Erich Fromm - The Art of Love (1989)

[Music] is Love. An art? 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 recording 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're 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 any anything that needs to be learned about [Music] 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. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim, they follow several paths. One which is especially used by men is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one's position permits. Another used especially by women is to make oneself attractive by cultivating one's body, dress, etc. Other ways of making oneself attractive used both by men and women are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, modest, inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, to Win Friends and Influence People. As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that to love is simple, but that to to find the right object to love or to be loved by is difficult. In the Victorian age, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal experience which then might lead to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was contracted either by the respective families or by a marriage broker. It was concluded on the basis of social considerations, and love was supposed to develop once the marriage had been concluded.

In the last few generations, the concept of romantic love has become almost most universal in the Western World. In the United States, to a vast extent, people are in search of romantic love, of the personal experience of Love which should then lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.

Closely related to this factor is another feature characteristic of contemporary culture. Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows and in buying all that he can afford to buy either for cash or on installments. He or she looks at people in a similar way. For the man, an attractive girl, and for the woman, an attractive man are the prizes that they are after. Attractive usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought-after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. The sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. "I am out for a bargain." The object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.

The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of falling in love and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of standing in love. If two people who have been strangers suddenly let the wall between them break down and feel close, feel one, this moment of Oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with or initiated by sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of Love Is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning, they do not know all this. In fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being crazy about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.

This attitude that nothing is easier than to love has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any Enterprise which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet which fails so regularly as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure and to learn how one could do better, or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of Love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love: to examine the reason reasons for this failure and to proceed to study the meaning of love.

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art. If we want to learn how to love, we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the Mastery of the theory, the other, the Mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one, one my intuition, the essence of the Mastery of any art.

But aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third Factor necessary to becoming a master in any art: the Mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern. There must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. And maybe here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art in spite of their obvious failures, in spite of the deep-seated craving for love. Almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power. Almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn The Art of Loving. Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love which only profits the soul but is profitless in the modern sense is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on? However this may be, the following discussion will treat The Art of Loving in the sense of the foregoing divisions. First, I shall discuss the theory of Love. Secondly, I shall discuss the practice of love.

[Music]

The Theory of Love. Love, the answer to the problem of human existence. Any theory of Love must begin with a theory of man. While we find the equivalent of love in animals, their attachments are mainly a part of their instinctual equipment. Only remnants of this instinctual equipment can be seen operating in man. What is essential in the existence of man is the fact that he has emerged from the Animal Kingdom and that he has transcended nature. Although he never leaves it, he is a part of it and yet, once torn away from nature, he cannot return to it. Once thrown out of paradise, a state of original Oneness with nature, cherubims with flaming swords block his way if he should try to return. Man can only go forward by developing his Reason, by finding a new Harmony, a human one, instead of the prehuman harmony which is irretrievably lost.

When man is Born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain, and open. There is certainty only about the past and about the future only as far as that it is death. Man is gifted with reason. He is life being aware of itself. He has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future. This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short lifespan, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before Those whom he loves or that they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.

Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence, to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world, things, and people actively. It means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety. It arouses shame and the feeling of guilt. This experience is expressed in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. After Adam and Eve have eaten of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, after they have disobeyed, there is no good and evil unless there is freedom to disobey. After they have become Human by having emancipated themselves from the original animal harmony with nature, they saw that they were naked and they were ashamed. The important point the story wants to convey to us is that after man and woman have become aware of themselves and of each other, they are aware of their separateness and of their difference in as much as they belong to different Sexes. But while recognizing their separateness, they remain strangers because they have not yet learned to love each other. As is also made very clear by the fact that Adam defends himself by blaming Eve rather than by trying to defend her. The awareness of human separation without reunion by love is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.

The deepest need of man then is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means Insanity because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of Separation disappears because the world outside from which one is separated has disappeared.

Man of all ages and cultures is confronted with the solution of one and the same question: the question of how to overcome separateness, how to achieve Union, how to transcend one's own individual life and find at-onement. While there are many answers, the record of which is human history, they are nevertheless not innumerable. On the contrary, as soon as one ignores smaller differences which belong more to the periphery than to the center, one discovers that there is only a limited number of answers which have been given and only could have been given by man in the various cultures in which he has lived. The history of religion and philosophy is the history of these answers, of their diversity as well as of their limitation in Number.

The answers depend to some extent on the degree of individuation which an individual has reached. In the infant, individuation has developed but little yet. He still feels one with mother, has no feeling of separateness as long as mother is present. Its sense of aloneness is cured by the physical presence of the mother, her breasts, her skin. Only to the degree that the child develops his sense of separateness and individuality is the physical presence of the mother not sufficient anymore, and does the need to overcome separateness in other ways arise. Similarly, the human race in its infancy still feels one with nature. The soil, the animals, the plants are still man's world. He identifies himself with animals, and this is expressed by the wearing of animal masks, by the worshiping of a totem animal or animal Gods. But the more the human race emerges from these primary bonds, the more it separates itself from the natural world, the more intense becomes the need to find new ways of escaping separateness.

One way of achieving this aim lies in all kinds of orgiastic States. These may have the form of an auto-induced trance, sometimes with the help of drugs. Many rituals of primitive tribes offer a vivid picture of this type of solution. In a transitory state of exaltation, the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it. Inasmuch as these rituals are practiced in common, an experience of fusion with the group is added, which makes this solution all the more effective.

Closely related to and often blended with this orgiastic solution is the sexual experience. The sexual orgasm can produce a state similar to the one produced by a trance or to the effects of certain drugs. Rights of communal sexual orgies were a part of many primitive rituals. It seems that after the orgiastic experience, man can go on for a time without suffering too much from his separateness. Slowly the tension of anxiety mounts and then is reduced again by the repeated performance of the ritual. As long as these orgiastic states are a matter of common practice in a tribe, they do not produce anxiety or guilt. To act in this way is right and even virtuous because it is a way shared by all, approved and demanded by the medicine men or priests. Hence, there is no reason to feel guilty or ashamed.

It is quite different when the same solution is chosen by an individual in a culture which has left behind these common practices. Alcoholism and drug addiction are the forms which the individual chooses in a non-orgiastic culture. In contrast to those participating in the socially patterned solution, such individuals suffer from guilt feelings and remorse. While they try to escape from separateness by taking refuge in alcohol or drugs, they feel all the more separate after the orgiastic experience is over and thus are driven to take recourse to it with increasing frequency and intensity.

Slightly different from this is the recourse to a sexual orgiastic solution. To some extent, it is a natural and normal form of overcoming separateness and a partial answer to the problem of isolation. But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction. It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness. Since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings except momentarily, all forms of orgiastic Union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; and they are transitory and periodical.

Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of Union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on Conformity with the group, its customs, practices, and beliefs. Here again, we find a considerable development. In a primitive Society, the group is small; it consists of those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a polis, the citizenry of a large State, the members of a church. In contemporary Western Society, the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas to the pattern of the group, I am saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this Conformity. The Democratic countries, suggestions and propaganda. Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking, and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority. The consensus of all serves as a proof for the correctness of their ideas. Since there is still a need to feel some individuality, such need is satisfied with regard to minor differences. The initials on the handbag or the sweater, the name plate of the bank teller, the belonging to the Democratic as against Republican party, to the Elks and instead of to the Shriners, become the expression of individual differences.

The increasing tendency for the elimination of differences is closely related to the concept of equality as it is developing in the most advanced industrial societies. Equality had meant in a religious context that we are all God's children, that we all share in the same human divine substance, that we are all one. It meant also that the very differences between individuals must be respected, that while it is true that we are all one, it is also true that each one of us is a unique entity, is a cosmos by itself. Equality as a condition for the development of individuality was the meaning of the concept that no man must be the means for the ends of another man, that all men are equal in as much as they are ends and only ends and never means to each other. In contemporary capitalistic Society, the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality, one refers to the equality of automatons, of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means sameness rather than Oneness. It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas.

Union by Conformity is not intense and violent; it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason often is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness. The incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide in contemporary Western Society are symptoms of this relative failure of her Conformity. Herd Conformity has only one advantage: it is permanent and not spasmodic. The individual is introduced into the Conformity pattern at the age of three or four and subsequently never loses his contact with the herd. Even his funeral, which he anticipates as his last great social affair, is in strict conformance with the pattern.

In addition to Conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and of the pleasure routine. Man becomes a nine-to-five; he has little initiative. His tasks are prescribed by the organization of the work. There is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom; they all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organization at a prescribed speed and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinized in similar, although not quite as drastic, ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theater owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them. The rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening, all activities are routinized and prefabricated. How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who has been given only this one chance of living with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?

A third way of attaining Union lies in Creative activity, be it that of the artist or of the artisan. In any kind of creative work, the creating person unites himself with his material, which represents the world outside of himself. Whether the peasant grows his corn or the painter paints a picture, in all types of creative work, the worker and his object become one. Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation. This, however, holds true only for productive work, for work in which I plan, produce, see the result of my work. In the modern work process of the worker on the endless belt, little is left of this uniting quality of work. The worker has ceased to be himself; hence, no Union takes place beyond that of Conformity.

The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal. The unity achieved in orgiastic Fusion is transitory. The unity achieved by Conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal Union, of fusion with another person in love. This desire for interpersonal Fusion is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion. It is the force which keeps the human race together: the clan, the family, Society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction, self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love, Humanity could not exist for a day. Yet, if we call the achievement of interpersonal Union love, we find ourselves in serious difficulty. Fusion can be achieved in different ways, and the differences are not less significant than what is common to the various forms of love. Should they all be called love? As with all semantic difficulties, the answer can only be arbitrary. What matters is that we know what kind of Union we are talking about when we speak of Love. Do we refer to love as the mature answer to the problem of existence, or do we speak of those immature forms of Love which may be called symbiotic Union? In the discussion that follows, I shall call love only the former.

