to achieve unity and get rid of loneliness. This is love. In the final analysis, this is a matter between people, not a matter of desire, nor a matter of human instinct. The people here are not beasts driven by instinct and desire, but can control instinct and desire in the palm of their hands and use them to achieve their goals. The noble spirituality of human beings serves as the rational man who answers the questions of human existence.

Fromm also talks about many wrong forms of love and explains in detail the practice of love in the last chapter of the book, including discipline, concentration, patience, interest and trust in others, overcoming narcissism, and active activities respectively. are necessary and special conditions. In fact, these things are not so much the conditions for acquiring the ability to love, but rather the conditions for a person's rational life. Regardless of whether a person intends to love others, only one person lives in this world and has the desire to have a good life. As an individual, a person needs to obtain these conditions. Only in this way can he gain happiness and understanding of life from the connection with others, instead of living a mediocre life like a mediocre person.

The book points out that "love" is an art that can be learned through patience. Similar to the sensitivity to art, love, the love of mother and child, and the love of friends are all factors that lead to perfection. A life practice that enriches the soul. Starting from the standpoint of humanism and critical psychoanalysis, we regard "love" as a way of thinking and answering human beings' self-survival. Love is not a program, it has no instructions. The purpose of the whole book is to tell human beings to realize the unity between people in love. If you do not strive to develop your entire personality, any attempts and ideas about love will fail. And love is first of all giving, it is loving others. If you do not have the ability to love others, you will never get the satisfaction of love.

Influence of the work

"The Art of Loving" caused a sensation when it was first published in the United States in 1956. People rushed to buy it, and the first edition was sold out within a few days. The second edition was published in the UK by George Allen and Unwin; a new edition was published in 1962 and reprinted ten times. It was subsequently reprinted in 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1982.

As of 2015, "The Art of Love" has been translated into 32 languages.

About the author

Erich Fromm (1900-1980), a 20th century Western philosopher, psychologist, thinker, representative of Western Marxism, Frankfurt School theorist. Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, he studied psychology, sociology and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and Heidelberg University, and received a doctorate. During World War II, he moved to the United States to escape Nazi persecution and taught psychology courses and engaged in psychoanalytic research at Columbia University and the National University of Mexico. In 1971, he moved to Switzerland and continued to engage in psychological research and writing until his death. His major works include: "Escape from Freedom", "The Art of Love", "Beyond the Chain of Fantasy", "To Have or to Survive", "The Self-Made Man", etc. ;