A Critical Review of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism

In 1979 Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) published The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. He warned that our culture was de-

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grading our psyche and many Americans were becoming narcissistic. Tom Wolfe termed the 1970s “The Me Decade” (“The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York Magazine, Aug. 23, 1976). Lasch felt the country had lost its sense of history, tradition, community, and reciprocity. In this essay I will describe the symptom picture of the narcissist, discuss the cultural causes of narcissism according to Lasch, and look at how post-modern social critics have extended Lasch’s views.

The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time

The narcissist is essentially lost to him or herself. The primary concern is with self-development and self-glorification, the obsession is with gaining respect, admiration, mirroring, and love. Overcompetitiveness and exhibitionism draw narcissists to occupations where an audience can be found, such as politics, theater and media arts, sports, writing, and teaching. There are fantasies of fame and power, and the goals are beauty and wealth. Narcissists are arrogant, self-assured, and greedy with a need to consume in order to be filled. Their inner self is often described as empty, shamed, aggressive, destructive, alone, and raging.

Heinz Kohut (The Restoration of Self, 1977) may be the most influential analyst to work in this area and suggested that narcissism represents a primary defect of the self where the young child was ignored by the mother and felt worthless. The child responds by building a defense around these feelings, which serves to insulate them from their own depression. The defense is a shell fueled by grandiosity and over-competitive urges. Virtually all analytic writers, including D.W. Winnicott, Harold Searles, Margaret Mahler, Alice Miller, and James Masterson, focus upon maternal failures and poor mirroring as the essential cause of primary narcissism.

Lasch, on the other hand, suggested that cultural

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changes outside the home, rather than maternal failures, bring so many narcissists to be seen clinically. His basic premise was that the media has destroyed all forms of authority in our culture and consequently we have lost our ego ideals. Without an adequate holding environment (a psychic and physical space in which there is a feeling of being protected, as described for children by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott) to identify with, this population is forced to revert back to its own harsher pre-Oedipal archaic superego. Irrational elements dominate the personality, causing grandiosity, fear, rage, and marked sadism. Lasch feels that the media’s systematic destruction of all authority causes grave consequences. We have seen the dismantling of politicians (Nixon, Clinton, Bush), athletes (Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps), clergy (Pope Benedict), police, teachers, parents, and virtually every authority imaginable. We all have a profound need for heroes, but there are really none left. Lasch felt this produced a massive confusion and regression into the self, which then leads to narcissism.

Additional support for Lasch’s thesis that the culture has severely regressed toward pre-Oedipal levels of functioning is found in Edward Shorter’s books, for example, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era, 1992. He notes the current epidemic of chronic fatigue, pain, and allergies are due to extensive cultural decay. Fully 90% of adults now experience some somatic problem in any two-week period. It is accepted that factors precipitating psychosomatic problems include chronic rage, anxiety, narcissism, and loss.

Cultural Causes of Narcissism

Psychoanalysts pointed to the family’s lack of adequate mothering as the reason behind pathological narcissism. Lack of mirroring will produce an empty self, which leads to construction of a hyper-competitive, overactive, defensive armor as compensation. Lasch describes a far more

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troubling scenario. He suggests that narcissistic traits have become common due to large-scale social changes outside the family that cause population regression. These influences include: the proliferation of fame and celebrity images that we are constantly bombarded with and seek to emulate; the professionalization and destruction of the family support system because parenting abilities to discipline children have been undermined by therapists and the legal system; the parent’s diminished status due to the shift from television programming like Father Knows Best to ones like Married with Children, which feature foolish, inept parents; the Cult of Consumerism, rampant with industry, credit, and advertising creating hidden needs for goods; and a change in socialization whereby both parents now work and day-care is used. This lack of good-enough parenting produces more empty selves and pre-Oedipal fixations. He goes on to suggest that wide-scale use of the electronic media has a way of undermining social connection and leaves us without a good enough holding environment as adults. Richard Koenigsberg (Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture, 1989) has written that we have used the media to escape from the social.

