Excerpt:
Greatly influenced by the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm — who observed in his landmark work on the art of loving that “there is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love” — hooks argues that we fumble and falter at love largely because we are unclear on what it actually means and what it asks of us. Looking back on her own life, she writes:
... Over the years, I have encountered some excellent definitions of love: For Iris Murdoch, it was “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”; for Tom Stoppard, “the mask slipped from the face”; for Adrienne Rich, “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” And yet, as hooks recognizes, definitions are only the starting point — then comes the difficult task of putting our general theories of love into practice. Because our formative attachments shape how we love, this may often require unlearning damaging models and grieving the damage. Looking back on her own childhood, marked by a sudden and baffling expulsion from her parents’ adoration, hooks writes:
We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago… All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning — clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.
But it was not until well into middle age, when her partner of fifteen years left her, that she came to consciously examine the meaning of love, personal and cultural. She captures the harrowing umbra of heartbreak:
My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love’s promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.
Alan: If you do not know Eric Fromm (and his work), this German Jew Democratic Socialist is, I think, a great psychologist and a great sociologist. When I was studying at University of Toronto, his book, "The Art of Loving" was widely read. Subsequently, I discovered other splendid books by Fromm: "Escape From Freedom" and "The Sane Society." If only we had listened... Fromm's Wikipedia page is a fascinating account. I had no idea Fromm moved to Mexico City, and during his years there, established a psychoanalytic department within UNAM (La Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Fromm described his position as "nontheistic mysticism".[10]
"Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape. He observed that embracing our freedom of will was healthy, whereas escaping freedom through the use of escape mechanisms was the root of psychological conflicts. Fromm outlined three of the most common escape mechanisms:
- Automaton conformity: changing one's ideal self to conform to a perception of society's preferred type of personality, losing one's true self in the process; Automaton conformity displaces the burden of choice from self to society;
- Authoritarianism: giving control of oneself to another. By submitting one's freedom to someone else, this act removes the freedom of choice almost entirely.
- Destructiveness: any process which attempts to eliminate others or the world as a whole, all to escape freedom. Fromm said that "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it".[12]
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