Part I. Seven Underlying Themes
1. Maturity is growing beyond childish sense of entitlement and wish-fulfillment fantasies, like being famous, loved by everyone, getting revenge on people you’ve grown to hate over the years, living a life of nonstop excitement and pleasure.
2. Becoming an adult is a balancing act of independence and healthy dependence.
3. Maturity requires a radical re-definition of love, from pleasant sensation to a disciplined art form that must pervade and affect every aspect of your personality.
4. We are naturally hard-wired to be terrified, anxious, and lonely because we don’t live entirely by our instincts like other animals. We’re thinking animals who must grow up or not based on our powers of reason and thinking.
5. We are naturally prone to anxiety because, unlike animals, we are self-conscious and self-judging beings.
6. We are prone to looking for misguided ways to overcome our loneliness and self-doubt through destructive ways of connection.
7. We must practice love as a disciplined art or we will be slaves to loneliness, addiction, and emotional retardation to our grave. There is no middle-ground for Fromm. If we love and connect with others in a way that is authentic and preserves our integrity, we achieve a “heaven,” so to speak; if we remain shackled to our infantile notions of love and destructive ways of connection, we will be incurably lonely and insane, Fromm’s version of “hell.”
Part II False Ways of Finding Love
One. Being Loveable Doesn’t Work Because—
1. Popularity is based on fashion and imitation. Something is deemed cool or desirable in the marketplace of fashion for a time and then it cycles out. Therefore, popularity is like the stock market. What makes you popular today might make a nobody tomorrow. A popular red-head actress from the 1980s is now homeless in Torrance. I saw her at Penguins buying a frozen yogurt with pennies and she spilled her frozen yogurt all over my shoes while I was buying mine. Where’s all her friends now?
2. Even if your popularity game works, nobody really loves you. They’re simply trying to feed off the energy that you’ve created by imitating some popular fashion trend.
3. Popularity is built on a paradox: The more popular you are, the more lonely you are. Why is this so? Because popularity isn’t about intimacy or closeness or loyalty; it’s about being around people who are just a needy for popularity as you are. It’s all about image in the end.
4. Popularity is often built on a gimmick and a gimmick is bound to wear off: The sad case of a Paul McCartney look-alike in Bakersfield who now lives with his mother.
5. Too much popularity makes you go crazy because the human psyche can’t absorb being worshipped all the time. Something breaks down. We hear the stories of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. But then there’s the Rich Hamill story, with Tasmanian Devil, Tahiti, married a fat woman who looked like Tasmanian Devil, now he walks along a beach in Italy with nothing but a gold medallion around his neck.
Two. Find the “right person” to love doesn’t work because
1. You’re not looking inside yourself as the problem to your condition of loneliness. Instead, you’re looking to use someone as a prescription drug for your mental illness and whenever you venture into a relationship in which you use someone as a prescription medication for your psychological ailments, the relationship is doomed to become an embarrassing failure.
2. There’s no such thing as the “right person” if you’re an emotionally retarded narcissist. The best people in the world can’t change your infantile condition.
3. Finding the “right person” is a distraction from learning the tough art of loving, which most people are too lazy to care about.
4. The quest for the “right person” is often a dishonest quest. You’re not really looking for the “right person” anyway. Instead, you’ve created an unrealistic ideal so that you’ll have the excuse of their making a commitment.
Three. Falling in love doesn’t work because
1. Falling in love has nothing to do with love. It’s the infatuation from encountering a new experience and all new experiences are bound to wear off so that you must face your boredom and loveless existence all over again. Rather than face this unpleasant fact, you blame the person you have “fallen in love with again,” and you start the “falling in love” process all over again with dozens and dozens of people who are just as stupid about this whole falling in love business as you are.
2. The psychological process of falling in love has many parallels to drug addiction. It’s more of a chemical high than anything else. As an addiction, you are using people to medicate your hellish existence rather than developing meaningful, close, mature relationships.
3. Falling in love is an artificial state of mind drummed up by Madison Avenue with their retarded ads about Axe body spray and Nair hair remover and shampoo that smells like cucumbers, ambrosia, and watermelons. In other words, fall in love is a slick marketing campaign and you are the idiot who’s been duped by it.
4. People who fall in love with the greatest intensity are not only more lonely than the rest of us, they are mentally imbalanced. I know of a woman who fell in love with a man and she put a poster of his image on her bedroom wall and placed a plate of freshly baked cookies below the poster every morning. I’ll let you decide if that’s love or not.
Part III. Why most of us are doomed to squirm in our private hell of loneliness and anxiety (7-10):
1. We lack instincts. We don’t live on pure instincts like animals. We have the capacity to think, to reason, to dream, to worry. Humans aren’t like animals living fully by instincts. Rather, humans are only partly instinctive and must learn to find a quality of life through a combination of instinct and the powers of reason and critical thinking. Because we don’t live purely on instincts, we must use our reason and thinking power and this causes uncertainty and uncertainty causes anxiety. See page 7. For example, a dog doesn’t consult a dating website to find the perfect mate. However, humans pour over thousands of personality profiles to find the right match. We’re using far more than our instincts for mating. See page 7.
2. We’re required to become independent. As we grow older and establish independence from our parents, our lives our filled with more and more uncertainty, which creates intense anxieties. The onset of schizophrenia happens most commonly to people between the ages of 17-21. We have to forge our own identity and destiny without any master if we are to achieve full maturity and independence. See page 8.
3. We are by nature self-conscious and self-judging. We are aware of ourselves and are self-conscious of “how we are doing.” In other words, we as humans feel compelled to constantly access “where we stand in life.” Are we failures? Are we successful. Is everything right inside our souls? Is something nagging us in the back of our minds and we can’t quite put our finger on it? These are the kinds of questions that plague thinking human beings. See page 8.
4. We understand the difference between intimacy and loneliness and the latter makes us anxious and ashamed. We have an awareness of being lonely, of being separate, and this awareness creates anxieties. More specific than our general awareness, we are conscious of how separate we are from other humans and this awareness of our separateness causes anxiety, shame, guilt, and a sense of helplessness, which compels us to overcome our separateness in effective or self-destructive ways. See page 8. The awareness of our separateness from others without a sense of reunion with the human race through love results in shame, guilt, and anxiety. See page 9.
5. We can become easily imprisoned by self-centeredness, which is a form of insanity. The absolute failure to connect with others and remain imprisoned in our separateness is the definition of insanity. Another word for this type of insanity is solipsism. See page 9.
Part IV. Misguided Attempts to Overcome Our Separateness
1. If we don’t understand the psychology of separateness, we try to bond with consumer products. Therefore, we will be at the mercy of advertisers who prey on our separation anxieties. For example, there was a Lexus commercial 10 years ago where the man walked through the door and his fleshed merged with the leather seats. He became one with the car. He overcame his separation anxiety by purchasing a Lexus. Another ad for Mercedes showed a man lost on a mountain. Soaked with sweat, he ran to the top of the mountain and saw in the constellation of stars a Mercedes Benz hood ornament and he was glowing with peace and tranquility. Buying a Benz overcame his separation anxiety. Or buying an iPod will give you a sense of belonging with the pack of other iPod cult followers.
2. Some of us avoid the awareness of our separateness from others by never leaving our emotional ties to our mother. This results in emotional retardation. Or a man thinks he’s left his mother only to marry a woman who acts like his Mommy. He, too, suffers from stunted emotional growth. See page 10.
3. Some rely on sex as a way of creating the illusion that they have overcome their separateness from others.
4. Sex is not the only way to reach a heightened, aroused state to escape our sense of separateness. Fromm talks about “orgiastic states” that result from not only sex, but drugs, ancient tribal rituals, Super Bowl parking lot rituals, toga parties, Fraternity ritual rites involving beer bongs. These states of communal drunkenness help us cover the guilt and shame of our separateness. See pages 10 and 11.
5. Some of us overcome our separation anxiety by creating web communities on My Space or Face Book in which we become addicted to how “friends” we’ve amassed. We can so other people, “I have five thousand friends on my My Space Account.”
Part V. The Characteristics of Orgiastic Union
1. Intense, often to the point of violence (hazing) see page 12
2. They occur in the total personality of mind and body.
3. They are short-lived or transitory.
4. The sense of individual self disappears into the herd or the tribe like someone at a David Matthews Concert.
5. Participation in orgiastic union requires blind conformity. If you’re at someone’s house and they serve a goat’s head and you don’t eat it, you offend everyone. Vegetarians often suffer feelings of rejection.
6. One achieves “equality” in the worst sense, that is “sameness.” The best sense of the word “equality” is “oneness.” See pages 14 and 15.
First Option: In about a page, summarize Fromm’s major ideas in The Art of Loving. Then in about a page write a critique, arguing how effective Fromm is in fulfilling his objectives. In the second part of your essay, analyze someone (personal acquaintance or someone from film or literature) who engages in the “love fallacies” explained by Fromm. In the final phase of your essay, write about someone who fulfills the highest expressions of love described by Fromm. For your Works Cited Page, be sure to include Fromm's book, your interviewed subjects, or your film or literature work you used. For interviews, consult page 441 , Rule #48, in the Rules for Writers.
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