I shall begin the discussion of love with the letter. Symbiotic Union has its biological pattern in the relationship between the pregnant mother and the fetus. They are two and yet one; they live together, symbiosis. They need each other. The fetus is a part of the mother; it receives everything it needs from her. Mother is its world, as it were. She feeds it, she protects it, but also her own life is enhanced by it. In the psychic symbiotic Union, the two bodies are independent, but the same kind of attachment exists psychologically.

The passive form of the symbiotic Union is that of submission, or if we use a clinical term, of masochism. The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel of another person who directs him, guides him, protects him, who is his life and his oxygen, as it were. The power of the one to whom one submits is inflated; he is everything, I am nothing except in as much as I am part of him. As a part, I am part of greatness, of power, of certainty. The masochistic person does not have to make decisions, does not have to take any risks. He is never alone, but he is not independent; he has no integrity; he is not yet fully born. In a religious context, the object of worship is called an idol. In a secular context of a masochist love relationship, the essential mechanism, that of idolatry, is the same. The masochistic relationship can be blended with physical sexual desire. In this case, it is not only a submission in which one's mind participates, but also one's whole body. There can be masochistic submission to fate, to sickness, to rhythmic music, to the orgiastic state produced by drugs or under hypnotic trance. In all these instances, the person renounces his Integrity, makes himself the instrument of somebody or something outside of himself. He need not solve the problem of living by productive activity.

The active form of symbiotic Fusion is domination, or to use the psychological term corresponding to masochism, sadism. The sadistic person wants to escape from his aloneness and his sense of imprisonment by making another person part and parcel of himself. He inflates and enhances himself by incorporating another person who worships him. The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former. Neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense. In a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: Fusion without Integrity.

If one understands this, it is also not surprising to find that usually a person reacts in both the sadistic and the masochistic manner, usually toward different objects. Hitler reacted primarily in a sadistic fashion toward people, but masochistically toward fate, history, the higher power of nature. His end, suicide among General destruction, is as characteristic as was his dream of success, Total Domination.

In contrast to symbiotic Union, mature love is Union under the condition of preserving one's Integrity, one's individuality. Love is an active power in man, a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others. Love makes him overcome the the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his Integrity. In love, the Paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word activity. A man sitting quiet and contemplating with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his Oneness with the world is considered to be passive because he is not doing anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the Soul which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and Independence. Love is an activity, not a passive effect; it is a standing in, not a falling for.

In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving. What is giving? Simple as the answer to this question seems to be, it is actually full of ambiguities and complexities. The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that giving is giving up something, sacrificing. The person whose character has not developed beyond the stage of the exploitative or hoarding orientation experiences the act of giving in this way. The marketing character is willing to give, but only in exchange for receiving. Giving without receiving for him is being cheated. People whose main orientation is a nonproductive one feel giving as an impoverishment. Most individuals of this type therefore refuse to give. Some make a virtue out of giving in the sense of a sacrifice. They feel that just because because it is painful to give, one should give. The virtue of giving to them lies in the very Act of acceptance of the sacrifice. For them, the norm that it is better to give than to receive means that it is better to suffer deprivation than to experience joy.

For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience fills me with joy. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness. In the sphere of material things, giving means being rich. Not he who has much is Rich, but he who gives much. The hoarder, who is anxiously worried about losing something, is psychologically speaking the poor, impoverished man, regardless of how much he has. Whoever is capable of giving of himself is Rich. Only one who is deprived of all that goes beyond the barest necessities for subsistence would be incapable of enjoying the act of giving material things. But daily experience shows that what a person considers the minimal necessities depends as much on his character as it depends on his actual possessions. It is well known that the poor are more willing to give than the rich. Nevertheless, poverty beyond a certain point may make it impossible to give and is so degrading, not only because of the suffering it causes directly, but because of the fact that it deprives the poor of the joy of giving.

The most important sphere of giving, however, is not that of material things, but lies in the specifically human Realm. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has; he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other, but that he gives him of that which is alive in him. He gives him of his Joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness, of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In in thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person; he enhances the other's sense of aliveness. By enhancing his own sense of aliveness, he does not give in order to receive. Giving is in itself Exquisite Joy, but in giving, he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him. In truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. In the act of giving, something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is born for both of them.

Specifically with regard to love, this means love is a power which produces love. Impotence is the inability to produce love. But not only in love does giving mean receiving. The teacher is taught by his students, the actor is stimulated by his audience, the psychoanalyst is cured by his patient, provided they do not treat each other as objects but are related to each other genuinely and productively. It is hardly necessary to stress the fact that the ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. It presupposes the attainment of a predominantly productive orientation. In this orientation, the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals. To the degree that these qualities are lacking, he is afraid of giving himself, hence of loving.

Beyond the element of giving, the active character of Love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements common to all forms of love. These are care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. That love implies care is most evident in a mother's love for her child. No Assurance of her love would strike us as sincere if we saw her lacking in care for the infant, if she neglected to feed it, to bathe it, to give it physical comfort. And we are impressed by her love if we see her caring for the child. It is not different even with the love for animals or flowers. If a woman told us that she loved flowers and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her love for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.

Care and concern imply another aspect of Love: That of responsibility. Today, responsibility is often meant to denote duty, something imposed upon one from the outside. But responsibility in its true sense is an entirely voluntary act. It is my response to the needs expressed or unexpressed of another human. The most daring and radical consequence of rationalism, it is based on our knowledge of the fundamental limitations of our knowledge. It is the knowledge that we shall never grasp The Secret of man and of the universe, but that we can know nevertheless in the act of Love. Psychology as a science has its limitations, and as The Logical consequences of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.

Care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge are mutually interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person, that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up narcissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has acquired humility based on the inner strength which only genuine productive activity can give.

Thus far, I have spoken of love as the overcoming of human separateness, as the Fulfillment of the longing for Union. But above the universal existential need for Union rises a more specific biological one: the desire for Union between the masculine and feminine poles. The the idea of this polarization is most strikingly expressed in the myth that originally man and woman were one, that they were cut in half, and from then on, each male has been seeking for the Lost female part of himself in order to unite again with her. The meaning of the myth is clear enough: sexual polarization leads man to seek Union in a specific way, that of Union with the other sex. The polarity between the male and female principles exists also within each man and each woman. Just as physiologically man and woman each have hormones of the opposite sex, they are bisexual also in the psychological sense. They carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrating, of matter and of spirit. Man and woman finds Union within himself only in the union of his female and his male polarity. This polarity is the basis for all creativity. The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature, not only as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions: that of receiving and that of penetrating. It is the polarity of the earth and Rain, of the river and the ocean, of Night and Day, of Darkness and Light, of matter and spirit.

The problem of the male-female polarity leads to some further discussion on the subject matter of love and sex. Freud made the error of seeing in love exclusively the expression or a sublimation of the sexual Instinct rather than recognizing that the sexual desire is one manifestation of the need for love and Union. But Freud's error goes deeper. In line with his physiological materialism, he sees in the sexual Instinct the result of a chemically produced tension in the body which is painful and for Relief the aim of the sexual desire is the removal of this painful tension. Sexual satisfaction lies in the accomplishment of this removal. This view has its validity to the extent that the sexual desire operates in the same fashion as hunger or thirst do. When the organism is undernourished, sexual desire in this concept is an itch, sexual satisfaction the removal of the itch. In fact, as far as this concept of sexuality is concerned, masturbation would be the ideal sexual satisfaction.

What Freud paradoxically enough ignores is the psychobiological aspect of sexuality: the masculine-feminine polarity and the desire to bridge this polarity by Union. This curious error was probably facilitated by Freud's extreme patriarchalism, which led him to the assumption that sexuality per se is masculine, that the libido has regly a masculine nature regardless of whether it is the libido in a man or in a woman. Sexual attraction between the Sexes is only partly motivated by the need for removal of tension; it is mainly the need for Union with the other sexual pole. In fact, erotic attraction is by no means only expressed in sexual attraction. There is masculinity and femininity in character as well as in sexual function. The masculine character can be defined as having the qualities of penetration, guidance, activity, discipline, and adventurousness. The feminine character by the qualities of productive receptiveness, protection, realism, endurance, motherliness. It must always be kept in mind that in each individual both characteristics are blended, but with the prance of those appertaining to his or her sex.

Very often, if the masculine character traits of a man are weakened because emotionally he has remained a child, he will try to compensate for this lack by the exclusive emphasis on his male role in sex. The result is the Don Juan who needs to prove his male prowess in sex because he is unsure of his masculinity in a characterological sense. When the paralysis of masculinity is more extreme, sadism becomes the perverted substitute for masculinity. If the feminine sexuality is weakened or perverted, it is transformed into masochism or possessiveness.

Freud has been criticized for his overevaluation of sex. This criticism was often prompted by the wish to remove an element from Freud's system which aroused criticism and hostility among conventionally minded people. Indeed, in his time, Freud's theory had a challenging and revolutionary character. But what was true around 1900 is not true anymore. Almost 90 years later, the sexual Moray have changed so much that Freud's theories are not any longer shocking to the Western middle classes. My criticism of Freud's theory is not that he overemphasized sex, but his failure to understand sex deeply enough. He took the first step in discovering the significance of interpersonal passions. In accordance with his philosophic premises, he explained them physiologically. In the further development of psychoanalysis, it is necessary to correct and deepen Freud's concept by translating Freud's insights from the physiological into the biological and existential dimension.

[Music]

Love Between Parent and Child. The infant at the moment of birth would feel the fear of dying if a gracious fate did not preserve it from any awareness of the anxiety involved in the separation from the mother and from intrauterine existence. Even after being born, the infant is hardly different from what it was before birth. It cannot recognize objects; it is not yet aware of itself and of the world as being outside of itself. It only feels the positive stimulation of warmth and food, and it does not yet differentiate warmth and food from its source. Mother is warmth; mother is food; mother is the euphoric state of satisfaction and security. Mother's Love Is Bliss, is peace. It need not be acquired; it need not be deserved. But there is a negative side too to the unconditional quality of Mother's Love. Not only does it not need to be deserved, it also cannot be acquired, produced, controlled. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there, it is as if all Beauty had gone out of life, and there is nothing I can do to create it.

