Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving (1956) is probably the most widely read book on love by a psychoanalyst. Its opening question sets the tone: "Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort." Many people assume that love is a feeling we stumble into by luck. Fromm argued instead that it is a capacity of the personality, to be learned and practised like any demanding art.
This article is part of the Psychoanalysis of Love series. It explains Fromm's main ideas in clear terms, including his view of love in market societies, and looks at the main criticisms of his work and why it matters in psychotherapy.
Who was Erich Fromm?
Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was born in Frankfurt into an Orthodox Jewish family. He completed a doctorate in sociology at Heidelberg in 1922 and trained as a psychoanalyst in Berlin. From 1930 he worked with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, later known as the Frankfurt School, studying how social and economic conditions shape character. After the Nazis came to power he emigrated to the United States, and later spent many years in Mexico (Funk, 1982; Friedman, 2013).
Fromm brought psychoanalysis and social theory together. He accepted Freud's discovery of unconscious motives, but increasingly rejected Freud's libido theory, which explained human behaviour mainly as the transformation of sexual energy.
For Fromm, the basic problem of human life was not managing our instincts but how each person relates to the world and to other people. Character, in his view, is formed by these ways of relating, which are shaped by society.
This brought him close to the neo-Freudian or culturalist school of Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, and was one of the reasons for his break with the Frankfurt Institute at the end of the 1930s. Fromm called his approach "humanistic": concerned with the conditions under which people can develop their potential for reason, productiveness and love. Escape from Freedom (1941), Man for Himself (1947) and The Sane Society (1955) prepared the ground for The Art of Loving.
The problem love answers: feeling separate
Fromm begins with a basic fact of human existence: we are aware of ourselves as separate individuals. We know that our lives are short, that we were born and will die without choosing to, and that in some sense we are alone. For Fromm, this awareness is the source of all anxiety, and our deepest need is to overcome separateness.
He looked at the ways people have tried to do this:
- Intense, all-absorbing experiences, from ritual trance to alcohol and drugs. These give a brief sense of merging, but leave the person more isolated afterwards.
- Conformity, or fitting in with the group. This gives belonging at the cost of individuality, and Fromm saw it as the main solution of modern societies.
- Creative work, which unites the worker with the material, but not with a person.
Only love, real union with another person, offers a full answer. This links Fromm with existential psychotherapy, and with the wider recognition of how damaging isolation can be.
Dependent love and mature love
Not every kind of closeness is love. Fromm distinguished symbiotic union from mature love.
In symbiotic union, two people depend on each other in a way that dissolves the individuality of at least one of them. It takes two forms:
- Submission. One person escapes separateness by becoming part of someone else who directs and protects them. Fromm described this, in clinical terms, as masochism.
- Domination. One person escapes separateness by treating the other as an extension of themselves. Fromm described this as sadism.
The dominating partner depends on the submissive one just as much as the other way round. A familiar example is a couple in which one partner makes every decision while the other goes along for fear of being left. Neither is fully free.
Mature love is a union in which both people keep their integrity and individuality. Fromm put the paradox simply: in love, two beings become one and yet remain two. A related line sums up the difference: "Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'"
His analysis of domination and submission anticipates Jessica Benjamin's later work on mutual recognition, and Otto Kernberg's view of mature love as a relationship between two whole and separate people.
Love is something we do
The book's central claim is that love is an activity, not a feeling that simply happens to us. In Fromm's words, it is "a 'standing in', not a 'falling for'."
Falling in love, the sudden collapse of barriers between two strangers, is real but short-lived. If it is mistaken for love itself, its fading is mistaken for love's end. Fromm also warned that intense infatuation may say more about earlier loneliness than about the bond.
By "activity" Fromm did not mean busyness, which can be driven by anxiety, but the productive use of one's own powers, expressed above all in giving. For what he called the receptive or marketing character, giving is a loss, made only in exchange for something else. For the productive character, giving expresses strength and aliveness. What we give in love is mainly not things but something of our own life: interest, understanding, humour, even sorrow.
The four basic elements of love
Fromm argued that all forms of love share four basic elements:
- Care. Love is "the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love."
- Responsibility. Not an imposed duty, but readiness to respond to the other person's needs, spoken and unspoken.
- Respect. Without respect, responsibility turns into domination. The word comes from the Latin respicere ("to look at"). It means seeing a person as they are and wishing them to grow in their own way.
- Knowledge. Respect requires knowing the other person beyond the surface, which is possible only when we move beyond concern for ourselves, and is never complete.
The four elements are interdependent. Care without respect becomes control; knowledge without care becomes cold curiosity. A partner who constantly decides what is best for the other may care a great deal but show little respect.
The different kinds of love
For Fromm, love is not mainly a relationship with one particular person but an attitude of character that shapes how a person relates to the world as a whole. Someone who loves one individual and is indifferent to everyone else shows, in his terms, symbiotic attachment or enlarged egotism.
He described several kinds of love:
- Brotherly love, the most basic kind, is love for all human beings. It is not exclusive and rests on a shared human core.
- Motherly love is unconditional acceptance of the child's life and needs. Its real test comes when the loving mother must want the child to become independent and separate from her.
- Erotic love is the longing for complete union with one other person. It is exclusive and the most deceptive form, easily confused with falling in love. Fromm held that it should also be an act of will and commitment.
- Self-love, discussed below.
- Love of God, the religious expression of the same need to overcome separateness, which Fromm treated psychologically and linked to a culture's character.
He also contrasted unconditional "motherly" love with a "fatherly" love that is conditional and earned, arguing that a mature person carries both.
