Criticism of E. Fromm"s ideas and proposals. E. Pushkarev
Google Translate Automated Translation - Original Text
Criticism of E. Fromm's ideas and proposals.
The most harsh criticism of the theory of love E. Fromm Doctor of Political Sciences. Alex Batler The Philosophy of Love by Erich Fromm
With all due respect to the humanist charge of Fromm's works, his hymn to love, it should be admitted that his concept of love is fundamentally wrong - a conclusion that is not only confirmed by practice, but also proven in theory.
D. political science Alex Battler "On Love, Family and State." The book is in our library
Fromm is a chatterbox who, in psychological terms invented by himself, explains the previous psychological terms, which also do not mean anything. Experiencing the phenomenon of another person as your own is an idiocy from a biological point of view. Doctor of Biological Sciences Sergey Saveliev
“Those are mistaken who think that love comes to us completely independently of us - as an instinct beyond our control or as a lucky chance, as a combination of external circumstances that gave us a loved one. The point, first of all, is whether we ourselves know how to love ”.
It is written well and understandably, as soon as you read it, the desire immediately arises to take up the development of the “art of love”.
But, when you begin to think more deeply on this topic, a variety of questions and doubts arise:
1. If we consider such a life story. Paul McCartney's marriage to Linda is an example of happiness and harmony, an example of true love itself. But ruthless cancer, Linda's death, Paul's hard, dramatic experiences.
More information - Paula and Linda McCartney.
Years go by, the wound is healed. Paul has a new vivid love for Heather Mills, beautiful courtship. Expensive gifts, for one of them he specially flies to India. Marriage, birth of a beautiful daughter, Beatrice. Paul's relationship with Heather is gradually getting worse and worse, a difficult, lengthy, divorce process. Paul: "I think this marriage of mine was a huge mistake of my whole life ...".
Paul begins his third youth, a series of violent falls in love, one of which with Nancy Shevell develops into true love. In 2011, they got married, love, which means happiness to this day. A remarkable fact is that both Paul's mother and Linda died of breast cancer, but Nancy, who also had this terrible disease, defeated him.
If we consider these stories from Paul's life also from the standpoint of other conclusions of E. Fromm:
“Love mainly does not characterize a relationship with a specific person; it is a position, an orientation of character, which determines a person's relationship to the world as a whole, and not to just one "object" of love. "
He also writes about love as an act of will:
Love should be an act of will, the determination to completely unite your life with the life of another person. 4
It is believed that love should be the result of a spontaneous, emotional outburst, a sudden irresistible feeling. <> This point of view does not want to see such an important factor in erotic love as will. 4
Questions: If Sir Paul McCartney in his first and third marriages perfectly mastered the art of love, a specific orientation of "character that determines a person's relationship to the world as a whole, and not to one, only an" object "of love," there was enough will to find love. Why did all these wonderful qualities disappear in the second marriage with Heather? Or maybe it's the other way around, these wonderful qualities are manifested depending on who the person is trying to find love with, and not on their initial presence?
But then the whole theory of the art of love by Z. Fromm gets a serious hole or even collapses.
2. Another story from life. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy and Sofya Andreevna Bers - a stormy, exciting love, a sublime declaration of love, streams of tears of emotion and her, and in the future this will happen to him many times.
Psychotherapist V.Levi
The result after 48 years of marriage. Lev Nikolaevich dies at the dilapidated Astapovo railway station. He asked that his wife not be allowed into the room. He was already so disgusted with finding out the relationship and making the next 1001st attempt to improve them that he did not want to overshadow his departure from life with her presence. He left his native estate because of this. Lev Nikolayevich's request was fulfilled and Sofya Andreevna was allowed in when the death cramps began.
Question: Well, if the genius Lev Nikolaevich, the extraordinary woman Sofya Andreevna could not only master the “art of love”, but even the elementary skills to get along like a spouse, how can we, mere mortals, master this complexity of the “art of love”?
