Thus Lee compares Fromm’s view of love to the Christian ideal of agape. Added to it is a superficial criticism of capitalism and its negative influence on love, against which he only proposes to reclaim the individual (he does not seem to envisage how changing the social and economic organization of humanity could have beneficial effects on love).įromm does not call love what exists now-for him this not real love-but only what it should be, a kind of of perfection that probably is seen nowhere in our present world.

On the other hand, Fromm starts from scratch, he unfolds his own personal thought, without reference to any cultural tradition, nor any sociological or historical data. de Rougemont examines the evolution in Western Europe, from the 12th to the 20th century, of the “Tristan and Iseult myth,” the romantic view of love as a superhuman passion bordering mysticism, doomed to be broken by the reality of life he opposes to it the ideal of Christian love. The long book L’Amour et l’Occident by D. Lewis based himself on the classical Greek teminology for the different forms of love. Lee adopted a standard sociological approach by studying love as it exists in the population, not as it should ideally be. His approach to the subject is radically different from that of other scholars I mentioned in my article. Several years ago, a reader of Agapeta told me that some ideas expressed in my post Components of Love overlap those put forward by Erich Fromm in his 1956 book The Art of Loving. William Sergeant Kendall – The Artist’s Wife and Daughters (1906) – from Springville Museum of Art

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm