Fromm does a great job of reviewing the various "types" of Love and providing the characteristics of each. His review clarifies what purpose each kind of love serves in our lives.
The book is an exceptional treatise on this most elusive topic. It's a very rational breakdown of what it is to love, what it means to each of us to love, and how it serves us (and the world) to love.
This isn't a Leo Buscalia book, but rather a very good compliment to one. This book is more an analysis of fundamental principles involved in love and loving. It's an in depth discussion, not a collection of stories. But it is very unique in a field of less thought provoking (but good feelings) books.
If you are a thinker, and still want to be a feeling person, the book can help you. For the mind, this is clarity. The book will help you get your mind out of the way so you can begin feeling - because it will teach your mind what your heart is trying to say.
THE ART OF LOVING purports to be a manual for the heart. Reading this book evokes within me feelings of irritation & frustration rather than love. Much of the irritation comes from his incapacity for logical thinking and consistency. Perhaps he disdains logic, but this is probably a symptom of my inability to empathize with his logical blindness.
It may be true that a loving person will sacrifice truth & logic at a moment's notice for the sake of love. if this is the case, Fromm is a very loving person. Fromm comes across as someone at a typewriter free-associating every possible statement he can make about love -- and many of the things he says are true.
For example, he says that romantic love is unlike parental or brotherly love in that it is exclusive and the other two are not. Yet, a parent has an exclusivity in the love for his/her child that is different from the love that is held for other children.
Brotherly love also has a level of exclusivity.
Fromm implies that exclusivity makes romantic love a less desirable form of love -- contradicting the more positive use of romantic love in the second premise and in the conclusion.
It's untrue to claim that the exclusivity of romantic love diminishes the love those lovers give to selected others. A happy lover usually feels more loving toward others in general because of that happiness.
Anyway, if you're reading this for any type of logical or step by step comprehension of love, this probably is not the book for you. If you're reading it as the "art" of being a loving individual, you may want to be prepared by having an appreciation for non objective abstract art.
Billy D Squires
BillyDSquires