3. Love should be an act of will, the determination to fully connect your life with the life of another person. 4
“... To love means to take on obligations without demanding guarantees, to surrender to the hope that your love will engender love in a loved one. Love is an act of faith, and whoever believes weakly loves weakly. … The ability to love requires energy, a state of wakefulness, high vitality, which can only arise as a result of a fruitful and active orientation of the individual in many other areas of life. If a person is not a fruitful person in other areas, he will not be fruitful in love. "
E. Fromm
And this is not so, it only confirms that the given example of the spiritual relationship between Lev Nikolaevich and Sofia Andreevna. More examples:
Guy de Maupassant's story "The Weaver of Chairs". About how, as a girl, when she saw the crying boy Shuke, she fell in love. After which she collected, saved up money, gave it to the pharmacist's son, for which he allowed himself to be kissed. When Suke got married, she attempted suicide but was rescued. She kept this feeling at a high level all her life, she confessed that for me there was only one man - Shuke. Before her death, she bequeathed him 2,300 francs, all that she had earned in her life.
The fact that this is not such a rare occurrence is said by a psychotherapist, sexologist, Ph. n. Professor Alexander Poleev:
“There is such a concept of“ overselective love ”or overselectivity, this is when for a long time a woman experiences a strong love feeling for a man who does not reciprocate, does not react to this feeling. This kind of love is called overselective or overselective. 20% of Muscovites never get married, and half of them do not get married precisely because of this overselectiveness.
Berne E. "Sex in Human Loving"
4. “Love is not necessarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character, which sets a person's attitude to the world in general, and not just to one "object" of love. If a person loves only one person and is indifferent to the rest of his neighbors, his love is not love, but a symbiotic union. Most people believe that love depends on an object, not on one's own ability to love.
They are even convinced that since they do not love anyone but their "beloved" person, this proves the power of their love.
<>
But if I really love some person, I love all people, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to someone “I love you”, I should be able to say “I love everything in you”, “I love the whole world thanks to you, I love myself in you”. 4
If we take a biased look at this difficult conclusion from Fromm's, then the term is more suitable to characterize it, not “love”, but “philanthropy,” and this is far from the same thing.
So in the ancient Greek language this feeling was designated by the term - agape (caritas, lat.) - philanthropy; selfless love-self-giving; altruistic, spiritual love, It is also generosity - a form of humanity, characterized by the presence of kindness. It is humanity, the ability to sacrifice for the sake of the interests of others.
Generosity is an innate gift to educate him, almost impossible.
Therefore, agape is not an individual interpersonal love that is acquired as a result of communication, interaction between a man and a woman. It's like perfect pitch some have, most don't. According to the Canadian sociologist D.A. About 7% of people have a similar gift of agape - philanthropy.
People endowed with a great gift of agape do not necessarily easily acquire inter-sex individual love. Mother Teresa (in the world of Gonja) from the age of 12 began to dream of monastic service in order to go to India to take care of the poor there. She made the effort of her whole life to realize her dream and she succeeded.
But in the intergender, personal sphere, Mother Teresa has not just emptiness, but rather indifference to the opposite sex. It can be assumed that her libido energy was sublimated in agape, thereby further enhancing it.
In the ancient Greek language there is a term - philia, love-affection, love-friendship, which presupposes free individual choice.
Friendship + love = philia. E. Pushkarev
Agape and filia are completely different psychological phenomena and the ancient Greek language helps us understand this.
N.A. Berdyaev, "On the appointment of a person"
Love is personal, individual, aimed at a single, unique, irreplaceable person.
< >
Love always refers to the individual, not to the general.
N.A. Berdyaev. "Metaphysics of Sex and Love"
5. According to expert estimates, less than 5% of married couples live in love. After all, it is possible for spouses who have lived in a happy, harmonious marriage for fifty - sixty or more years to "find out" how they mastered the "art of love" and then replicate this knowledge for the benefit of the young. Repeated attempts were made and all of them were unsuccessful, even when professional psychologists were engaged in the research. Such questions in deeply elderly and happy spouses caused not only bewilderment about the "art of love", but even the term "love" they rarely used and carefully or did not use at all.