Closely related to the development of the capacity of Love is the development of the object of love. The first months and years of the child are those where his closest attachment is to the mother, but daily he becomes more independent. He learns to walk, to talk, to explore the world on his own. The relationship to Mother loses some of its vital significance, and instead, the relationship to father becomes more and more important. In order to understand this shift from mother to Father, we must consider the essential differences in quality between motherly and fatherly love.

Motherly love, by its very nature, is unconditional. Mother loves the newborn infant because it is her child, not because the child has fulfilled any specific condition or lived up to any specific expectation. No wonder that we all cling to the longing for motherly love as children and also as adults. Most children are lucky enough to receive motherly love. As adults, the same longing is much more difficult to fulfill. In the most satisfactory development, it remains a component of normal erotic love. Often it finds expression in religious forms, more often in neurotic forms.

The relationship to father is quite different. Mother is the home we come from; she is nature, soil, the Ocean. Father does not represent any such natural home. He has little connection with the child in the first years of its life, and his importance for the child in this early period cannot be compared with that of mother. But while father does not represent the natural world, he represents the other pole of human existence: the world of thought, of man-made things, of Law and Order, of discipline, of Travel and Adventure. Father is the one who teaches the child, who shows him the road into the world.

Closely related to this function is one which is connected with socioeconomic development. When private property came into existence and when private property could be inherited by one of the sons, father began to look for that son to whom he could leave his property. Naturally, that was the one whom father thought best fitted to become his successor, the son who was most like him and consequently whom he liked the most. Fatherly love is conditional love. Its principle is: "I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me." In conditional fatherly love, we find, as with unconditional motherly love, a negative and a positive aspect. The negative aspect is the very fact that fatherly love has to be deserved, that it can be lost if one does not do what is expected. In the nature of fatherly Love Lies the fact that obedience becomes the main virtue, that disobedience is the main sin, sin and its punishment the withdrawal of fatherly love. The positive side is equally important. Since his love is conditioned, I can do something to acquire it; I can work for it. His love is not outside my control as motherly love is.

The mother's and the father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs. The infant needs mother's unconditional love and care, physiologically as well as psychically. The child after six begins to need Father's love, his authority and guidance. Mother has the function of making him secure in life; father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him. In the ideal case, mother's love does not try to prevent the child from growing up, does not try to put a premium on helplessness. Mother should have faith in life, hence not be over anxious and thus not infect the child with her anxiety. Part of her life should be the wish that the child become independent and eventually separate from her. Father's love should be guided by principles and expectations; it should be patient and tolerant rather than threatening and authoritarian. It should give the growing child an increasing sense of competence and eventually permit him to become his own authority and to dispense with that of father.

Father eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. If he would only retain his fatherly conscience, he would become harsh and inhuman. If he would only retain his motherly conscience, he would be apt to lose judgment and to hinder himself and others in their development. In this development from mother-centered to father-centered attachment and their eventual synthesis lies the basis for mental health and the achievement of maturity. In the failure of this development lies the basic cause for Neurosis.

One cause for neurotic development can lie in the fact that a boy has a loving but overindulgent or domineering mother and a weak and uninterested father. In this case, he may remain fixed at an early mother attachment and develop into a person who is dependent on mother, feels helpless, has the strivings characteristic of the receptive person, that is, to receive, to be protected, to be taken care of, and who has the lack of fatherly qualities: discipline, Independence, and ability to master Life by himself. He may try to find mothers in everybody, sometimes in women and sometimes in men in a position of authority and power.

If, on the other hand, the mother is cold, unresponsive, and domineering, he may either transfer the need for motherly protection to his father and subsequent father figure, in which case the end result is similar to the former case, or he will develop into a one-sidedly father oriented person, completely given to the principles of law, order, and authority, and lacking in the ability to expect or to receive unconditional love. This development is further intensified if the father is authoritarian and at the same time strongly attached to the son.

What is characteristic of all these neurotic developments is the fact that one principle, the fatherly or the motherly, fails to develop, or, and this is the case in the more severe neurotic development, that the roles of mother and father become confused, both with regard to persons outside and with regard to these roles within the person. Further examination may show that certain types of neurosis, like obsessional Neurosis, develop more on the basis of a one-sided father attachment, while others, like hysteria, alcoholism, inability to assert oneself and to cope with life realistically, and depressions, result from mother-centeredness.

[Music]

The Objects of Love. Love is not primarily a

Relationship to a specific person, it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody else except the loved person.

This is the same fallacy which we have already mentioned above because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul. One believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who instead of learning the art claims that he is just to wait for the right object and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

If I truly love one person, I love all persons. I love the world. I love life. If I can say to somebody else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody. I love through you the world. I love in you also myself." Saying that love is an orientation which refers to all and not to one does not imply, however, the idea that there are no differences between various types of love which depend on the kind of object which is loved.

Brotherly Love

The most fundamental kind of love which underlies all types of love is Brotherly Love. By this I mean the sense of responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further his life. This is the kind of love the Bible speaks of when it says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Brotherly Love is love for all human beings. It is characterized by its very lack of exclusiveness. If I have developed the capacity for love, then I cannot help loving my brothers.

In Brotherly Love there is the experience of Union with all men, of human solidarity, of human atonement. Brotherly Love is based on the experience that we all are one. The differences in talents, intelligence, knowledge are negligible in comparison with the identity of the human core common to all men. In order to experience this identity, it is necessary to penetrate from the peripheral to the core. If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences, that which separate us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our Brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center instead of that from periphery to periphery is Central relatedness.

Brotherly Love is love between equals. But indeed, even as equals, we are not always equal. Inasmuch as we are human, we are all in need of help; today I, tomorrow you. Love of the helpless one, love of the poor and the stranger are the beginning of Brotherly Love. To love one's flesh and blood is no achievement. The animal loves its young and cares for them. The helpless one loves his master since his life depends on him. The child loves his parents since he needs them. Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose love begins to unfold.

Motherly Love

We have already dealt with the nature of motherly love, but one important addition must be made here. Affirmation of the child's life has two aspects. One is the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preservation of the child's life and his growth. The other aspect goes further than mere preservation; it is the attitude which instills in the child a love for living, which gives him the feeling, "It is good to be alive. It is good to be a little boy or girl. It is good to be on this Earth."

In biblical symbolism, the promised land is always a mother symbol. It is described as flowing with milk and honey. Milk is the symbol of the first aspect of love, that of care and affirmation. Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, the love for it, and the happiness in being alive. Most mothers are capable of giving milk, but only a minority of giving honey too. In order to be able to give honey, a mother must not only be a good mother but a happy person, and this aim is not achieved by many.

The effect on the child can hardly be exaggerated. Mother love for life is as infectious as her anxiety. Both attitudes have a deep effect on the child's whole personality. One can distinguish indeed among children and adults those who got only milk and those who got milk and honey.

In contrast to Brotherly Love and Erotic Love, which are love between equals, the relationship of mother and child is by its very nature one of inequality, where one needs all the help and the other gives it. It is for this altruistic, unselfish character that motherly love has been considered the highest kind of love and the most sacred of all emotional bonds. It seems, however, that the real achievement of motherly love lies not in the mother's love for the small infant but in her love for the growing child. It must emerge from the mother's womb, from the mother's breast; it must eventually become a completely separate human being. The very essence of motherly love is to care for the child's growth, and that means to want the child's separation from herself.

Here lies the basic difference to Erotic Love. In Erotic Love, two people who were separate become one. In Motherly Love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation. It is only at this stage that motherly love becomes such a difficult task that it requires unselfishness, the ability to give everything and to want nothing but the happiness of the loved one. It is also at this stage that many mothers fail in their task of motherly love. The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a loving mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.

Motherly love for the growing child, love which wants nothing for oneself, is perhaps the most difficult form of love to be achieved, and all the more deceptive because of the ease with which a mother can love her small infant. But just because of this difficulty, a woman can be a truly loving mother only if she can love if she is able to love her husband, other children, strangers, all human beings. The woman who is not capable of love in this sense can be an affectionate mother as long as the child is small, but she cannot be a loving mother. The test of which is the willingness to bear separation and even after the separation to go on loving.

Erotic Love

Brotherly Love is love among equals. Motherly Love is love for the helpless. Different as they are from each other, they have in common that they are by their very nature not restricted to one person. If I love my brother, I love all my brothers. If I love my child, I love all my children. No, beyond that, I love all children, all all that are in need of my help.

In contrast to both types of love is Erotic Love. It is the craving for complete Fusion, for Union with one other person. It is by its very nature exclusive and not Universal. It is also perhaps the most deceptive form of love there is. First of all, it is often confused with the explosive experience of falling in love, the sudden collapse of the barriers which existed until that moment between two strangers. But as was pointed out before, this experience of sudden intimacy is by its very nature short-lived. After the stranger has become an intimately known person, there are no more barriers to be overcome, no more sudden closeness to be achieved. The loved person becomes as well known as oneself, or perhaps I should better say, as little known. For most people, their own person as well as others is soon explored and soon exhausted for them.

Intimacy is established primarily through sexual contact. Since they experience the separateness of the other person primarily as physical separateness, physical Union means overcoming separateness. Beyond that, there are other factors which to many people denote the overcoming of separateness: to speak of one's own personal life, one's hope and anxieties, to show oneself with one's childlike or childish aspects, to establish a common interest visa vie the world. All this is taken as overcoming separateness. Even to show one's anger, one's hate, one's complete lack of inhibition is taken for intimacy. And this may explain the perverted attraction married couples often have for each other who seem intimate only when they are in bed or when they give vent to their mutual hate and rage.

