The Art of Loving - [Erich Fromm]Part A常人对爱的误解一：爱等同于外在的财富、地位、权力、美貌、好体型、性格魅力、华饰等As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love.常人对爱的误解二：爱关乎对象【object being loved】，不关乎能力【capacity to love】A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object יnot the problem of a faculty.解释这一现象背后的原因：从维多利亚时代包办婚姻向当代自由浪漫式婚姻转变。
This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.解释这一现象背后的另一原因：买卖式市场文化【bargain】的蔓延Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. “Attractive“ usually means a nice pack- age of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.常人对爱的误解三：认为【情窦初开】与【厮守一生】并无二致。
The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of “falling“ in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of “standing“ in love.上述三种误解最终导致了大部分【靡不有初，鲜克有终】的爱There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. 鉴于人们对爱尽管屡试屡败却生生不息的追求，作者给出了解决方案：把爱当作一门艺术来学全篇也基于此前提分两部分展开论述：爱的理论【theory of love】和爱的实践【practice of love】。
Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which “only“ profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on? However this may be, the following discussion will treat the art of loving in the sense of the foregoing divisions: first I shall discuss the theory of love—and this will comprise the greater part of the book; and secondly I shall discuss the practice of love—little as can be said about practice in this, as in any other field.分析了人需要爱的原因：克服存活于世的隔离感【disunitedness】和分裂感【separateness】，以爱驱逐孤立感【aloneness】。
Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself; he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future. This awareness of him- self as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.人类社会克服孤立感的方法：从原始社会的图腾崇拜到后来的各种纵欲、狂欢活动，包括酗酒、吸毒、滥交。
But the more the human race emerges from these primary bonds, the more it separates itself from the natural world, the more intense becomes the need to find new ways of escaping separateness.上述方法的局限性：短暂且需要定期重复于是产生了新的方法：方法一：随大流，入乡随俗All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical. Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. 方法二：和别人上一样的班，玩一样的乐。
Union by conformity is not intense and violent; it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason often is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness. In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and of the pleasure routine.方法三：从事创造活动A third way o。