The Passing of the Torch

Lasch’s writing has been both fertile and prophetic. A sign of any theory’s power is the lasting interest in it, as is the case with Lasch’s book. Here I want to discuss four pieces of writing that have extended Lasch’s work.

President Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise Speech,” July 15, 1979

In 1979, Lasch was brought to Camp David to help Carter with his national address concerning the oil shortage. With divorce rates, drug use, and disco on the rise, Carter sensed the nation was in a state of cultural decay. This would be Carter’s sixth speech on oil dependence and he had grown tired of using the same metaphors. He reached out to

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Lasch and his warning that the country had lost respect for tradition to become greedy and conspicuous consumers. All this was true, but Carter’s clear articulation was what helped to oust him from office the following year. In his place, we elected the narcissist’s dream president, the handsome actor Ronald Reagan.

Jean Baudrillard’s The Illusion of the End (1994)

Baudrillard is a French sociologist and social critic who does not directly reference Lasch but I see his writing as extending Lasch’s concerns. Like Lasch’s theorized disconnect from tradition, Baudrillard has claimed that history ended in about 1980. He blames the electronic media and the ensuing information flood. He suggests that the sheer amount, speed, and beauty of information makes it impossible to digest or resist. He also feels that our voracious need to know more is quickly leading to our destruction. We are now under the total sway of our death wish and gleefully sacrificing ourselves to an unknown fate. He has taken Lasch’s relatively despairing view and concluded that we are in jeopardy of extinction.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)

Putnam details the dramatic collapse of community since around 1970. He suggested that time, pressure, money, mobility, and the electronic media have nearly destroyed our sense of community in direct extension of Lasch’s statements.

Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on the film Children of Men, 2006

Zizek is a social critic from Slovenia who also worries about living in a world of images and the resultant lack of historical reference. Remarking on the film Children of Men, Zizek says, “This film is the best diagnosis of ideological despair of late capitalism and of a society without a his-

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tory. The true infertility is of our lack of meaningful historical experience” (Slavoj Zizek, 2006 DVD Special Features Commentary on Children of Men, book by P. D. James, 1992) takes Lasch’s initial concern for narcissistic man under the media’s sway and finds a conclusion: to live in a world of images and without community is certain death.

Summary

We began with Lasch’s observed trends toward narcissism, self-involvement, and the end of community. A reason the electronic media has been embraced relates to our desire to reject community. The disappearance of the social and emergence of the false self has been discussed elsewhere. In the end, where are we? Baudrillard and Zizek describe our near future as one of impotence, despair, and self-destruction: an apt description of the narcissist’s inner self.

So where is our hope? For one, we see that coupled with this narcissistic epidemic we have also witnessed a sudden emergence of sport participation. Organized activities like running, swimming, weight-lifting, biking, golfing, and walking have grown exponentially over the last 40 years and parallel the information and media age. People are automatically compensating as they experience information overload. Also, many now seek some form of ascetic practice to escape the electronic world’s influence. The wild appeal of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, and Love (2006), stemming from her ascetic experiences in Indian ashrams, and the popularity of Bikrim Yoga in the United States also suggest how many seek some ascetic discipline to balance their over-stimulating, media-driven life.

There can be no doubt that the “dark side” is here. It is described in films like The Matrix where we are all near death in a blissful fantasy, and in Donna Haraway’s description of late 20^th century America, “We are all theorized as fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short we are

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Cyborgs. The Cyborg does not dream of community or models of the organic family.” She describes our future as thus: cyborgs, independent, fully functioning units, narcissistic, grand, perfect, and cool (Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Nature, 1991).

In the end, Lasch can be considered a modern-day prophet. He could see that Americans were captured by the entrancing world of media. The media, corporate power, and global capitalism continue to consume all in its wake. No other worldview has been able to keep up or compete. The only human response to this is to slow down and regain connection between body and reality. There is hope only in the body, which will be the antidote to the fantasies, images, status-seeking, celebrities, and narcissism that threaten to swallow us whole. The body will humble you and make you real, and it is the answer to narcissism and to grandiose fantasies as well.

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