Is Self-Love Overrated?

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There’s an ad appearing regularly on streaming video, and I assume on regular TV, showing an attractive young woman with beautiful, long black hair who has just used a hair product that has made her hair gleaming and shiny.

Walking down a city street, she passes a store front with a big window and can’t resist stopping to look at her reflection, running her hand down her hair as if appreciating a luxurious garment. Her face conveys a self-satisfaction, even smugness that says, “My hair and I are beautiful. Aren’t I wonderful?”

This is a message conveyed by an endless barrage of TV advertising that wants you to believe that their products – from hair and beauty products to toilet-bowl cleaners - will make you feel good about yourself. And feeling good about yourself is a cultural priority.

Pop Psychology

Obviously, it’s not good to feel bad about yourself, and contemporary psychology has helped us appreciate this fact. But there’s psychology as a science – which is only about a couple of hundred years old – and what’s known as “pop psychology,” which include myths and simplifications that are part of the popular culture. And pop psychology is big on self-love.

And that brings us to the subject of love and its meaning.

The New York Times Columnist David Brooks recently wrote an opinion article entitled, “The Wrong Definition of Love” in which he quotes a blogger named Antonia Bentel who asked six strangers and friends about how they fall in love.

Antithesis of Self-Love?
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“Bentel,” writes Brooks, “makes it clear that this is far from a scientific survey, but what struck me about these answers is that they all had a common definition of love — that love blooms when somebody else makes you feel understood and good about yourself.

“There was a lot of self in these answers,” Brooks writes, “and not much about the other person. There was a lot about being paid attention to, and not much about maybe serving and caring for another person or even putting that person’s interests above your own.”

Brooks argues that “shared moral frameworks” are being discarded and replaced by “therapeutic values,” the kind advanced by pop psychology, in which, as Brooks puts it, “The highest good is not some sacred ideal, but rather, personal well-being and psychological adjustment.  

“In other, less self-oriented cultures, and in other times, love was seen as something closer to self-abnegation than to self-comfort. It was seen as a force so powerful that it could overcome our natural selfishness.”

Brooks also quotes psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm who in his 1956 book, “The Art of Loving," argued that “love is not a feeling; it’s a practice, an art form.” Fromm wrote: “Love is the active concern for the life and growth of that which we love.”

Close to Christian Ideal

All this sounds very close to the Christian ideal of love. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus, quoting the Hebrew Shema, answers the question of a Pharisee, who asks, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”

“And he answered him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

And that reminds me of the second part of the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi - ideals of love that I believe are now countercultural.

Oh, Divine Master,

Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console.
To be understood, as to understand.
To be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.