Love, as Fromm tells us, is what we are starved for. Love defines us; it is “the answer to the problem of human existence.”
If the culture is alienating, how shall we find what we long for: intimacy, passion, attunement, what Fromm calls “reunion by love”?


We are social creatures, made anxious by our separateness. The culture offers false and easy means for addressing our anxiety–through sameness. It invites us consume the same goods, work at the same jobs, adopt the same goals–defining ourselves through conformity and insignificant nuances of difference. But if we lack the courage to be individuals, we will never achieve love, since “love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity.”
For Fromm, love is rebellion against a commercial ideal. He has particular contempt for glossy magazine articles in which happy marriage looks like corporate middle management. The “smoothly functioning team,” he writes, “is the well-oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives.”
Text from Peter D. Kramer’s introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. Images by Banksy.
Notes
mashatupitsyn liked this
omgcolostomeboy liked this agameofme posted this