For example, in the study "The Psychological Problems of Marriage," a member of the American Psychological Association D.S. Wallerstein, which was conducted only among happy married couples, neither the happy spouses studied, nor the researcher, in his large, comprehensive report, never once used the term "love", let alone "art." They live for many decades in happy marriages, but they don't use the concept of love, but why? But because our culture has turned an exclusively positive phenomenon "love" into a dangerous chimera.
This is a malicious word "love". E. Pushkarev
A person who lives happily in love does not perceive it as a phenomenon.
All the same, the very formulation of the question “the art of love”, in the form that it expresses, and therefore offers a solution in the work of the same name by E. Fromm, is a priori, overestimating expectations and insufficiently elaborated.
And still:
Film Love is the union of the soul with the soul of one's own.
F.I. Tyutchev
To designate the highest form of sexual love, the philosopher V.S. Soloviev uses the concept of "syzygy", which in translation from Greek means "combination" to denote such a conjugation between a man and a woman, which is the basis of an ideal marriage union. Because it is only in him that "the healing of the flaws of human nature and their reimbursement" occurs, which exists among the Platonic androgynes.
Therefore, the main thing in intersexual individual love is still syzygy - the compatibility of kindred souls.
So the “art of loving” begins with the knowledge which soul can become dear to you, as happened in the marriage of Paul and Linda McCartney, and which one will never become dear under any efforts, as it happened in the marriage of Lev Nikolaevich and Sophia Andreevna and married to Paul and Heather Mills. Then purposefully look for this potential soul mate and only then build relationships.
Fortunately, the researchers have done a good job in this direction and give specific recommendations:
First - Classifications of love relationships. E. Pushkarev
Then - From disharmony in choosing a marriage partner to harmony. E. Pushkarev
“Awareness of human separateness without reunification in love is a source of shame and at the same time it is a source of guilt and anxiety. Thus, the deepest human need is the desire to leave the prison of his loneliness. "
"Now (1999), half of young families break up in the first year of life, two thirds - in the first five years, in 70% of families that have not yet broken up, the spouses are in tense relations ..." d.philos. n. V.M. Rozin
Considering that only since the middle of the 19th century, the choice of a marriage partner has been made independently by a person, guided by his feelings, earlier this was done by older relatives. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people have lived, are living, and will live outside of sexual individual love.
The question arises: if a person lives in a tense marriage relationship, does this mean that he left the "prison of loneliness", because the goal - "love", he did not achieve?
Fromm has a saying: "The desire for power, the desire to avoid loneliness ..." Love, power are completely different goals, but fromm is all for getting rid of loneliness.
Maybe “overcoming separation”, “prison of one's loneliness” is just an unresolved intrapersonal problem of E. Fromm himself? It was not for nothing that his first wife was the famous psychoanalyst Karen Horney, who was six years older than him.
Neurotic need for love. Karen Horney.
After a divorce from her, he married a second time and, it seems, more successfully.
Then the reason for love should be sought in something else? After all, if we find the true reason for love, then more people will be able to find it.
The essence of love. E. Pushkarev.
Viktor Vostokov "The Art of Love"
Dilya Enikeeva "Man and Woman: The Art of Love"
and others.
What is good?
What's bad?
It all depends on
What is the era.
Well, how can a simple man in the street, especially a young man, understand these love arts? Which of these arts will open the way to true love? In addition, the small number of lucky people who have a marriage in love do not know about any art. Or maybe ...
Any theory of love must start with a theory of man, of human existence. Although we find love, or rather the equivalent of love, already in animals, their attachments are mainly part of their instinctive nature; in man, only the remnants of these instincts act.
History of the culture of love feelings. E. Pushkarev
A considerable part of his ideas, including those already cited by E. Fromm, expresses in the form of moral and ethical slogans, this, of course, to a certain extent helps in the cultural development of society, but completely negates their scientific value and the possibility of using them in individual life.
