Self-Love as Prerequisite

Fromm made a counterintuitive claim: you cannot truly love another person until you love yourself. This is not narcissism. Self-love means treating yourself with the same care and honest concern you would give someone you cherish.

Without it, love turns extractive — you need the other person to fill a void, which breeds dependency, not partnership. And selfishness, he argued, is not too much self-love but too little: selfish people cannot care for anyone, themselves included.