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Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.
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.
People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or to be loved by—is difficult.
This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.
For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after.
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.
The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement.
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as 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?
Man can only go forward by developing his reason, by finding a new harmony, a human one, instead of the prehuman harmony which is irretrievably lost.
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.
Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react.
The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears—because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared.
Man—of all ages and cultures—is confronted with the solution of one and the same question: the question of how to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one’s own individual life and find atonement.
The question can be answered by animal worship, by human sacrifice or military conquest, by indulgence in luxury, by ascetic renunciation, by obsessional work, by artistic creation, by the love of God, and by the love of Man. While there are many answers—the record of which is human history—they are nevertheless not innumerable.
Only to the degree that the child develops his sense of separateness and individuality is the physical presence of the mother not sufficient any more, and does the need to overcome separateness in other ways arise.
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.
In a transitory state of exaltation the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it. Inasmuch as these rituals are practiced in common, an experience of fusion with the group is added which makes this solution all the more effective.
It seems that after the orgiastic experience, man can go on for a time without suffering too much from his separateness.
As long as these orgiastic states are a matter of common practice in a tribe, they do not produce anxiety or guilt.
It is quite different when the same solution is chosen by an individual in a culture which has left behind these common practices.
But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction.
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.