But all these types of closeness tend to become reduced more and more as time goes on. The consequence is one seeks love with a new person, with a new stranger. Again the stranger is transformed into an intimate person. Again the experience of falling in love is exhilarating and intense, and again it slowly becomes less and less intense and ends in the wish for a new conquest, a new love, always with the illusion that the new love will be different from the earlier ones. These illusions are greatly helped by the deceptive character of sexual desire. Sexual desire aims at fusion and is by no means only a physical appetite, the relief of a painful tension. But sexual desire can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to conquer or be conquered, by vanity, by the wish to hurt and even to destroy, as much as it can be stimulated by love. It seems that sexual desire can easily blend with and be stimulated by any strong emotion of which love is only one. Because sexual desire is in the minds of most people coupled with the idea of love, they are easily misled to conclude that they love each other when they want each other physically.

Love can inspire the wish for sexual Union. In this case, the physical relationship is lacking in greediness, in a wish to conquer or to be conquered, but is blended with tenderness. If the desire for physical Union is not stimulated by love, if Erotic Love is not also Brotherly Love, it never leads to Union in more than an orgiastic, transitory sense. Sexual attraction creates for the moment the illusion of Union, yet without love, this Union leaves strangers as far apart as they were before. Sometimes it makes them ashamed of each other or even makes them hate each other because when the illusion is gone, they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before.

Tenderness is by no means, as Freud believed, a sublimation of the sexual instinct; it is the direct outcome of Brotherly Love and exists in physical as well as in non-physical forms of love. In Erotic Love, there is an exclusiveness which is lacking in Brotherly Love and Motherly Love. Frequently, the exclusiveness of Erotic Love is misinterpreted as meaning possessive attachment. One can often find two people in love with each other who feel no love for anybody else. They are two people who identify themselves with each other, who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two. They have the experience of overcoming aloneness, yet since they are separated from the rest of mankind, they remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves. Their experience of Union is an illusion.

Erotic Love is exclusive, but it loves in the other person all of mankind, all that is alive. It is exclusive only in the sense that I confuse myself fully and intensely with one person only. Erotic Love excludes the love for others only in the sense of erotic fusion, full commitment in all aspects of life, but not in the sense of deep Brotherly Love. Erotic Love, if it is love, has one premise: that I love from the essence of my being and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical; we are all part of one; we are one. This being so, it should not make any difference whom we love.

Love should be essentially an act of will, of decision to commit my life completely to that of one other person. This is indeed the rationale behind the idea of the insolubility of marriage, as it is behind the many forms of traditional marriage in which the two partners never choose each other but are chosen for each other and yet are expected to love each other. In contemporary Western culture, this idea appears altogether false. Love is supposed to be the outcome of a spontaneous emotional reaction, of suddenly being gripped by an irresistible feeling. In this view, one sees only the peculiarities of the two individuals involved and not the fact that all men are part of Adam and all women part of Eve.

One neglects to see an important factor in Erotic Love: that of will. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling; it is a decision. It is a judgment. It is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever when my act does not involve judgment and decision? Taking these views into account, one may arrive at the position that love is exclusively an act of will and commitment, and that therefore, fundamentally, it does not matter who the two persons are, whether the marriage was arranged by others or the result of individual choice. Once the marriage is concluded, the act of will should guarantee the continuation of love.

This view seems to neglect the paradoxical character of human nature and of Erotic Love. We are all one, yet every one of us is a unique, unduplicable entity. In our relationships to others, the same paradox is repeated. Inasmuch as we are all one, we can love everybody in the same way, in the sense of Brotherly Love. But inasmuch as we are all also different, Erotic Love requires certain specific, highly individual elements which exist between some people but not between all. Both views then, that of Erotic Love as completely individual attraction, unique between two specific persons, as well as the other view that Erotic Love is nothing but an act of will, are true, or as it may be put more aptly, the truth is neither this nor that. Hence, the idea of a relationship which can be easily dissolved if one is not successful with it is as erroneous as the idea that under no circumstance must the relationship be dissolved.

Self Love

While it raises no objection to apply the concept of love to various objects, it is a widespread belief that while it is virtuous to love others, it is sinful to love oneself. It is assumed that to the degree to which I love myself, I do not love others; that self-love is the same as selfishness. Freud speaks of self-love in psychiatric terms, but nevertheless, his value judgment is: self-love is the same as narcissism, the turning of the libido toward oneself. Narcissism is the earliest stage in human development, and the person who in later life has returned to this narcissistic stage is incapable of love. In the extreme case, he is insane.

Freud assumes that love is the manifestation of libido, and that the libido is either turned toward others (love) or toward oneself (self-love). Love and self-love are thus mutually exclusive in the sense that the more there is of one, the less there is of the other. If self-love is bad, it follows that unselfishness is virtuous. These questions arise: Does psychological observation support the thesis that there is a basic contradiction between love for oneself and love for others? Is love for oneself the same phenomenon as selfishness, or are they opposites? Furthermore, is the selfishness of modern man really a concern for himself as an individual with all his intellectual, emotional, and sensual potentialities? Has he not become an appendage of his socioeconomic role? Is his selfishness identical with self-love, or is it not caused by the very lack of it?

The logical fallacy in the notion that love for others and love for oneself are mutually exclusive should be stressed. If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue and not a vice to love myself, since I am a human being too. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other human being. We have come now to the basic psychological premises on which the conclusions of our argument are built. Generally, these premises are as follows: The attitudes toward others and toward ourselves, far from being contradictory, are basically conjunctive. With regard to the problem under discussion, this means love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. To love somebody is the actualization and concentration of the power to love. The basic affirmation contained in love is directed toward the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities. Love of one person implies love of man as such. From this, it follows that my own self must be as much an object of my love as another person. The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth, freedom is rooted in one's capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too. If he can love only others, he cannot love at all.

Granted that love for oneself and for others in principle is conjunctive, how do we explain selfishness which obviously excludes any genuine concern for others? The selfish person is interested only in himself, wants everything for himself, feels no pleasure in giving but only in taking. The world outside is looked at only from the standpoint of what he can get out of it. He lacks interest in the needs of others and respect for their dignity and integrity. He can see nothing but himself. He judges everyone and everything from its usefulness to him. He is basically unable to love. Does this not prove that concern for others and concern for oneself are unavoidable alternatives? This would be so if selfishness and self-love were identical, but that assumption is the very fallacy which has led to so many mistaken conclusions concerning our problem. Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much, but too little. In fact, he hates himself. This lack of fondness and care for himself, which is only one expression of his lack of productiveness, leaves him empty and frustrated. He is necessarily unhappy and anxiously concerned to snatch from life the satisfaction which he blocks himself from attaining. He seems to care too much for himself, but actually, he only makes an unsuccessful attempt to cover up and compensate for his failure to care for his real self.

Freud holds that the selfish person is narcissistic, as if he had withdrawn his love from others and turned it toward his own person. It is true that selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. This is borne out by psychoanalytic experience with neurotic unselfishness, a symptom of neurosis observed in not a few people who usually are troubled not by this symptom but by others connected with it, like depression, tiredness, inability to work, failure in love relationships, and so on. Not only is unselfishness not felt as a symptom, it is often the one redeeming character trait on which such people pride themselves. The unselfish person does not want anything for himself; he lives only for others, is proud that he does not consider himself important. He is puzzled to find that in spite of his unselfishness, he is unhappy and that his relationships to those closest to him are unsatisfactory. This person can be cured only if his unselfishness too is interpreted as a symptom along with the others, so that his lack of productiveness, which is at the root of both his unselfishness and his other troubles, can be corrected.

The nature of unselfishness becomes particularly apparent in its effect on others, and most frequently in our culture, in the effect the unselfish mother has on her children. She believes that by her unselfishness, her children will experience what it means to be loved and to learn in turn what it means to love. The effect of her unselfishness, however, does not at all correspond to her expectations. The children do not show the happiness of persons who are convinced that they are loved; they are anxious, tense, afraid of mother's disapproval, and anxious to live up to her expectations. Usually, they are affected by their mother's hidden hostility toward life, which they sense rather than recognize clearly, and eventually, they become imbued with it themselves. Altogether, the effect of the unselfish mother is not too different from that of the selfish one; indeed, it is often worse because the mother's unselfishness prevents the children from criticizing her. They are put under the obligation not to disappoint her; they are taught, under the mask of virtue, dislike for life.

If one has a chance to study the effect of a mother with genuine self-love, one can see that there is nothing more conducive to giving a child the experience of what love, joy, and happiness are than being loved by a mother who loves herself. These ideas on self-love cannot be summarized better than by quoting Meister Eckhart on this topic: "If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself. But if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person, and that person is both God and man. Thus, he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally."

Love of God

It has been stated above that the basis for our need to love lies in the experience of separateness and the resulting need to overcome the anxiety of separateness by the experience of Union. The religious form of love, that which is called the love of God, is psychologically speaking not different. It springs from the need to overcome separateness and to achieve Union. In fact, the love of God has as many different qualities and aspects as the love of man, and to a large extent, we find the same differences in all theistic religions, whether they are polytheistic or monotheistic.

God stands for the highest value, the most desirable good. Hence, the specific meaning of God depends on what is the most desirable good for a person. The understanding of the concept of God must therefore start with an analysis of the character structure of the person who worships God.

The development of the human race, as far as we have any knowledge of it, can be characterized as the emergence of man from nature, from mother, from the bonds of blood and soil. In the beginning of human history, man, though thrown out of the original Unity with nature, still clings to these primary bonds. He finds his security by going back or holding on to these primary bonds. He still feels identified with a world of animals and trees and tries to find Unity by remaining one with the natural world. Many primitive religions bear witness to this stage of development: an animal is transformed into a totem, one wears animal masks in the most solemn religious acts or in war, one worships an animal as God.

At a later stage of development, when human skill has developed to the point of artisan and artistic skill, when man is not dependent anymore exclusively on the gifts of nature, the fruit he finds and the animal he kills, man transforms the product of his own hand into a god. This is the stage of the worship of Idols made of clay, silver, or gold. Man projects his own powers and skills into the things he makes and thus, in an alienated fashion, worships his prowess, his possessions.

