Customer Reviews

The Ability to Love

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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A well written and practical psychological (especially Freudian) perspective on love as attachment. Discusses the ways disorders of the ability to love originate, particularly in childhood, and affect us through our lives in friendship, romantic love, parenthood etc, and the ways we can heal and have healthy attachments. I think different readers will relate to this book in different ways; I found its assumptions about what is normal were rather far away from the way I try to live my life. The book has a lot of emphasis on positive self image and getting one's needs met, and those with a spiritual perspective of cultivating humility and nonattachment as a basis for self-giving love may find this book hard to relate to and "worldly." In trying to read this book I was challenged to make a clear distinction between disordered psychology (for instance chronic, morbid feelings of inferiority and unworthiness) and the counterintuitive values of the spiritual life (for instance a generous spirit of humility and poverty, as in the Beatitudes) which require good psychological health for their full practice. The book did help me think about some of my problems constructively.

I found Dr. Fromme's book while wandering in my university library, thinking as I opened it that it would be dated and old-fashioned. Not so. The book's observations are timeless, and its advice relevant to anyone regardless of his or her experience with relationships. I'm sure I don't need another book on this subject, that's how much I learned from it.

I really like this book cause it is well written, insightful and honest. At times it challenges the reader to be honest with themselves. My favorite thing about reading in general is to learn new ideas, and this book contains a great deal of insight into human behavior from a philosophical and psychological viewpoint. If you like new ideas that challenge conventional thinking then you will enjoy this book. I highly recommend it.