Lashing* out at you.

*Lashing out at you. Pun intended. Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism revisited.

Christopher Lasch (June 1, 1932 - February 1994) a prolific writer and social critic who may at times criticized the Conservative's Capitalism ideology, was somewhat a capitalist himself.  Author of at least a dozen books, some of which were best sellers, more than supplemented his salary as a history professor at the University of Rochester.  Christine Rosen's (see below) description of Lasch is intertwined with the past and the present, and in my opinion rightly so.  It could also be described as history repeating itself for every generation there's an example narcissism that reflects in the mirror of time. Yet most of us old folks desire the years gone by.  Don't expect too much from the future if you can't praise the past that got us here.  Is there a brighter future for America?  Only if you're an optimist. ~ Norman E. Hooben

The Overpraised American
Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism revisited
Saturday, October 1, 2005 24 By: Christine Rosen

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure,” the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism. For Lasch, writing in 1979, that character structure was an unrelenting narcissism, one that threatened to undermine the rugged individualism of previous eras and, quite possibly, liberalism itself. His book “describes a way of life that is dying,” he wrote in the introduction, “the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, [and] the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”

Critics promptly judged Lasch’s work a jeremiad (albeit a best-selling one), an erudite but extreme lament about the state of the culture that was astute in pointing out the development of certain tendencies among Americans but far too pessimistic about the future of liberalism. Those optimists assessed the American and found an individualistic, competitive specimen who had, in recent years, become appropriately more attuned to the need for self-care and an enriched self-esteem. Lasch, by contrast, looked at the American and found him peering into a mirror, anxiously rating the figure staring back at him and wondering how to combat the inexplicable emptiness he felt. As for the causes of this new narcissism, Lasch placed the blame on “quite specific changes in our society and culture — from bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the inner life, the cult of consumption, and in the last analysis from changes in family life and from changing patterns of socialization.”

Although it is true that Lasch allowed himself to make sweeping generalizations about the quality of the American character, The Culture of Narcissism has nevertheless remained one of the more useful critiques of late twentieth-century American life and has outlived the feverish criticism it once spawned. The book challenged many of the core assumptions that elites and non-elites blithely accepted as facts at the time: that human beings would continue to devise more sophisticated means of controlling nature and its effects (such as aging) through technology and science, and that these would bring inordinately positive results; that democracies inevitably continue to progress in their development rather than stall or regress; that extremes of individualism and secularism would free people from the supposedly restrictive confines of family, religious, social, and political obligation. Such sentiments were hardly new, of course, but Lasch outlined the weaknesses of them keenly.

Lasch subtitled his book, “American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations,” and it is useful to question just how far the diminishing of expectations he first identified has gone. Looking back on The Culture of Narcissism more than 25 years later, what did Lasch get right and what did he get wrong? What developments did he presciently identify and which ones did he miss? In the interim decades, has Lasch’s narcissist given way to a new type of American character and, if so, what are that character’s defining traits? A descriptive tour revisiting some of Lasch’s themes — especially the transformation of the family — suggests that the narcissism Lasch described has not disappeared. It has simply taken on a different and in some ways more exaggerated form.

The cult of therapy

Today, a book about the vagaries of the American character might still have a great deal to say about narcissism, but its subtitle would likely point to something other than diminishing expectations. It would, perhaps, document “Life in the Age of the Overpraised American,” for praise (and its kin, attention-seeking), is our common cultural currency. If, in the twentieth century, “character” gave way to “personality,” as Lasch and others such as Richard Sennett and Anthony Giddens argued, then in the twenty-first century “personality” exists only if it is broadcast, rated, praised and consumed by as many people as possible — put on display for strangers as well as intimates. In addition, the over-praised American personality expects regularly to assess the worth of others, regardless of his qualifications for doing so: Instant polling, telephone surveys that follow even the most mundane business transaction, voting on television shows such as “American Idol,” ratings on Websites such as Amazon.com and eBay that rank buyers, sellers, and even rate the raters all give the overpraised American a perpetual reminder of his own supposed control over the success of others.

Moreover, the self-esteem movement nascent when Lasch was writing has reached maturity, and its progeny — the children of Lasch’s 1970s narcissists — are now forming their own families. None of them, evidently, is merely average. Many of them embrace an increasingly egalitarian family structure, uncritically and enthusiastically use personal technologies that alter the rhythms of private life and isolate family members from each other, and approach institutions such as schools and the workplace with a healthy sense of entitlement. They spend less time with their children than parents in Lasch’s day, rely more on experts for advice about how to deal with them when they do, and begin building a resumé of activities and test scores for them from an increasingly early age. When they seek religion, it is a heavily therapeutic kind of faith, and they avail themselves of rafts of advice and consumer products — from Suze Orman’s relentlessly upbeat financial self-esteem directives to the ministrations of professional closet organizers — to help them cope with the “stresses” of their daily lives. It seems like a long time ago that Americans made much of their own clothing, grew their own food, had much larger families, and produced books, like one published in the U.S. in 1911, with titles such as Etiquette: Good Manners for All People, Especially for Those Within the Broad Zone of the Average.