At a still later stage, man gives his Gods the form of human beings. It seems that this can happen only when he has become still more aware of himself and when he has discovered man as the highest and most dignified thing in the world. In this phase of anthropomorphic God worship, we find a development in two dimensions: the one refers to the female or male nature of the Gods, the other to the degree of maturity which man has achieved and which determines the nature of his Gods and the nature of his love of them.

Let us first speak of the development from mother-centered to father-centered religions. There can be little doubt that there was a matriarchal phase of religion preceding the patriarchal one, at least in many cultures. In the matriarchal phase, the highest being is the mother; she is the goddess; she is also the authority in family and society. In order to understand the essence of matriarchal religion, we have only to remember what has been said about the essence of motherly love. Since mother loves her children because they are her children and not because they are good or obedient or fulfill her wishes and commands, Mother's Love is based on equality. All men are equal because they all are children of a mother, because they all are children of Mother Earth.

The next stage of human evolution, the only one of which we have thorough knowledge and do not need to rely on inferences and reconstruction, is the patriarchal phase. In this phase, the mother is dethroned from her supreme position, and the father becomes the Supreme Being in religion as well as in society. The nature of fatherly love is that he makes demands, establishes principles and laws, and that his love for the son depends on the obedience of the latter to these demands. He likes best the son who is most like him, who is most obedient, and who is best fitted to become his successor as the inheritor of his possessions. As a consequence, patriarchal society is hierarchical; the equality of the brothers gives way to competition and mutual strife.

Whether we think of the Indian, Egyptian, or Greek cultures, or of the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic religions, we are in the middle of a patriarchal world with its male Gods, over whom one chief god reigns, or where all gods have been eliminated with the exception of the one, the God. However, since the wish for Mother's Love cannot be eradicated from the hearts of man, it is not surprising that the figure of the loving mother could never be fully driven out from the pantheon. In the Jewish religion, the mother aspects of God are reintroduced, especially in the various currents of mysticism. In the Catholic religion, mother is symbolized by the Church and by the Virgin. Even in Protestantism, the figure of mother has not been entirely eradicated.

I had to discuss this difference between the matriarchal and the patriarchal elements in religion in order to show that the character of the love of God depends on the respective weight of the matriarchal and the patriarchal aspects of religion. The patriarchal aspect makes me love God like a father. I assume he is just and strict, that he punishes and rewards, and eventually that he will elect me as his favorite son. In the matriarchal aspect of religion, I love God as an all-embracing mother. I have faith in her love that no matter whether I am poor and powerless, no matter whether I have sinned, she will love me; she will not prefer any other of her children to me. Whatever happens to me, she will rescue me, will save me, will forgive me.

Needless to say, my love for God and God's love for me cannot be separated. If God is a father, he loves me like a son, and I love him like a father. If God is Mother, her love and my love are determined by this fact. This difference between the motherly and the fatherly aspects of the love of God is, however, only one factor in determining the nature of this love. The other factor is the degree of maturity reached by the individual, hence in his concept of God and in his love for God.

Since the evolution of the human race shifted from a mother-centered to a father-centered structure of society as well as of religion, we can trace the development of a maturing love mainly in the development of patriarchal religion. In the beginning of this development, we find a despotic, jealous God who considers man, whom he created, as his property and is entitled to do with him whatever he pleases. This is the phase of religion in which God drives man out of paradise lest he eat from the Tree of Knowledge and thus could become God himself. This is the phase in which God decides to destroy the human race by the flood because none of them pleases him with the exception of the favorite son, Noah. This is the phase in which God demands from Abraham that he kill his only, his beloved son Isaac to prove his love for God by the act of ultimate obedience.

But simultaneously, a new phase begins. God makes a covenant with Noah in which he promises never to destroy the human race again, a covenant by which he is bound himself. Not only is he bound by his promises, he is also bound by his own principle, that of justice. And on this basis, God must yield to Abraham's demand to spare Sodom if there are at least 10 just men. But the development goes further than transforming God from the figure of a despotic tribal chief into a loving father, into a father who himself is bound by the principles which he has postulated. It goes in the direction of transforming God from the figure of a father into a symbol of his principles, those of Justice, Truth, and Love. God is Truth. God is Justice. In this development, God ceases to be a person, a man, a father; he becomes the symbol of the principle of unity behind the manifoldness of phenomena, of the vision of the flower which will grow from the spiritual seed within man.

God cannot have a name; a name always denotes a thing or a person, something finite. How can God have a name if he is not a person, not a thing? The prohibition to make any image of God, to pronounce his name in vain, eventually to pronounce his name at all, aims at the goal of freeing man from the idea that God is a father, that he is a person. In the subsequent theological development, the idea is carried further in the principle that one must not even give God any positive attribute. To say of God that he is wise, strong, good implies again that he is a person. The most I can do is to say what God is not, to state negative attributes, to postulate that he is not limited, not unkind, not unjust. The more I know what God is not, the more knowledge I have of God.

Following the maturing idea of monotheism in its further consequences can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God's name at all, not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology: the nameless one, an inexpressible stammer referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal Universe, the ground of all existence. God becomes Truth, Love, Justice. God is I, inasmuch as I am human.

The God of Abraham can be loved or feared as a father, sometimes his forgiveness, sometimes his anger being the dominant aspect. Inasmuch as God is the father, I am the child. I still claim that there must be a father who rescues me, who watches me, who punishes me, a father who likes me when I am obedient, who is flattered by my praise and angry because of my disobedience. Quite obviously, the majority of people have in their personal development not overcome this infantile stage, and hence the belief in God. To most people, it is the belief in a helping father, a childish illusion.

In spite of the fact that this concept of religion has been overcome by some of the great teachers of the human race and by a minority of men, it is still the dominant form of religion. The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea, does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God. He does not love God as a child loves his father or his mother. He has acquired the humility of sensing his limitation to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God. God becomes to him a symbol in which man, at an early stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man is striving for: the realm of the spiritual world, of love, truth, and justice. He has faith in the principles which God represents. He thinks truth, lives love and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable inasmuch as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever fuller unfolding of his human powers as the only reality that matters, as the only object of ultimate concern. And eventually, he does not speak about God, nor even mention his name.

To love God, if you were going to use the word, would mean then to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which God stands for in oneself. We can return now to an important parallel between the love for one's parents and the love for God. The child starts out by being attached to his mother as the ground of all being. He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his affections, fathering being a guiding principle for thought and action. In this stage, he is motivated by the need to acquire father's praise and to avoid his displeasure.

In the stage of fullness maturity, he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers. He has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother. He is father and mother. In the history of the human race, we see and can anticipate the same development: from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and Justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.

From these considerations, it follows that the love for God cannot be separated from the love for one's parents. If a person does not emerge from incestuous attachment to mother, clan, man, nation; if he retains the childish dependence on a punishing and rewarding father or any other authority, he cannot develop a more mature love for God. Then his religion is that of the earlier phase of religion, in which God was experienced as an all-protective mother or a punishing, rewarding father.

One thing is certain: the nature of his love for God corresponds to the nature of his love for man. And furthermore, the real quality of his love for God and man often is unconscious, covered up, and rationalized by a more mature thought of what his love is. Love for man, furthermore, while directly embedded in his relations to his family, is in the last analysis determined by the structure of the society in which he lives. If the social structure is one of submission to authority, overt authority or the anonymous authority of the market or public opinion, his concept of God must be infantile and far from the mature concept the seeds of which are to be found in the history of monotheistic religion.

Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society

If love is a capacity of the mature productive character, it follows that the capacity to love in an individual living in any given culture depends on the influence this culture has on the character of the average person. If we speak about love in contemporary Western culture, we mean to ask whether the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit resulting from it are conducive to the development of love. To raise the question is to answer it in the negative. No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love, Brotherly Love, Motherly Love, and Erotic Love is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of Love.

Capitalistic society is based on the principle of political freedom on the one hand and of the market as the regulator of all economic and social relations on the other. The commodity market determines the conditions under which commodities are exchanged. The labor market regulates the acquisition and sale of labor. Both useful things and useful human energy and skill are transformed into commodities which are exchanged without the use of force and without fraud. Under the conditions of the market, shoes, useful and needed as they may be, have no economic value, exchange value, if there is no demand for them on the market. Human energy and skill are without exchange value if there is no demand for them under existing market conditions.

The owner of capital can buy labor and command it to work for the profitable investment of his capital. The owner of labor must sell it to capitalists under the existing market conditions unless he is to starve. This economic structure is reflected in a hierarchy of values: Capital commands labor; amassed things, that which is dead, are of superior value to labor, to human powers, to that which is alive. This has been the basic structure of capitalism since its beginning. But while it is still characteristic of modern capitalism, a number of factors have changed which give contemporary capitalism its specific qualities and which have a profound influence on the character structure of modern man.

As the result of the development of capitalism, we witness an ever-increasing process of centralization and concentration of capital. The large enterprises grow in size continuously; the smaller ones are squeezed out. The ownership of capital invested in these enterprises is more and more separated from the function of managing them. Hundreds of thousands of stockholders own the enterprise; a managerial bureaucracy, which is well paid but which does not own the enterprise, manages it. This bureaucracy is less interested in making maximum profits than in the expansion of the enterprise and in their own power.

The increasing concentration of capital and the emergence of a powerful managerial bureaucracy are paralleled by the development of the labor movement through the unionization of Labor. The individual worker does not have to bargain on the labor market by and for himself; he is united in big labor unions, also led by a powerful bureaucracy which represents him visa vie the industrial colossi. The initiative has been shifted, for better or worse, in the fields of capital as well as in those of labor, from the individual to the bureaucracy. An increasing number of people ceased to be dependent and become dependent on the managers of the great economic empires.

Another decisive feature resulting from this concentration of capital and characteristic of modern capitalism lies in the specific way of the organization of work. Vastly centralized enterprises with a radical division of labor lead to an organization of work where the individual loses his individuality, where he becomes an expendable cog in the machine. The human problem of modern capitalism can be formulated in this way: Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers, who want to consume more and more and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience, yet willing to be commanded to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction, who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.

