All You Need Is Love (But There's a Catch)

Reviews the book, The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm (see record 2006-01589-000). Experientially transformative and occupying a realm beyond the division of cognition and affect, this small jewel of a book is densely packed with extensive trajectories of ideas, considerations, and scholarship. Like many, it is a book worthy of study, but unlike many, in the course of such study, one's orientation as a self in the world among people is decentered in the simultaneously dizzying, terrifying, and exhilarating manner that the best psychoanalytic work may provoke. Translated into more than two dozen languages, with more than 5 million copies sold in English alone, The Art of Loving is that all too rare psychoanalytic book that successfully transcends limitation to a professional audience. This half-century commemoration of its 1956 publication provides occasion for a present-day review of Erich Fromm's views on psychoanalysis and humanity and pays homage to Fromm some quarter century after his death in 1980, just prior to his 80th birthday. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)