Learning To Love According To Erich Fromm

According to Erich Fromm, people must celebrate love every day as a liberating and enriching act. People who are able to learn to love in a mature and conscious way understand that love is not an asset or a condition. Love is caring and is a burning desire to promote the growth of all the people we love.

It is likely that Erich Fromm never discovered how important his book The Art of Loving would be. It is also likely that not everyone knows what conditions he was under when he wrote this interesting and wonderful book. Those who had the opportunity to meet this Jewish psychoanalyst and humanist philosopher used to say that only a few people did such a transformation as he did.

Until the 1950s, Fromm was the great Talmudic teacher and Marxist psychoanalyst who wanted to give up Sigmund Freud’s theoretical basis.

He was a somewhat introverted intellectual who settled in the United States after World War II. He left behind the burden of a divorce, as well as the death of his last wife (by suicide) and the memory of a fragmented and ruined Europe.

It was in this decade that he decided to move to Mexico and become an activist for peace and women’s rights. Fromm wanted to change his perspective on life, open himself to happiness and the world, and fight for what he believed in. He became a very influential therapist and became friends with President Kennedy. He also found love in a brilliant woman named Annis Freeman.

Even with the bitter memories of his former wives, Fromm established a specific goal: to learn to love. He wanted this time of his life to be the best so far. He did not just want to learn to love her. Fromm also wanted to learn to love the rest of the world. It was where his famous book came from, from the happiness he experienced in the last decades of his life.

Learning to love according to Erich Fromm

“To love without knowing how to love hurts those we love.” This quote by Thich Nhat Hanh sums up a more than obvious reality. Most of us have not mastered the art of loving. We are rather neophytes of a reality we immerse ourselves in by chance. We limit ourselves to loving others as children rather than as adults, mainly because of our culture.

We have been shaped by a number of norms. They have led us to see love as a construction of magic and ideals. In our current society we still find the idea of ​​”chivalrous love”, where men are to enchant women. We like to think we are victims of Cupid’s arrows, and the real passion is what Shakespeare’s eternal lovers in Verona experienced. We believe that we are all destined to love someone.

Erich Fromm, a prominent social psychologist, made it very clear in his book The Art of Loving  that love requires responsibility. Love is something that trained artists do.  Learning to love requires training, mastery and continuous work where effort and strain do not leave anything to  fate.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the things Erich Fromm can teach us about love.

Active love

We all want to be loved. We long to be cared for, valued, respected and validated in everything we do, are and have. But there is one thing we must keep in mind: Passive love is immature and does not work.

Love is not something to rest on, it is an active and current scenario. We must take care of each other, love each other and respect each other. When someone really knows how to love another person, they let them participate, they give and receive, and they continue to be an active part of a project where there is always both spiritual and emotional growth.

Our eternal concern to find the perfect person

Learning to love also means being aware of another aspect. We often worry too much about not finding an ideal person who is in line with all our dreams and desires. More often than not, we become frustrated that we do not find our “true love” when in reality we do not even know if we are able to maintain it.

We are sometimes so full of romantic constructions that we tend to ignore a very important thing. Love requires work. It is important for us to know how to meet the challenges that come with a good relationship.

Love as a need

Learning to love means knowing how to get rid of all needs. Anyone seeking a romantic relationship to fill their own shortcomings will feel so dissatisfied that they will end up leading the other person to a permanent state of slavery.

To love is a creative act

According to Erich Fromm, love is a form of energy. It is an impulse that encourages us to move, express ourselves and create. Compared to the previous statement, this expansive and creative force arises only when we have already met our basic needs.

Similarly, Fromm wrote something in The Art of Loving,  that it is not enough to just feel that energy. We must remember that love is something we must live and shape. Authentic passion lives on emotion, maturity and balance, and it understands that the most beautiful work of art requires hard work and commitment.

Love is like music, paintings, carpentry, writing or architecture: you have to understand the theory to be able to master the exercise. In the same way as a very creative engineer, we find an effective way to overcome all difficulties, challenges and bumps in the road.

To conclude, love requires, according to Erich Fromm, that we leave behind all the childish perspectives that often define us (and society has taught us). We must stop seeing love as a passive act and begin to see it as a spark that magically binds two people together. Love is a substance, a body and a matter. It is a raw material we can use to build a spectacular project, but only if we really want it and are responsible for it.