Love of
others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude
of love toward themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving
others. Love, in principle, is indivisible as far as the connection between ‘objects’
and one’s own self is concerned. Genuine love is an expression of
productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. It is
not an “affect” in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an active
striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own
capacity to love.
To love
is an expression of one’s power to love, and to love somebody is the
actualization and concentration of this power with regard to one person. It is
not true, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only the
one person in the world whom one could love and that it is the great chance of
one’s life to find that one person. Nor is it true, if that person be found
that love for him (or her) results in a withdrawal of love from others. Love
which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this
very fact that it is not love, but a symbiotic attachment. The basic affirmation
contained in love is directed toward the beloved person as an incarnation of
essentially human qualities. Love of one person implies love of man as such.
The kind of “division of labor,” as William James calls it, by which one loves
one’s family but is without feeling for the “stranger,” is a sign of a basic
inability to love. Love of man is not, as is frequently supposed, an
abstraction coming after the love for a specific person, but it is its premise,
although, genetically, it is acquired in loving specific individuals.
From
this it follows that my own self, in principle, must be as much an object of my
love as another person. The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth,
freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility,
and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself
too; if he can love only others, he can not love at all.
Erich
Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics.(p.134-135)
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