What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd and not being different in thought, feeling, or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety, and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome.

Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness. First of all, the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry. Furthermore, by the satisfaction of buying ever new things and soon exchanging them for others.

Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well-fed, well-clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men. Guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as "When the individual feels, the community reels" or "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today," or as the crowning statement, "Everybody is Happy Nowadays." Man's happiness today consists in having fun; having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and taking in commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies – all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast. We are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones. Our 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 consumption.

The situation as far as love is concerned corresponds, as it has to by necessity, to this social character of modern man. Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their personality packages and hope for a fair bargain. One of the most significant expressions of love and especially of marriage with this alienated structure is the idea of the team. In any number of articles on happy marriage, the ideal described is that of the smoothly functioning team. This description is not too different from the idea of a smoothly functioning employee: he should be reasonably independent, cooperative, tolerant, and at the same time ambitious and aggressive. Thus, the marriage counselor tells us, the husband should understand his wife and be helpful; he should comment favorably on her new dress and on a tasty dish. She, in turn, should understand when he comes home tired and disgruntled; she should listen attentively when he talks about his business troubles and should not be angry but understanding when he forgets her birthday. All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well-oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a central relationship, but who treat each other with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better.

In this concept of Love and Marriage, the main emphasis is on finding a refuge from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness. In "love," one has found at last a haven from aloneness. One forms an alliance of two against the world, and this egoism, alas, is mistaken for love and intimacy. The emphasis on team spirit, mutual tolerance, and so forth is a relatively recent development. It was preceded in the years after the First World War by a concept of love in which mutual sexual satisfaction was supposed to be the basis for satisfactory love relations and especially for a happy marriage. It was believed that the reasons for the frequent unhappiness in marriage were to be found in that the marriage partners had not made a correct sexual adjustment. The reason for this fault was seen in the ignorance regarding correct sexual behavior, hence in the faulty sexual technique of one or both partners.

In order to cure this fault and to help the unfortunate couples who could not love each other, many books gave instructions and counsel concerning the correct sexual behavior and promised implicitly or explicitly that happiness and love would follow. The underlying idea was that love is the child of sexual pleasure and that if two people learn how to satisfy each other sexually, they will love each other. It fitted the general illusion of the time to assume that using the right techniques is the solution not only to technical problems of industrial production but of all human problems as well. One ignored the fact that the contrary of the underlying assumption is true: love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness, even the knowledge of the so-called sexual technique, is the result of love.

If aside from everyday observation, this thesis needed to be proved, such proof can be found in ample material of psychoanalytic data. The study of the most frequent sexual problems, frigidity in women and the more or less severe forms of psychic impotence in men, shows that the cause does not lie in a lack of knowledge of the right technique but in the inhibitions which make it impossible to love. Fear of or hatred for the other sex are at the bottom of those difficulties which prevent a person from giving himself completely, from acting spontaneously, from trusting the sexual partner in the immediacy and directness of physical closeness. If a sexually inhibited person can emerge from fear or hate and hence become capable of loving, his or her sexual problems are solved.

Solved if not, no amount of knowledge about sexual techniques will help. But while the data of psychoanalytic therapy point to the fallacy of the idea that knowledge of the correct sexual technique leads to sexual happiness and love, the underlying assumption that love is the concomitant of mutual sexual satisfaction was largely influenced by the theories of Freud. For Freud, love was basically a sexual phenomenon. The experience of brotherly love is, for Freud, an outcome of sexual desire.

But with the sexual instinct being transformed into an impulse with an inhibited aim, as far as the feeling of fusion, of oneness, ocean and feeling, which is the essence of mystical experience and the root of the most intense sense of union with one other person or with one's fellow men, is concerned, it was interpreted by Freud as a pathological phenomenon, as a regression to a state of an early limitless narcissism. It is only one step further that, for Freud, love is in itself an irrational phenomenon. The difference between irrational love and love as an expression of the mature personality does not exist for him. He pointed out in a paper on transference love that transference love is essentially not different from the normal phenomenon of love. Falling in love always verges on the abnormal, is always accompanied by blindness to reality, compulsiveness, and is a transference from love objects of childhood. Love as a rational phenomenon, as the crowning achievement of maturity, was to Freud no subject matter for investigation, since it had no real existence.

It is interesting to compare the concepts of Freud, which correspond to the spirit of capitalism as it existed, yet unbroken, around the beginning of this century, with the theoretical concepts of one of the most brilliant contemporary psychoanalysts, H.S. Sullivan. In Sullivan's psychoanalytic system, we find, in contrast to Freud's, a strict division between sexuality and love. In Sullivan's concept, the essence of love is seen in a situation of collaboration in which two people feel, "We play accordingly to the rules of the game to preserve our PR PR and feeling of superiority and merit." Just as Freud's concept of love is a description of the experience of the patriarchal male in terms of 19th-century capitalism, Sullivan's description refers to the experience of the alienated marketing personality of the 20th century. It is a description of an egotism adur of two people pooling their common interests and standing together against a hostile and alienated world. Love as mutual sexual satisfaction and love as teamwork and as a haven from aloneness are the two normal forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western society.

The socially patterned pathology of love. There are many individualized forms of the pathology of love which result in conscious suffering and which are considered neurotic by psychiatrists and an increasing number of laymen alike. Some of the more frequent ones are briefly described in the following examples of neurotic love.

One: One or both of the lovers have remained attached to the figure of a parent and transfer the feelings, expectations, and fears one once had toward father or mother to the loved person in adult life. The persons involved have never emerged from a pattern of infantile relatedness and seek for this pattern in their affective demands in adult life.

Two: Men who in their emotional development have remained stuck in an infantile attachment to mother. These men still feel like children; they want mother's protection, love, warmth, care, and admiration. They want mother's unconditional love, a love which is given for no reason other than that they need it, that they are mother's child, that they are helpless. Such men frequently are quite affectionate and charming if they try to induce a woman to love them, and even after they have succeeded in this. But their relationship to the woman, as in fact to all other people, remains superficial and irresponsible. Their aim is to be loved, not to love. There is usually a good deal of vanity in this type of man, more or less hidden grandiose ideas. If they have found the right woman, they feel secure, on top of the world, and can display a great deal of affection and charm, and this is the reason why these men are often so deceptive. But when, after a while, the woman does not continue to live up to their fantastic expectations, conflicts and resentments start to develop. If the woman is not always admiring them, if she makes claims for a life of her own, if she wants to be loved and protected herself, and in extreme cases, if she is not willing to condone his love affairs with other women or even have an admiring interest in them, the man feels deeply hurt and disappointed and usually rationalizes this feeling with the idea that the woman does not love him, is selfish, or is domineering.

In a more severe form of pathology, the fixation to mother is deeper and more irrational. On this level, the wish is not, symbolically speaking, to return to mother's protecting arms, nor to her nourishing breast, but to her all-receiving and all-destroying womb. If the nature of sanity is to grow out of the womb into the world, the nature of severe mental disease is to be attracted by the womb, to be sucked back into it, and that is to be taken away from life. This kind of fixation usually occurs in relation to mothers who, in the name of love, sometimes of duty, want to keep the child, the adolescent, the man within them. He should not be able to breathe but through them, not be able to love except on a superficial sexual level, degrading all other women. He should not be able to be free and independent, but an eternal or a criminal. This aspect of mother, the destructive, engulfing one, is the negative aspect of the mother figure. Mother can give life, and she can take life; she is the one to revive and the one to destroy; she can do miracles of love, and nobody can hurt more than she.

Three: A different form of neurotic pathology is to be found in cases where the main attachment is that to the father. A case in point is a man whose mother is cold and aloof, while his father, partly as a result of his wife's coldness, concentrates all his affection and interest on the son. He is a good father, but at the same time authoritarian. Whenever he is pleased with the son's conduct, he praises him, gives him presents, is affectionate. Whenever the son displeases him, he withdraws or scolds. The son, for whom the father's affection is the only one he has, becomes attached to father in a slavish way. His main aim in life is to please father, and when he succeeds, he feels happy, secure, and satisfied. But when he makes a mistake, fails, or does not succeed in pleasing father, he feels deflated, unloved, cast out. In later life, such a man will try to find a father figure to whom he attaches himself in a similar fashion. His whole life becomes a sequence of ups and downs depending on whether he has succeeded in winning father's praise. Such men are often very successful in their social careers, but in their relationships to women, they remain aloof and distant. The woman is of no central significance to them; they usually have a slight contempt for her, often masked as fatherly concern for a little girl.

Four: More complicated is the kind of neurotic disturbance in love occurring when parents do not love each other but are too restrained to quarrel or to indicate any signs of dissatisfaction outwardly. At the same time, remoteness makes them also unspontaneous in their relationship to their children. What a little girl experiences is an atmosphere of correctness, but one which never permits a close contact with either father or mother, and hence leaves the girl puzzled and afraid.

Five: Idolatrous love. If a person has not reached the level where he has a sense of identity of eyess, he tends to idolize the loved person. He is alienated from his own powers and projects them into the loved person, who is worshiped as the bearer of all love, all light, all bliss. In this process, he deprives himself of all sense of strength, loses himself in the loved one instead of finding himself. Since usually no person can in the long run live up to the expectations of her or his idolatrous worshipper, disappointment is bound to occur, and as a remedy, a new idol is sought for, sometimes in an unending circle. What is characteristic for this type of idolatrous love is at the beginning the intensity and suddenness of the love experience. This idolatrous love is often described as the true great love, but while it is meant to portray the intensity and depth of love, it only demonstrates the hung and despair of the idolator.

Six: Another form of pseudo love is what may be called sentimental love. Its essence lies in the fact that love is experienced only in fantasy and not in the here-and-now relationship to another person who is real. The most widespread form of this type of love is that to be found in the vicarious love satisfaction experienced by the consumer of screen pictures, magazine love stories, and love songs. All the unfulfilled desires for love, union, and closeness find their satisfaction in the consumption of these products. A man and a woman who, in relation to their spouses, are incapable of ever penetrating the wall of separateness are moved to tears when they participate in the happy or unhappy love story of the couple on the screen. For many couples, seeing these stories on the screen is the only occasion on which they experience love, not for each other, but together as spectators of other people's love. As long as love is a daydream, they can participate; as soon as it comes down to the reality of the relationship between two real people, they are frozen.

