the Art of Loving

The following is taken from notes on a lecture on Erich Fromm, made available in the public domain, by Prof. Victor Daniels, Sonoma State University, Psychology Department. You can read all of his lecture at http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/frommnotes.html The quote from Fromm is used with permission.)

Erich Fromm, 
The Art of Loving, Part 1

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one "falls into" if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.

Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love -- yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.

This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love… People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love--or to be loved by--is difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of modem society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth century with respect to the choice of a "love object…"