Lasch identified most of these trends in their early stages. Americans, he wrote in The Culture of Narcissism, “have retreated to purely personal preoccupations,” most involving the maintenance or spiritual “growth” of the self. “The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious,” he noted, and he deemed therapy the successor to both old-fashioned individualism and old-time religion. These and other factors produced the “narcissistic personality of our time,” he said, someone who “depends on others to validate his self-esteem” and who “cannot live without an admiring audience.” Lasch contrasted this narcissist, who viewed the world as a mirror, with the rugged individualist of earlier times, who saw the world “as an empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design.” In the narcissist’s world, he argued, confession and self-absorption become “the moral climate.”

Today, we are more open about discussing character disorders such as the narcissism and borderline personalities that Lasch described — disorders that present with “vague, ill-defined complaints” rather than traditional symptoms of neuroses — but we have also expanded the range of personal pathologies to include new conditions. Take, for example, the recent discovery of the “highly sensitive person” or hsp. Such people, according to one hsp support Website, have unusually sensitive nervous systems and a “greater capacity for inner searching” but are often misunderstood by the rest of society as merely “shy” or “introverted.” They may have “low tolerance for noise, glaring lights, strong odors, clutter and chaos” and frequently find themselves becoming over-stimulated in social settings. Society, alas, does not recognize the unique qualities of such people, and so “sensitive people learn early in life to mask their wonderful attributes of sensitivity, intuition, and creativity.” Sensitive people also claim to have unique insights. “When we’re not feeling overwhelmed,” one hsp told a reporter for a California newspaper, “we can experience joy and love much more deeply than the nonhsp.”

Were he alive today, Lasch likely would view hsps as modern neurasthenics. They are, in essence, allergic to the conditions of modern life, with its hectic pace, congestion, bewildering bureaucracies, and frequently liminal social situations. This is not a pathology of the few; Dr. Elaine Aron, a self-appointed expert on hsps, claims that there are 50 million highly sensitive people in the country (that’s 20 percent of the population). She fears their unique social capital is not being appropriately tapped. “hsps could contribute much more to society if they received the right kind of attention,” she notes on her Website.

But therapy today is itself a form of attention, as a glance at popular self-help books reveals. Lasch might have diagnosed the problem of cultural narcissism, but the contemporary self-help industry has rushed in to try to solve it; the shelves of bookstore self-help aisles are filled with offerings such as Why Is It Always About You? Saving Yourself from the Narcissists in Your Life and Enough About You, Let’s Talk About Me: How to Recognize and Manage the Narcissists in Your Life. In the ever-indulgent world of self-help, the narcissist is, of course, never you; it is always someone else.

The overarching goal of most of these volumes (as with those who claim to suffer from hsp) is learning to love oneself. In If Love Is a Game, These Are the Rules, for example, readers embark on a program of self-improvement that begins with “Rule One: You Must Love Yourself First.” “Have a love affair with yourself!” another writer advises in Codependent No More. “Practice celebrating your magnificence,” urges the author of Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know. Whether the focus is on repairing strained romantic relationships or getting along better with your boss, today’s commercialized therapy purveyors all begin with the same premise: Think first of yourself. As Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel argued in their recent book, One Nation Under Therapy, such relentless focus on our supposedly vulnerable sense of self has infected nearly every aspect of American culture, with predictably pernicious results. Jean Bethke Elshtain has called this the “quivering sentimental self that gets uncomfortable very quickly, because this self has to feel good about itself all the time.”

If anecdotal evidence is any guide, the cult of therapy observed by Lasch also continues to exert its influence over religion. The “soft-core spirituality” Lasch saw as a sign of cultural narcissism thrives in offerings such as Mitch Albom’s best-selling bit of pop spirituality, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and similar books. “The heaven that is apparently popular with readers these days is nothing more than an excellent therapy session,” New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in 2004. “When you go to [Albom’s] heaven, friends and helpers come and tell you how innately wonderful you are. They help you reach closure. In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It’s all about you.”

Lasch identified the mass media as abetting this therapeutic culture; the media, he argued, “with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers.” As well, the media “encourage the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the ‘herd,’ and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence.” This, too, has only intensified since Lasch wrote. An avalanche of celebrity magazines offer candid photographs of movie stars without makeup or taking out the garbage, with headlines conveying the message, “Stars: They’re just like us!” At the same time, cable networks such as vh1 and mtv broadcast programs, like “The Fabulous Life” and “Cribs,” that do little more than offer an endless array of images of celebrities’ decadent homes, spa vacations, shopping sprees, and private jets. The intent is paradoxical: to make celebrities seem more like regular people (and thus make regular people feel better about themselves) and to encourage envy of those same celebrities for their lavish lifestyles, which are unattainable by regular people.