Seven: Still another form of neurotic love lies in the use of projective mechanisms for the purpose of avoiding one's own problems and being concerned with the defects and frailties of the loved person. Instead, individuals behave in this respect very much as groups, nations, or religions do. They have a fine appreciation for even the minor shortcomings of the other person and go blissfully ahead, ignoring their own, always busy trying to accuse or to reform the other person. If two people both do it, as is so often the case, the relationship of love becomes transformed into one of mutual projection. If I am domineering or indecisive or greedy, I accuse my partner of it, and depending on my character, I either want to cure him or to punish him. The other person does the same, and both thus succeed in ignoring their own problems and hence fail to undertake any steps which would help them in their own development.

Eight: Another form of projection is the projection of one's own problems on the children. When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children, the former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself and not by proxy, and the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.

One other frequent error must be mentioned here: the illusion, namely, that love means necessarily the absence of conflict. Just as it is customary for people to believe that pain and sadness should be avoided under all circumstances, they believe that love means the absence of any conflict. The conflicts of most people are actually attempts to avoid the real conflicts; they are disagreements on minor or superficial matters which, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to clarification or solution. Real conflicts between two people—those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong—are not destructive; they lead to clarification, they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength.

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this central experience is human reality; only here is aliveness; only here is the basis for love. 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. This is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned. This is the fruit by which love is recognized. Just as automatons cannot love each other, they cannot love God.

The disintegration of the love of God has reached the same proportions as the disintegration of the love of man. Religion allies itself with autosuggestion and psychotherapy to help man in his business activities, just as modern psychiatrists recommend happiness of the employee in order to be more appealing to the customers. Some ministers recommend love of God in order to be more successful. Make God your partner means to make God a partner in business rather than to become one with him in love, justice, and truth. Just as brotherly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote general director of Universe Incorporated. You know that he is there; he runs the show, although it would probably run without him too. You never see him, but you acknowledge his leadership while you are doing your part.

The practice of love. Having dealt with the theoretical aspect of the art of loving, we are now confronted with a much more difficult problem: that of the practice of the art of loving. Can anything be learned about the practice of an art except by practicing it? The difficulty of the problem is enhanced by the fact that most people today expect to be given prescriptions of how to do it yourself, and that means, in our case, to be taught how to love. To love, however, is a personal experience which everyone can only have by and for himself. The steps toward the goal can be practiced only by oneself. Yet, I believe that the discussion of the approaches may be helpful for the mastery of the art for those, at least, who have freed themselves from expecting prescriptions.

The practice of any art has certain general requirements. First of all, the practice of an art requires discipline. I shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way. Anything I do only if I am in the mood may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art. But the problem is not only that of discipline in the practice of the particular art, but it is that of discipline in one's whole life. The fact is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline outside the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy, to slouch, or, to use a nicer word, to relax. This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the work, he rebels, and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism, he has become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration. That concentration is a necessary condition for the mastery of an art is hardly necessary to prove; anyone who ever tried to learn an art knows this.

Yet, even more than self-discipline, concentration is rare in our culture. On the contrary, our culture leads to an unconcentrated and diffused mode of life, hardly paralleled anywhere else. You do many things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still without talking, smoking, reading, drinking is impossible for most people; they become nervous and fidgety and must do something with their mouth or their hands. Smoking is one of the symptoms of this lack of concentration; it occupies hand, mouth, eye, and nose.

A third factor is patience. Again, anyone who ever tried to master an art knows that patience is necessary if you want to achieve anything. If one is after quick results, one never learns an art. Yet, for modern man, patience is as difficult to practice as discipline and concentration. Our whole industrial system fosters exactly the opposite: quickness. All our machines are designed for quickness; the car and the airplane bring us quickly to our destination, and the quicker the better. The machine which can produce the same quantity in half the time is twice as good as the older and slower one. Of course, there are important economic reasons for this, but as in so many other aspects, human values have become determined by economic values. What is good for machines must be good for man, so goes the logic. Modern man thinks he loses something, time, when he does not do things quickly, yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except to kill it eventually.

A condition of learning any art is a supreme concern with the mastery of the art. If the art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn it; he will remain, at best, a good dant, but will never become a master. This condition is as necessary for the art of loving as for any other art. One more point must be made with regard to the general conditions of learning an art: one must learn a great number of other and often seemingly disconnected things before one starts with the art itself. An apprentice in carpentry begins by learning how to plane wood; an apprentice in the art of piano playing begins by practicing scales. With regard to the art of loving, this means that anyone who aspires to become a master in this art must begin by practicing discipline, concentration, and patience throughout every phase of his life.

How does one practice discipline? To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking, not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink, are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will, that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss if one stopped practicing it. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of our Western concept of discipline, as of every virtue, that its practice is supposed to be somewhat painful, and only if it is painful can it be good. The East has recognized long ago that that which is good for man, for his body and for his soul, must also be agreeable, even though at the beginning some resistance must be overcome.

Concentration is by far more difficult to practice in our culture, in which everything seems to act against the ability to concentrate. The most important step in learning concentration is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listening to the radio, smoking, or drinking. Indeed, to be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself, and this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be alone with himself will discover how difficult it is; he will begin to feel restless, fidgety, or even to sense considerable anxiety. He will be prone to rationalize his unwilling to go on with this practice by thinking that it has no value, is just silly, that it takes too much time, and so on and so on.

It would be helpful to practice a few very simple exercises, as for instance, to sit in a relaxed position, neither slouching nor rigid, to close one's eyes and to try to see a white screen in front of one's eyes and to try and remove all interfering pictures and thoughts. Then to try to follow one's breathing, not to think about it nor force it, but to follow it and, in doing so, to sense it. Furthermore, to try to have a sense of "I," "I" equals myself as the center of my powers, as the creator of my world. One should at least do such a concentration exercise every morning for 20 minutes, and if possible longer, and every evening before going to bed. Besides such exercises, one must learn to be concentrated in everything one does: in listening to music, in reading a book, in talking to a person, in seeing a view. The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing; the important as well as the unimportant things assume a new dimension of reality because they have one's full attention.

To learn concentration requires avoiding, as far as possible, trivial conversation. If two people talk about the growth of a tree they both know, or about the taste of the bread they have just eaten together, or about a common experience in their job, such conversation can be relevant, provided they experience what they are talking about and do not deal with it in an abstract way. On the other hand, a conversation can deal with matters of politics or religion and yet be trivial. This happens when the two people talk in clichés, when their hearts are not in what they are saying. I should add here that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company, I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also 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 cliché opinions instead of thinking. However, it is not always possible to avoid the company of such people, nor even necessary, if one does not react in the expected way (that is, in clichés and trivialities) but directly and humanly. One will often find that such people change their behavior, often helped by the surprise affected by the shock of the unexpected.

To be concentrated in relation to others means primarily to be able to listen. Most people listen to others or even give advice without really listening; they do not take the other person's talk seriously; they do not take their own answers seriously either. As a result, the talk makes them tired; they are under the illusion that they would be even more tired if they listened with concentration, but the opposite is true. Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake, although afterward natural and beneficial tiredness sets in, while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy while at the same time it makes it difficult to fall asleep at the end of a day.

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done while I am doing something right now. Needless to say, that concentration must be practiced most of all by people who love each other; they must learn to be close to each other while running away in the many ways in which this is customarily done. The beginning of the practice of concentration will be difficult; it will appear as if one could never achieve the aim that this implies the necessity to have patience. Need hardly be said; if one does not know that everything has its time and wants to force things, then indeed one will never succeed in becoming concentrated, nor in the art of loving.

One cannot learn to concentrate without becoming sensitive to oneself. Now, what does this mean? Should one think about oneself all the time? Analyze oneself? Or what? If we were to talk about being sensitive to a machine, there would be little difficulty in explaining what is meant. Anybody, for instance, who drives a car is sensitive to it; even a small, unaccustomed noise is noticed, and so is a small change in the pickup of the motor. In the same way, the driver is sensitive to changes on the road surface, to movements of the cars before and behind him. Yet, he is not thinking about all these factors; his mind is in a state of relaxed alertness, open to all relevant changes in the situation on which he is concentrated: that of driving his car safely.

If we look at the situation of being sensitive to another human being, we find the most obvious example in the sensitiveness and responsiveness of a mother to her baby. She notices certain bodily changes, demands, anxieties before they are overtly expressed; she wakes up because of her child's crying, where another and much louder sound would not waken her. All this means that she is sensitive to the manifestations of the child's life; she is not anxious or worried, but in a state of alert equilibrium, receptive to any significant communication coming from the child. In the same way, one can be sensitive toward oneself. One is aware, for instance, of a sense of tiredness or depression, and instead of giving into it and supporting it by depressive thoughts, which are always at hand, one asks oneself, "What happened? Why am I depressed?" The same is done by noticing when one is irritated or angry or tending to daydreaming or other escape activities. In each of these instances, the important thing is to be aware of them and not rationalize them in the thousand and one ways in which this can be done. Furthermore, to be open to our own inner voice, which will tell us, often rather immediately, why we are anxious, depressed, irritated.

The average person has a sensitivity toward his bodily processes; he notices changes or even small amounts of pain. This kind of bodily sensitivity is relatively easy to experience because most persons have an image of how it feels to be well. The same sensitivity toward one's mental processes is much more difficult because many people have never known a person who functions optimally. They take the psychic functioning of their parents and relatives or of the social group they have been born into as the norm, and as long as they do not differ from these, they feel normal and without interest in observing anything. There are many people, for instance, who have never seen a loving person or a person with integrity or courage or concentration. It is quite obvious that in order to be sensitive to oneself, one has to have an image of complete, healthy human functioning, and how is one to acquire such an experience if one has not had it in one's own childhood or later in life? There is certainly no simple answer to this question, but the question points to one very critical factor in our educational system. While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.

