No doubt love occupied a central stage at several moments in your life. Perhaps the lack of it did.
In our quest for love we can be faced with hope, doubt, excitement, rejection, passion, wrong assumptions, idolization, sadness.
Where and how do we search for love ? It seems to me a primordial question. Or do we think we have to be lucky ? If so, our chances are perhaps not bigger than in the lottery.
Erich Fromm (1900-1980) is an internationally renowned German American psychologist.
Although he grew up in an orthodox Jewish family, he later chose a humanistic philosophy of life.
He emigrated in 1934 to New York because of the rise of national socialism in Germany.
In 1950 he moved to Mexico, where he would spend most of his life. The last six years he spend in Ticino in Switserland.
Already his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eva is very interesting. Erich Fromm knew very well the Talmud (he had also several rabbis in the family) and he came up with a new interpretation.
In Jewish tradition the Tree of Knowledge and the eating of its fruit represents the beginning of the mixture of good and evil together.
In catholic education I learned that Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying God.
Augustine later said that eating the fruit was not sinful. The fruit was created by God and thus good.
But the authority (in this case God) had told them not to eat the fruit and thus the sin was to disobey the authority.
If I understand Erich Fromm well, Adam and Eve started to develop their own moral values by taking independent action. They felt naked, ashamed and they had existential angst.
Conscious of themselves they were now confronted with a looming death in the future. They were however "free".
Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape.
I think freedom of will is incredibly healthy for a human being. Without it the value of your possibilities are shrinking considerably.
If you have to obey to a dictator (such as Hitler, Isis, Pol Pot), you no longer control yourself, the dictator does. Your choices are very limited, at best. The authoritarian force can also be a father or a mother, a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife and in our modern indulgent times our own children or grandchildren. Love can be far away in the family, even if the family members claim they love one another.
Another way of loosing your freedom is by living through the eyes of other people. You then replace your own ideals and dreams by the perception the society has as it should be. You lose yourself in the process. You no longer behave, think or speak as you wish. Your first goal is that others will like you or that you will impress them. The further you go in that direction the more you can lose yourself.
This applies to different levels of our society (work, love relationships, communities).
Eliminate other people is of course the most obvious way of escaping freedom.
"The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crashed by it" (= quote by Erich Fromm).
In 1956 he published "The art of loving". You can't become a master at playing the violin overnight.
The same applies to love. True humility, courage, faith and discipline are required to obtain satisfaction in love.
Those qualities do not abound in our modern society. Therefore the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement. Or, anyone can ask himself how many truly loving persons he has known ?
It seems to me if you do not love yourself, you are also doomed never to be loved by another one.
If you don't love your proper values, moral attitudes or if you hardly believe in yourself, how can you expect another person to love you ?