Self-love is not selfishness
A long tradition condemned loving oneself as sinful. Freud's theory of narcissism suggested that the more love is directed towards the self, the less is left for others (see Freud on Love).
Fromm rejected this "hydraulic" logic, in which love works like a fixed amount of liquid that can flow in only one direction at a time. If it is a virtue to love one's neighbour as a human being, he argued, it cannot be a vice to love oneself, since one is also a human being. Love for others and love for oneself are not alternatives; they go together.
Fromm drew a sharp line between self-love and selfishness. The selfish person is interested only in themselves and judges others only by how useful they are. Yet, for Fromm, the selfish person loves themselves not too much but too little: selfishness makes up for a lack of genuine care for oneself. Likewise, conspicuous unselfishness can hide hostility and an inability to enjoy life.
Love in a market society
Drawing on his idea of the marketing orientation from Man for Himself (1947), Fromm argued that in modern capitalist society people come to experience themselves as products, whose value depends on how "saleable" they are. Love is then organised like an exchange. In his account, two people fall in love when each feels they have found the best partner available on the market, given the limits of their own value. The ideal couple becomes a smoothly functioning team.
Fromm described several forms of "pseudo-love" typical of this condition:
- Idolatrous love, in which the partner is worshipped as the source of all value.
- Sentimental love, experienced mainly in fantasy, in films or in memories.
- Projective love, in which one's own problems are placed onto the partner or the children.
- Shared egotism for two, in which the couple forms a closed alliance against the world.
He saw these as symptoms of a culture that discourages the productive attitude love requires. Later commentators often apply this analysis to digital dating, although that is an extension of Fromm rather than his own claim.
How love is practised
Fromm insisted that his book offered no recipe. Practising love has the same general requirements as any art:
- Discipline. Not a rule imposed from outside, but an expression of one's own will, applied across life.
- Concentration. Being fully present. This depends on the ability to be alone with oneself, an idea that echoes Winnicott's "capacity to be alone".
- Patience. Results cannot be hurried.
- Supreme concern. The art must matter deeply to the person who practises it.
Loving also requires overcoming narcissism (self-absorption), objectivity (seeing others as they are, not as our wishes and fears make them), rational faith in oneself and the other, and the courage to risk disappointment.
Having and being
In To Have or To Be? (1976), twenty years later, Fromm widened this into two basic ways of living:
- In the having mode, a person relates to the world through possession and control: of objects, knowledge, status and people.
- In the being mode, a person relates through active involvement, sharing and growth.
In love, the having mode turns the partner into a possession acquired once and for all. Fromm used this to explain why relationships often deteriorate once partners stop working to be lovable and start to take each other for granted. In the being mode, love is something one does, renewed again and again.
Criticisms and limitations
Fromm's work has been criticised in several ways:
- Losing the critical edge of psychoanalysis. Herbert Marcuse, in the epilogue to Eros and Civilization (1955), accused the neo-Freudians, Fromm among them, of giving up the critical core of Freud's drive theory and turning psychoanalysis into an ethics of adjustment.
- More ethical than clinical. Psychoanalytic readers have often found The Art of Loving more of a moral guide than a clinical account; it says little about the unconscious conflict, aggression and early development that Melanie Klein or Kernberg place at the centre of the capacity to love.
- Gender and sexuality. His gendered account of "motherly" and "fatherly" love, and his description of erotic love as a union of masculine and feminine poles, reflect the assumptions of the 1950s. His treatment of homosexuality as a failure of that polarity has been widely criticised and is not consistent with contemporary psychotherapeutic understanding.
- Lack of evidence. His claims are philosophical rather than empirical, although broadly compatible with later attachment research (see Bowlby and Attachment).
Why Fromm's ideas matter in therapy
Despite these limitations, Fromm's ideas remain useful in psychotherapy. Seeing love as a capacity shifts the focus from the search for an ideal partner to one's own ability to care for, respect and know another. His ideas can also help people recognise patterns such as:
- relationships organised around domination and submission, or around the fear of being alone
- believing that caring for oneself is selfish or morally suspect, while being harshly self-critical
- feeling that love has ended when the first excitement and idealisation fade
- measuring oneself, or a partner, by "market value"
Work on boundaries can be understood as work on the capacity to remain two while being close. Fromm's argument that harsh self-neglect and selfishness share a common root often helps people who feel that self-care is wrong. Seeing the end of the first idealisation as a transition rather than a failure is a frequent theme in couple therapy. And Fromm's attention to culture is a reminder that treating partners as interchangeable is not only an individual problem.
The qualities Fromm asked of the lover, concentration, respect for separateness and knowledge gained through involvement, are also those of a good therapeutic relationship.
Conclusion
Fromm presented love as a learnable, active attitude rather than a passive emotion or a lucky encounter. His account of separateness, his distinction between dependent and mature love, the four elements of care, responsibility, respect and knowledge, and his critique of love treated as market exchange still offer a clear language for adult relationships, even where parts of his theory have dated. When difficulties in giving or receiving love keep causing distress, psychodynamic psychotherapy can help to explore their origins and develop new capacities; online sessions can be arranged here.
References
- Friedman, L. J. (2013). The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet. Columbia University Press.
- Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.
- Fromm, E. (1947). Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. Rinehart.
- Fromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. Rinehart.
- Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Brothers.
- Fromm, E. (1976). To Have or To Be? Harper & Row.
- Funk, R. (1982). Erich Fromm: The Courage to Be Human. Continuum.
- Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Beacon Press.