In contemporary capitalistic society, and the same holds true for Russian communism, the men suggested for admiration and emulation are everything but bearers of significant spiritual qualities. Those are essentially in the public eye who give the average man a sense of vicarious satisfaction: movie stars, important business or government figures. These are the models for ulation; their main qualification for this function is often that they have succeeded in making the news. If we should not succeed in keeping alive a vision of mature life, then indeed we are confronted with the probability that our whole cultural tradition will break down. This tradition is not primarily based on the transmission of certain kinds of knowledge, but of certain kinds of human traits. If the coming generations will not see these traits any more, a 5,000-year-old culture will break down, even if its knowledge is transmitted and further developed.

Thus far, I have discussed what is needed for the practice of any art. Now I shall discuss those qualities which are of specific significance for the ability to love. According to what I said about the nature of love, the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite poll to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are objectively and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.

All forms of psychosis show the inability to be objective to an extreme degree. For the insane person, the only reality that exists is that within him, that of his fears and desires. He sees the world outside as symbols of his inner world, as his creation. All of us do the same when we dream. In the dream, we produce, we stage dramas which are the expression of our wishes and fears, although sometimes also of our insight and judgment. And while we are asleep, we are convinced that the product of our dreams is as real as the reality which we perceive in our waking state. All of us have an unobjective view of the world, one which is distorted by our narcissistic orientation.

A woman, for instance, calls up the doctor saying she wants to come to his office that same afternoon. The doctor answers that he is not free this same afternoon but that he can see her the next day. Her answer is, "But doctor, I live only 5 minutes from your office." She cannot understand his explanation that it does not save him time, that for her the distance is so short. She experiences the situation narcissistically; since she saves time, he saves time. The only reality to her is she herself. How many parents experience the child's reactions in terms of his being obedient, of giving them pleasure, of being a credit to them, and so forth, instead of perceiving or even being interested in what the child feels for and by himself? How many husbands have a picture of their wives as being domineering because their own attachment to mother makes them interpret any demand as a restriction of their freedom? How many wives think their husbands are ineffective or stupid because they do not live up to a fantasy picture of a shining knight which they might have built up as children?

The lack of objectivity as far as foreign nations are concerned is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard, every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.

The faculty to think objectively is reason. The emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. If I want to learn the art of loving, I must strive for objectivity in every situation and become sensitive to the situations where I am not objective. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior as it is narcissistically distorted and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs, and fears. To have acquired the capacity for objectivity and reason is half the road to achieving the art of loving, but it must be acquired with regard to everybody with whom one comes in contact. If someone would want to reserve his objectivity for the loved person and think he can dispense with it in his relationship to the rest of the world, he will soon discover that he fails both here and there.

The ability to love depends on one's capacity to emerge from narcissism and from the incestuous fixation to mother and clan. It depends on our capacity to grow, to develop a productive orientation in our relationship toward the world and ourselves. This process of emergence, of birth, of waking up, requires one quality as a necessary condition: faith. The practice of the art of loving requires the practice of faith.

What is faith? Even to begin to understand the problem of faith, one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith. By irrational faith, I understand the belief which is based on one's submission to to irrational authority. In contrast, rational faith is a conviction which is rooted in one's own experience of thought or feeling. Rational faith is not primarily belief in something, but the quality of certainty and firmness which our convictions have.

The process of creative thinking in any field of human endeavor often starts with what may be called a rational vision, itself a result of considerable previous study, reflective thinking, and observation. When the scientist succeeds in gathering enough data or in working out a mathematical formulation to make his original vision highly plausible, he may be said to have arrived at a tentative hypothesis. A careful analysis of the hypothesis in order to discern its implications and the amassing of data which support it lead to a more adequate hypothesis and eventually, perhaps, to its inclusion in a wide-ranging theory. At every step from the conception of a rational vision to the formulation of a theory, faith is necessary: faith in the vision as a rationally valid aim to pursue, faith in the hypothesis as a likely and plausible proposition, and faith in the final theory, at least until a general consensus about its validity has been reached. This faith is rooted in one's own experience, in the confidence in one's power of thought, observation, and judgment. While irrational faith is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority say so, rational faith is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one's own productive observing and thinking, in spite of the majority's opinion.

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. Having faith in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this, I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same, that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change. In the same sense, we have faith in ourselves; we are aware of the existence of a self, of a core in our personality which is unchangeable and which persists throughout our life, in spite of varying circumstances and regardless of certain changes in opinions and feelings. It is this core which is the reality behind the word "I" and on which our conviction of our own identity is based. Unless we have faith in the persistence of our self, our feeling of identity is threatened, and we become dependent on other people, whose approval then becomes the basis for our feeling of identity. Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others because only he can be sure that he will be the same at a future time as he is today and therefore that he will feel and act as he now expects to.

Another meaning of having faith in a person refers to the faith we have in the potentialities of others. The most rudimentary form in which this faith exists is the faith which the mother has toward her newborn baby, that it will live, grow, walk, and talk. However, the development of the child in this respect occurs with such regularity that the expectation of it does not seem to require faith. It is different with those potentialities which can fail to develop: the child's potentiality to love, to be happy, to use his reason, and more specific potentialities like artistic gifts. They are the seeds which grow and become manifest if the proper conditions for their development are given, and they can be stifled if these are absent. One of the most important of these conditions is that the significant person in a child's life have faith in these potentialities.

The faith in others has its culmination in faith in mankind. Like the faith in the child, it is based on the idea that the potentialities of man are such that, given the proper conditions, he will be capable of building a social order governed by the principles of equality, justice, and love. Man has not yet achieved the building of such an order, and therefore the conviction that he can do so requires faith. But like all rational faith, this too is not wishful thinking but based upon the evidence of the past achievements of the human race and on the inner experience of each individual, on his own experience of reason and love. The basis of rational faith is productiveness. To live by our faith means to live productively. It follows that the belief in power, in the sense of domination and the use of power, are the reverse of faith. There is no rational faith in power; there is submission to it or, on the other part of those who have it, the wish to keep it. While to many power seems to be the most real of all things, the history of man has proved it to be the most unstable of all human achievements because of the fact that faith and power are mutually exclusive. All religions and political systems which originally are built on rational faith become corrupt and eventually lose what strength they have if they rely on power or ally themselves with it.

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith. To be loved and to love need courage; the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern and to take the jump and stake everything on these values. Is there anything to be practiced about faith and courage? Indeed, faith can be practiced at every moment. It takes faith to bring up a child; it takes faith to fall asleep; it takes faith to begin any work. But we all are accustomed to having this kind of faith: to stick to one's judgment about a person even if public opinion or some unforeseen facts seem to invalidate it; to stick to one's convictions even though they are unpopular. All this requires faith and courage. To take the difficulties, setbacks, and sorrows of life as a challenge which to overcome makes us stronger rather than as unjust punishment which should not happen to us requires faith and courage.

The practice of faith and courage begins with the small details of daily life. The first step is to notice where and when one loses faith, to look through the rationalizations which are used to cover up this loss of faith, to recognize where one acts in a cowardly way and again how one rationalizes it, to recognize how every betrayal of faith weakens one and how increased weakness leads to new betrayal and so on in a vicious circle. Then one will also recognize that while one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious, fear is that of loving. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce a love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

One attitude is basic for the practice of love activity. I have said before that by activity is not meant doing something, but an inner activity, the productive use of one's powers. Love is an activity. If I love, I am in a constant state of active concern with the loved person, but not only with him or her, for I shall become incapable of relating myself actively to the loved person if I am lazy, if I am not in a constant state of awareness, alertness, activity. Sleep is the only proper situation for inactivity; the state of awakeness is one in which laziness should have no place. The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake and half awake when asleep or when they want asleep. To be fully awake is the condition for not being bored or being boring, and indeed, not to be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving.

To be active in thought, feeling, with one's eyes and ears throughout the day, to avoid inner laziness, be it in the form of being receptive, hoarding, or plain wasting one's time, is an indispensable condition for the practice of the art of loving. 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.

The discussion of the art of loving cannot be restricted to the personal realm alone; it is inseparably connected with the social realm. For if to love means to have a loving attitude toward everybody, if love is a character trait, it must necessarily exist in one's relationship not only with one's family and friends but toward those with whom one is in contact through one's work, business, profession. Here, however, an important question arises: since our whole social and economic organization is based on each one seeking his own advantage, since it is governed by the principle of egotism tempered only by the ethical principle of fairness, how can one do business, how can one act within the frame of existing society and at the same time practice love? Does the latter not imply giving up all one's secular concerns and sharing the life of the poorest? Indeed, there are those who claim that only a martyr or a mad person can love in the world of today and that all discussion of love is nothing but preaching.

I am of the conviction that the answer of the absolute incompatibility of love and normal life is correct only in an abstract sense. The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible, but modern society, seen concretely, is a complex phenomenon. A salesman of a useless commodity, for instance, cannot function economically without lying. A skilled worker, a chemist, or a physician can. Similarly, a farmer, a worker, a teacher, and many a type of businessman can try to practice love without ceasing to function economically. Even if one recognizes the principle of capitalism as being incompatible with the principle of love, one must admit that capitalism is in itself a complex and constantly changing structure which still permits of a good deal of non-conformity and of personal latitude.

In saying this, however, I do not wish to imply that we can expect the present social system to continue indefinitely and at the same time to hope for the realization of the ideal of love for one's brother. People capable of love under the present system are necessarily the exceptions. Love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in in present-day Western Society, not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it.

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 changes in our social structure are necessary if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic marginal phenomenon. Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion; their aim is producing more and consuming more as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals; means have become ends. Man is an automaton, well-fed, well-clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place; the economic machine must serve him rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work rather than at best share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence but becomes one with it.

If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes relatively the development of love must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not preaching for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional individual phenomenon is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.