Cultural Reflections | Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

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The Culture of Narcissism is the product of an American historian who has borrowed a psychiatric syndrome to examine issues and to synthesize a picture of our culture. Narcissism, an ancient term with roots in Green mythology, can trace its current psychiatric significance to Freud who distinguished the primary, healthy narcissism of the newborn from the secondary, pathological narcissism of those whose earliest relationships had gone awry. Recent psychiatric theorists, most prominently Heinz Kohut, have greatly expanded our understanding of the narcissistic personality, a personality produced in a climate of indulgence combined with faulty empathic responses to the child’s emotional needs. The child, highly valued as an extension of the parent, may be used to bolster the parents’ self-esteem but is not valued for himself. This results in a person who has both low self-esteem and a sense of superiority, one who idealizes some people while devaluing others. Relationships are shallow; the person is self-absorbed; life is impoverished because nothing beyond oneself seems worth one’s inter est. There is a sense of inner emptiness, depression, and anxiety. This narcissistic personality ranges from severely impaired to relatively healthy. 

Lasch sees our current society as in tensely narcissistic. Narcissism becomes the mode of success in the business world as the corporate executive exchanges the tools of concrete achievement for a successful image and the ability to manipulate the feelings of others. The media has made the public intensely aware of the image of success, of celebrity (i.e., visibility) rather than fame through personal achievement or character traits. In the theater, themes of emptiness and absurdity have replaced earlier “neurotically” conflicting themes of great drama. Politics has also become a spectacle. In sports, cooperation and loyalty among team members and competition against rivals has been replaced by celebrity noncompetitive ness. It is a narcissistic trait to avoid competition and to avoid realistic appraisal of one’s abilities in favor of fantasied greatness. 

Lasch claims that education has also become contaminated by narcissism as students avoid the difficulty of solid academic training for a potpourri of courses focusing instead on “self-discovery” and self-absorption. Teachers abdicate the role of authority figures to avoid antagonizing students. The result is an alarming “new illiteracy” in which youths prefer the easy entertainment of the media to the struggle of the learning process. 

The collapse of school authority is paralleled at home as society assumes family functions in an ever-widening arena. For example, juvenile courts have assumed the right to judge families and take over their functions with children. Lasch feels that child and family therapy and books by experts have made parents less confident. The absence of fathers through divorce or work has led to a collapse of paternal authority and hence an impairment in the development of conscience. The relationship between the sexes has also been invaded by narcissism as people flee intimacy for casual sexual relationships. Because sex brings no emotional commitment and hence no hope for the future, divorce becomes the easy way out. 

Final evidence is our culture’s attitude toward aging. Wisdom and experience are devalued in favor of youth. The old should find value in life by vicariously enjoying the accomplishments of their chil dren, but narcissistic people are unable to reach beyond themselves in that fashion. We behave like a culture “that believes it has no future.” 

The strength of these chapters lies in their historical perspective. Lasch gives a fascinating account of the historical development of each theme he elaborates. He values independence, hard work, loyalty to others, respect for the nuclear family, and the authority of parents—values consistent with LDS values. His theory is attractive not only because it brings coherence to many of the problems of contemporary life, but also because it also provides scapegoats: the villains of bureaucracy, the media, and the therapeutic community. 

However, his repeated attacks on therapy display a marked lack of understanding of both the process and the goals of psychotherapy. He accuses psychotherapy of ex posing the “innermost secrets of the psyche to medical scrutiny,” thus encouraging “habits of anxious self-scrutiny . . . rooted in anxiety . . .” and exempting the patient “from critical judgment and . . . moral responsibility.” I believe that successful psychotherapy leads not to increased self-absorption (not the same thing as introspection) but to improved understanding of oneself and mature, more caring relationships. An important result of therapy is the improved self-esteem that follows greater independence. 

Lasch contends that narcissistic personality disorders are on the rise. Are they? A rise in narcissistic behavior may actually mean that society is encouraging the expression and the use of narcissistic traits as a means of success (in business, politics and the media, as Lasch has claimed), thereby making these traits more apparent. 

Lasch’s villains are bureaucracy, the media and advertising, and therapeutic ideaologies which rob the individual of initiative and competence, stimulate an insatiable craving for goods and thrills to fulfill an inner emptiness and invade our personal life as the media bombards us with anxiety provoking news and as authority figures tell us how to regulate our most intimate relationships. True, the narcissistic personality is formed in the earliest years by one’s par ents, but it is a simplified view of humanity to think that a parent’s capacity for empathy, acceptance, and spontaneous emotional warmth toward one’s child could be completely shaped by such outside forces as child guidance books. The process of parrenting has much less to do with education than with unconscious processes, particularly the identification with one’s own par ents. It may be true that corporate monoliths increase dependency in the population at large, but even if this is so, it is a long way from saying that they are at the root of an upwelling of narcissistic personality dis orders. The point is that it is very difficult to assess and validate causality for something so complex as changing patterns of society. 

If one bypasses the question of child hood etiology—the origin of narcissism—and accepts the finding that there is in creased expression and acceptance of narcissistic behavior in our society, then one can value this work as an excellent attempt to help us see ourseleves and our culture. It reminds the reader to safeguard proper values, to analyze and change those forces in our society which contribute to the problem of narcissism. 

The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch, New York, New York: WW Norton and Company., Inc., 1978, 268 pp., $11.95.