The assumption underlying the thinking of Luther and Calvin and also that of Kant and Freud, is: Selfishness is identical with self-love. To love others is a virtue, to love oneself is a sin. Furthermore, love for others and love for oneself are mutually exclusive.
Theoretically we meet here with a fallacy concerning the nature of love. Love is not primarily “caused” by a specific object, but a lingering quality in a person which is only actualized by a certain “object”. Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of an “object” : it is not an “affect” but an active striving and inner relatedness, then aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object. It is a readiness which, in principle, can turn to any person and object including ourselves. Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself. To be sure, it is not accidental that a certain person becomes the “object” of manifest love. The love for a particular “object” is only the actualization and concentration of lingering love with regard to one person; it is not, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only one person in the world whom one can love, that it is the great chance of one’s life to find that person, and that love for him results in a withdrawal from all others. The kind of love which can only be experienced with regard to just one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love but a sado-masochistic attachment. The basic affirmation contained in love is directed towards the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities. Love for one person implies love for man as such. Love for man as such is not, as it is frequently supposed to be, an abstraction coming “after” the love for a specific person, or an enlargement of the experience with a specific “object”; it is its premise, although, genetically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals.
From this it follows that one’s own self, in principle, i9s as much an object of one’s love as another person. The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in the presence of the basic readiness of and ability for such an affirmation. If an individual has this readiness, he has it also towards himself; if he can only “love” others, he cannot love at all.
Selfishness is not identical with self love but with it is very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness it contains insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without reaching satisfaction. Close observation shows that while the selfish person is always anxiously concerned with the fear of not getting enough, of mission something, of being deprived of something. He is filled with burning envy of anyone who might have more. If we observe still closer especially the unconscious dynamics, we find that this type of person is basically not fond of himself, but deeply dislikes himself.
Selfishness is rooted in this very lack of fondness of oneself. The person who is not fond of himself, who does not approve of himself, is in constant anxiety concerning his own self. He has not the inner security which can exist only on the basis of genuine fondness and affirmation. He must be concerned about himself, greedy to get everything for himself, since basically he lacks security and satisfaction. The same holds true with the so called narcissistic person, who is not so much concerned with getting things for himself as with admiring himself. Though on the surface it seems that these persons are very much in love with themselves, they actually are not fond of themselves, and their narcissism – like selfishness - is overcompensation for the basic lack of self-love. Freud has pointed out that the narcissistic person has withdrawn his love from others and turned it towards his own person. Although the first part of this statement is true, the second is a fallacy. He loves neither others nor himself.
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PS - This excerpt is taken from the book - "The fear of freedom" by Erich Fromm.
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