“... I'm desperately asking for advice on what to do! I've never been so confused! Something strange is happening with my young man, he can talk, but rarely that he loves (he has already confessed his love twice), he can joke to come to me, and then take it and completely ignore it, not pick up the phone, talk, I’ll call you back, I can’t find the strength in myself. He does not like to discuss serious topics. He generally gets angry when I try to talk to him seriously or translate everything into jokes. Vika"
And he explains to her: in order to improve this love, you and him need to try hard and love all of humanity ??? The saddest thing about this advice is that there are a lot of psychologists who give them.
To say about the knowledge of man, care, the deepest kinship, as the content of fruitful love, is only part of the truth. And what is primary in this, and what is secondary: love, knowledge, or care and kinship?
Duality is a vital necessity.
Ode to dual contact.
Love arises, develops and is a good until the end of the century as a result of the best psychotypical compatibility - the source of soul kinship, as the primary factor of love.
From disharmony in choosing a marriage partner to harmony.
The essence of love. E. Pushkarev.
"Love is an art, just like the art of living." 4
Giving is the ultimate manifestation of power. 4
what is "giving - acceptance" is it a humanistic act, the result of mental, volitional training, art, or is it a gift from God?
11. Despite the fact that Fromm's works had a significant impact on the development of the psychology of love, some moments in them are modern psychologists were criticized. The structure of love allegedly proposed by him : care, responsibility, respect and knowledge is overly rational and even ascetic, for the lack of pleasure and joy in it. (Ph.D. L. Gozman)
The knowledge factor raises additional doubts among his critics. The fact is that in most descriptions of love, one of its signs is the tendency to idealize the partner, to overestimate the positive qualities inherent in him and to partially ignore the negative ones, i.e. the knowledge factor is untilled. (Ph.D. L. Gozman)
And if we take most of the modern, both literary and everyday descriptions of love, then it is in them that the main confusion of our culture of love with falling in love is expressed. Details
Various feelings of love and being in love.
A. Fromm has repeatedly highlighted: "Falling in love is one of the forms of pseudo-love."
Modern researchers of love (psychiatrist M. Skop Peck, psychologist Dorothy Tennov "Partial Love") not only confirmed this, but also came to the conclusion that falling in love has nothing to do with love. These are phenomena that are different in nature. And just, knowledge is necessary for a person before falling in love, so as not to confuse anything, being in a state of altered selective criticality. If in love there is an idealization of a partner, then in love it is not, this can be considered one of the important signs of love.
University of Wisconsin Professor R. Short "Sex, Love, or Falling in Love"
Club: And yet E. Fromm made the greatest contribution to solving the mystery of love, set a vector, a progressive direction of the semantics of love, gave important concepts, definitions of love and pseudo-love. But its final disclosure took place after scientists undertook research using the latest biochemical methods and equipment: nuclear magnetic resonance, magnetic encephalographic scanning, functional magnetic resonance imaging.
About Professor Helen Fisher and true love. E. Pushkarev
A detailed analysis and explanation of E. Fromm's theory of love is done by Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Academician P. Gurevich In love, a person wants to become a god (about Erich Fromm).
Compatible love, it's true love.
Factors of marital compatibility.
Culture of longevity of love. A culture of separation grief.
From disharmony in choosing a marriage partner to harmony.
Guide to the site and the main milestones in the knowledge of love. E. Pushkarev
The essence of love. E. Pushkarev.
Briefly about love. E. Pushkarev
Man and woman: compatibility, love. E. Pushkarev
Man and woman: relationships. E. Pushkarev
Man and woman: leadership in love and marriage. E Pushkarev
Psychology of love. E. Pushkarev
Love test: "love scale" by Z. Rubin.
Manifestation of love in the intimate life of spouses. E. Whit, G. Patkins
Books:
Erich Fromm “The Art of Love. Study of the nature of love "
Erich Fromm "Man and Woman"
and others
is in our library: "Love, family, sex and about ..." (almost 2000 books and video)
