Fromm -The Art of Loving/Time

In My Daughter's Eyes Martina McBride (I remember the very first time I felt unconditional love.......  it was the birth of my first born.)  ...cal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2y6S8CwPJA

http://www.inspirationalarchive.com/1325/the-original-warm-fuzzy-tale/
Excerpt:

Hippie Chick and the International Scattered Brains

Not long ago, a lovely, strong woman with big hips and a happy smile came to this unhappy land. She seemed not to have heard about the witch and was not worried about running out of Warm Fuzzies. She gave them out freely, even when not asked. People called her the Hip Woman and some disapproved of her because she was giving the children the idea that they should not worry about running out of Warm Fuzzies.
The children liked her very much because they felt good around her. They, too, began to give out Warm Fuzzies whenever they felt like it.
The grownups became concerned and decided to pass a law to protect the children from using up their supplies of Warm Fuzzies. The law made it a criminal offense to give out Warm Fuzzies in a reckless manner, without a license.
Many children, however, seemed not to know or care, and in spite of the law they continued to give each other Warm Fuzzies whenever they felt like it and always when asked.
Because there were many many children…almost as many as grownups…it began to look as if maybe the children would have their way.

my g'ma ...cal

As of now it is hard to say what will happen. Will the forces of law and order stop the children? Are the grownups going to join with the Hip Woman and the children in taking a chance that there will always be as many Warm Fuzzies as needed?

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Loving-Erich-Fromm/dp/0060915943  (I read lots of books back in my college days and altho I never completed my degree, I learned a lot and part of it was the study of Erich Fromm and other like minded folks........  funny how the memories rush back when reminded, ey?  The times were tough what with Vietnam and all but there were good things going on too.)  ...cal
Art of Loving
Excerpt:
"Love," says Fromm, "is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." Poets have written that, "Love conquers all," and to "surrender to it." Urging one to surrender implies resistence to Love, but why?
Fromm asks, is Love an art, or is Love a pleasant sensation or feeling which to experience is a metter of chance, i.e. something one, "falls into," if one is lucky. Fromm asserts that Love is an art, and says that to truly Love, in all its forms, one must possess: Maturity; Self-Knowledge; and Courage.
"Object," or "faculty,": Many people pursue objects or affection, or objects to love, and correspondingly treat them as possessions. Fromm asserts that Love is the faculty or ability to Love in its different forms: brotherly love; romantic love, etc. Since Love is an art to be practiced, Fromm asserts that it can only be practiced in freedom with one another. In other words, people cannot treat others as objects or possessions to be controlled for ones own egotistical or selfish purposes. Such behavior to result in certain destruction and never to attain true Love.
"Love," vs. "falling in Love/Infatuation,": People speak of falling in Love, with new people they meet. Falling in Love is not necessarly Love, but infatuation, e.g., strangers meet, they break down social walls between one another, they feel close/as one. This new experience, infatuation, Fromm describes as "one of the most exhilarating and most exciting experiences in life. However, Fromm argues astutely, that this initial infatuation feeling slowly and naturally loses its miraculous character more and more with time, as the two people get more acquainted and learn more and more about eachother - flaws, character defects, etc. Fromm says the problem all-to-often arises when people confuse infatuation feelings (exhilaration/excitement) for proof of the intensity of their Love. As the infatuation feelings naturally subside, it results in the wish for a new conquest, a new "Love," with a new stranger. Again the stranger is transformed into an "intimate" person, again the experience of falling in love is exhilarating and intense, and again it slowly becomes less and less, and ends in another wish for a new conquest - a new "Love," always with the illusion that the new "Love," will be different from the earlier ones. Fromm says this is not Love. These illusions are greatly helped by the deceptive character of sexual desires. Sexual desire aims at fusion, says Fromm. It can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to conquer, by vanity, by the wish to hurt or even to destroy, as much as it can be stimulated by Love. Because most people associate sexual desire with the idea of Love, says Fromm, they are easily misled to conclude that they Love each other only when they want each other physically. Fromm asserts this is not unlike a drug addiction, when people constantly seek out the exhilaration/excitement of infatuation. Fromm cautions that if the desire for physical union is not stimulated by Love, if romantic/erotic Love is not also coupled with other forms of Love, that it will never lead to union in more than an orgiastic, transitory sense.
An implication of this that when this happens, i.e., when one finds new infatuation, the other one on the losing end gets scarredm then after a few times of getting burnt will begin to actively destroy or sabotage Love in the nascent stage when it occurs in the future, in an effort to avoid the past painful feelings associated with Love gone wrong or to avoid feelings of vulnerability and/or to maintain control -- in essence to not surrender to Love.
Fromm describes what he calls the essential components that need to be mastered, for all forms of Love: Care (the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love); Responsibility (to be able, willing and ready to respond to the psychic nneds of the other); Respect (concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he/she is on their own, to be aware of her unique individuality - freedom); and Knowledge(a desire to discover what makes the other "tick," an active penetration of the other person).
Fromm concludes that Love is not just a feeling, it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. To love means to surrender and commit without guarantees. Love is an act of utter faith says Fromm.

