Psychoanalysis is an amazing tool for us to understand our actions and feelings. It can also be incredibly bourgeois. It studies the individual, and usually stops there as well. It's refreshing to read The Art Of Loving, in which Marxist Erich Fromm sees love, and the Self, as social creations.

Fromm begins with the obvious: everyone talks about love, but very few actually do it. What many people call love is just obsession. This stems way back into childhood, and Fromm uses psychoanalysis to trace our early development: the long, slow process of separating from and internalizing one's parents as symbols of love and self-acceptance, leading to the formation of the Self.

So far we're on standard psychoanalytic ground, but Fromm goes further. He sees Self formation unleashing creativity. We can be productive – we have the will and drive to express our powers, to fulfill our creative capacity – in a word, Marx's 'species being'. Love is the expression of those powers, for ourselves, our loved ones and the world at large.

Just a cigar... - Erich Fromm

Some of Fromm's formulations are unfashionable; I wonder whether today's psychiatrists think the Self develops in a straight line, which means any deviations are sicknesses (and Fromm includes being gay as one of them - of course he's dead wrong.) But the idea that there are accepted norms of development, which form the basis of a healthy, whole Self, is extremely important for what comes next.

Social nurture

No one lives in a vacuum, yet to read modern self-help literature, you’d think we did - that our only influences are our own bad choices or brain chemicals. This is liberalism: the idea that we can be understood entirely as individuals. Psychiatrists work one-on-one with patients, so it's not surprising. But Fromm is under no such illusions. We're shaped by our social influences, and they reflect and reinforce alienation.

The God of Earth

Religion comes in for particular scrutiny. Fromm contrasts western and eastern religions. Western belief has a single, linear focus; while eastern religions embrace dialectics, where contradiction is central to understanding the world - which Fromm links to Marx and Hegel. Moreover, western God so often resembles a punishing, disapproving father figure. Fromm roots this in an inability to completely separate from, and internalize, the father: “The patriarchal aspect [of God] makes me love God like a father; I assume he is just and strict, that he punishes and rewards; and eventually he will elect me as his favorite son.” (67)

Instead, Fromm wants a theism that posits God as a spirit, not as an rewarding/punishing actor (and hence mental, parental projection). He also sees no contradiction between the non-acting God and atheism, because both contain a faith in the essential powers of humanity, and a celebration of the human spirit.

The God of Rock!

Sell your soul

Fromm doesn't hide his disdain for capitalism. Market relations and corporate culture reduce us to automatons:

Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self... one's character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption. (86-87)

This shapes the entire question of love. It's "possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence". Even then it's not easy: "love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness." (103)

We don't even face the challenge, let alone struggle through it. Love is an expression of one's essential powers, and these are the very things capitalism destroys. We work for a boss, our leisure is reduced to consumption, we have no means to develop or even hear our Selves. This is an act of self-destruction, and how can we love others if we can't stand ourselves?

The office is not a loving environment, though some people try

This social analysis is the book’s strength, but also its challenge. There are no easy individual answers, no 12 step programmes. The art of loving is not just building the right relationship, but the right society. Only in that struggle do we create our identities:

It is an illusion to believe... that one is productive in the sphere of love and unproductive in all other spheres. The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either. (129)

But how is this possible, when those other spheres are taken over by soul-destroying work, when the very act of socializing means joining "the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive; of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliche opinions instead of thinking"? (114)

The challenge begins with knowing your Self and speaking it. But it doesn't end there. The problem is not individual:

People capable of love... are necessarily the exception... in present-day Western society. ... because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it.

Society itself blocks love; we must address society first. 'Self-help', as a private strategy, doesn't get to root of the problem:

Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical cahgnes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon. (132)

See how happy they look?

At the heart of Fromm's modest book lies the most radical conclusion: the preconditions for lasting love are socialist revolution. That thesis is what makes The Art of Loving such a rewarding - and challenging - read.