From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.4

(Con'td)

Loving

Fromm thinks that most people do not understand the true meaning of "loving" and of "marriage" and as a result are forever unsatisfied and dissatisfied and in the process cause untold misery to themselves and those whom they think they "love".  He analyzes the problem also from the view point of his principal thesis in the book: the "having" mode and the "being" mode of relating ourselves to others.  He  says that "loving" has one meaning in the "having" mode and another in the "being" mode. If we think of love in the "having" mode, love would become a thing, a substance that we can "have", "own" and "possess", an abstraction but that in reality, there exists only "the act of loving", which is an art, not a science. To him, loving is "a productive activity" which implies "caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying the person, the tree, the painting, the idea" and "bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness." It is he says, "a process, self-renewing and self-increasing". However, when loving is  experienced in the "having" mode, it means confining, imprisoning, controlling the "object" of one's love, strangling, deadening, suffocating and killing them with one's "love", instead of giving them more life, expanding their horizons, opening them to new possibilities of finding the joys of life. He thinks that what most people call "love" is frequently a misuse of the word which tries to hide the reality of their not loving. He cites Lloyd de Mause's( founder of the journal Psychohistory)  finding that in the last two thousand years of Western history, there have been numerous reports of cruelty against children, ranging from physical to psychic torture, carelessness, sheer possessiveness, and sadism so shocking that one must believe that loving parents are the exception rather than the rule. He thinks that the same may be said of "marriages"."Whether the marriage is based on love or like traditional marriages of the past, on social convenience and custom, the couple who truly love each other seem to be the exception. What is social convenience, custom, mutual economic interest, shared interest in children, mutual dependency, or mutual hate or fear is consciously experienced as "love"--up to the moment when one or both partners recognize that they do not love each other and they never did." He notes that today, people have become more realistic, more sober and more honest and that many no longer think that being sexually attracted means "to love" or that a friendly, though distant team relationship is a manifestation of "loving" and this has led to more frequent changes of partners which does not necessarily mean they "love" more, just "having" more partners.

As a psycho-analyst, he has plenty of opportunity of observing in detail the history of couples who have "fallen in love" ("falling" is to him a misnomer as love is an active productive and creative activity and process: "one can only stand in love, walk in love" and not "fall" in love, something entirely passive): during courtship, neither partner is yet sure of the other and each tries to win the other and thus both are alive, attractive, interesting, even beautiful (insofar as aliveness always makes a face beautiful) and neither yet "has" the other and hence each's energies are devoted to "being" ie. to giving to and stimulating the other. Once married, the marriage "contract" gives each partner the "exclusive possession" of the other's body, feelings and care and nobody has to be won over any more because "love" has become a form of property, something one "has". They cease to make the effort to make themselves lovable and attractive to foster more love and start becoming boring and lose the sparkle in their eyes. They are disappointed and puzzled and ask themselves: are they the same person any more? Did they make a mistake in the first place? Each usually think the adverse change is in the other and feels defrauded but fail to see that they "are" no longer the same person they "were" when they "were" in love with each other and that reason for their plight is their mistaken notion that they can "have" love or they can "have" the other, a mistake which causes them to stop loving each other. Having arrived at such a condition, instead of starting to truly love each other again, they try to make the best they can and settle for "owning" things they "have" together: money, social standing, a home, a car, their boat, and club memberships, common circle of friends and other possessions, including even children and in this way, a marriage beginning  with love becomes transformed into one of a friendly co-ownership in which two egotisms are polled into one: that of the "family". And when one or the other cannot get over the yearning for the renewal of the previous feeling of loving, they may delude themselves that a new partner(s) will satisfy their longing. "They feel that all they want to have is love" but they fail to realize that love must be an expression of their "being" and they necessarily fail because "love is a child of liberty" and the worshipper of the goddess of love eventually becomes so passive and boring and loses whatever is left of his or her former attractiveness. To Fromm, the difficulty does not lie in marriage itself, but in "the possessive, existential structure of both partners and in the last analysis, of their society and the alternative forms of relationships like group marriage, partner-switching, group sex etc merely avoid the problem of their failure to truly "love". It merely cures boredom with ever new stimuli by "having" more "lovers" instead of being able to love even one!

(to be cont'd)