http://eqi.org/fromm.htm
Excerpt:
People who manipulate both people and things advance and are highly rewarded.
People who care for people are passed over.
Efficiency and effectiveness are King and Queen and humanity has been left in the dust. Remember the ancient Greeks saying that the purpose of society is to further the happiness of it's members? The purpose of our society is to make more more, more things, buy more things, buy more expensive things. Thus we pay more taxes all along the way which sends more money and gives more power to the people who make and enforce the rules and tell us what we need, want and believe in a way which serves them more than us.
You and I are out there at the stores frantically buying and that assures that this will continue. Fromm makes the excellent point that those who are successful in society are considered sane, no matter how pathological they might be when viewed from the perspective of what it means to be an integrated, productive human being.
As we ever more frantically race to make life ever more frantic, we are forgetting what sanity is in our materialistic frenzy. You can drive from coast to coast across America, a country of 300 million people, and not have contact with another human being except when they pass you a burger at the drive-through. Very efficient but is this isolation that technology promotes good for people? We could all do with a careful reading of Fromm's book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm
Excerpt:
Critique of Freud
Fromm examined the life and work of Sigmund Freud at length. He identified a discrepancy between early and later Freudian theory: namely that prior to World War I, Freud described human drives as a tension between desire and repression, but after the war's conclusion, he framed human drives as a struggle between biologically-universal Life and Death (Eros and Thanatos) instincts. Fromm charged Freud and his followers with never acknowledging the contradictions between the two theories.
He also criticized Freud's dualistic thinking. According to Fromm, Freudian descriptions of human consciousness as struggles between two poles was narrow and limiting. Fromm also condemned him as a misogynist unable to think outside the patriarchal milieu of early 20th century Vienna. However, Fromm expressed a great respect for Freud and his accomplishments, in spite of these criticisms. Fromm contended that Freud was one of the three most influential people of modern history, alongside Albert Einstein and Karl Marx.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogynist#Scientology
Excerpt:
Scientology

See also: Scientology and marriage

L. Ron Hubbard wrote the following passages in his 1965 book Scientology: A New Slant on Life:

"A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out."

"The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs, since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women. This is not a sermon on the role or position of women; it is a statement of bald and basic fact."

These have been criticized by Alan Scherstuhl of The Village Voice as expressions of hatred towards women.^[36] However, Baylor University professor Dr. J. Gordon Melton has written that Hubbard disregarded and abrogated much of his earlier views about women, which Melton views as merely echos of common prejudices at the time. Melton has also stated that the Church of Scientology welcomes both genders equally at all levels from leadership positions to auditing and so on since Scientologists view people as spiritual beings.^[37]

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03a.html
Excerpt:

Adolfine [Dolfi], Marie [Mitzi], Rosa, and Pauline [Pauli] -- Freud's sisters
Prints & Photographs Division
Library of Congress (186)
 Four Sisters
Freud's sisters, Dolfi, Mitzi, Rosa and Pauli remained behind in Vienna. As the Nazi's anti-Semitic pogroms grew ever more violent, it was clear that even these women in their late seventies would not be safe. Various efforts to secure them visas in 1939 were of no avail, however. Dolfi died of starvation in a Theresienstadt concentration camp, and the other three were murdered in the death camps. Freud's brother, Alexander, successfully escaped from Vienna in 1938. His sister, Anna, had emigrated to the U.S. many years earlier after her marriage to Eli Bernays.


EPILOGUE

Robbie mi robot and his mommie ...cal

Freud's thinking emerged in the wake of Marx and Darwin, both of whom emphasized struggle as the engine of change. Freud's thought developed in a century in which violent conflicts reached unheard of dimensions. The conflicts that Freud stressed were within the psyche: people at war with themselves and sometimes with the cultural authorities they had internalized. But he thought that the way we managed (or failed to manage) those conflicts had everything to do with the explosions of violence that marked the modern world. Although much has changed since Freud first formulated his theories, today's concern with the disruptive power of sexuality and aggression has only intensified. Freud did not propose solutions to how one might escape this violence. Instead, his writings on the connection of culture and conflict identified fundamental problems for the twentieth century -- problems that show no sign of disappearing as we move into the twenty-first.

Are you past oriented or future oriented.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isPj5KgpVqg&feature=related