The media now accomplish something else that Lasch could not have predicted, however: They now offer ordinary Americans the opportunity to become celebrities themselves. In 1979, Lasch noted, “modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions — and our own — were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time.” Today, there is no “as if” involved; many more of our mundane interactions are recorded — or have the potential to be so. A contributor to the op-ed page of the New York Times recently wrote about enduring an emergency airplane landing. When the plane put down safely, the first people to come aboard were not emergency workers, but a television crew eager to turn the passengers’ harrowing experience into reality television gold. For this passenger, more disturbing than the emergency landing was the speed with which the passengers’ fears were transformed into a surreal form of entertainment for the masses. Indeed, Lasch’s delineation of the secondary characteristics of narcissism perfectly describes the tenor of most contemporary reality tv: pseudo–self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor. Today, tv is itself a form of therapy, and not merely for those who tune into Dr. Phil or Oprah. Television offers 24-hour-a-day reassurance that our “reality” can be interesting — interesting enough, even, to broadcast to millions.

It is not a surprise, in this climate, to find that the ability to win praise and attention has become the marker of success in the culture. As Charles Derber argues in The Pursuit of Attention, such efforts have only increased since Lasch wrote his book. We live, Derber claims, in an “attention-seeking culture” where self-involvement is so great that it even imposes on regular social interactions in the form of “conversational narcissism.” Today we find ordinary Americans setting up webcams in their dorm rooms to broadcast their daily activities over the Internet. Confessional novels and memoirs pour forth from publishers detailing personal histories of drug abuse, incest, sexual profligacy, and various other addictions.

The taxonomy of fame has also changed. Celebrity begets pseudo–celebrity, which begets reality tv celebrity, and the world has become so full of attention-seeking potential stars and starlets that we must grade them like beef: a-list, b-list, c-list, and so on. At the same time, as the demand for attention has increased, it has become more acceptable to be the object of unflattering attention, as witness the antics of celebutante Paris Hilton, who has, among other things, had a pornographic tape of herself widely circulated over the Internet. Websites such as Gawker and Wonkette skewer the rich, famous, and intellectually pretentious, as do, daily, thousands of personal bloggers. Talking heads on television offer cutting remarks about political leaders and other public figures. The underlying theme of much of this commentary is contempt for genuine achievement. Writing in the Guardian recently, Dylan Evans noted, “Nowadays, if someone is vastly more talented than us, we don’t congratulate them — we envy them and resent their success. It seems we don’t want heroes we can admire, so much as heroes we can identify with.” “If Achilles were around today,” he added ruefully, “the headline would all be about his heel.”

“Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity,” Lasch wrote. Today, however, the process of ratification is swift and constant, and genuine success based on real achievement is no longer a requirement for receiving it. Any attention will do. So demanding is this need that even the objectively successful, who wouldn’t seem to require additional ratification, still seek it, as the efforts of former celebrities, business tycoons, musicians, and chefs to remain in the public eye through reality television shows attest. The reality of their achievements evidently ceases to matter unless a television audience also endorses it.

For Lasch, writing in the 1970s, the prostitute had replaced the conformist, Willy Loman-like salesman of the 1950s and 1960s as the symbol of achievement in American society. Today, two other types prevail: the porn star, who has taken the prostitute’s art, broadcast it, and in the process become a celebrity, and the reality television star, whose only achievement is his supposed normalcy, which exists only if it is televised. Unlike some other forms of celebrity, pornography and reality television offer the average American the tantalizing idea that he, too, can partake of the glamorous life. In succumbing to this fantasy, however, we fulfill the worst of Lasch’s predictions about the extremes of narcissism.

Shock and confusion

As this incomplete and largely descriptive tour of the culture suggests, the narcissistic entitlement Lasch first identified in the 1970s has not disappeared; it has merely taken new form: Lasch’s narcissist has become the overpraised, attention-seeking, technologically dependent American who is aware and concerned about certain influences on family and social life but little motivated to change his lifestyle to counteract them.


Although Lasch might not have anticipated the damaging effects of technology or the rapidity with which the transformation of the family would progress, the conclusions he reached in 1979 still have resonance. In an afterword to The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch described a culture that has “replaced character building with permissiveness, the cure of souls with the cure of the psyche, blind justice with therapeutic justice, philosophy with social science, personal authority with an equally irrational authority of professional experts. It has tempered competition with antagonistic cooperation . . . [I]t has surrounded people with ‘symbolically mediated information’ and has substituted images of reality for reality itself. Without intending to, it has created new forms of illiteracy.”

Lasch argued throughout The Culture of Narcissism that “The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.” These were the very things he saw the culture beginning to devalue. It is as true today as it was in Lasch’s day that society requires the creation of people who are capable of fulfilling their responsibilities to democratic culture. And yet Lasch had little hope that Americans would meet this challenge in the future. Writing in a later work, The Minimal Self, Lasch argued: “With the help of an elaborate network of therapeutic professions, which themselves have largely abandoned approaches stressing introspective insight in favor of ‘coping’ and behavior modification, men and women today are trying to piece together a technology of the self, the only apparent alternative to personal collapse.”

The indictment he handed down in this later book was harsh but worth quoting at length, as it describes well our contemporary situation. He envisioned a culture whose children “spend too much time watching television, since adults use the television set as a baby-sitter and a substitute for parental guidance and discipline. They spend too many of their days in child-care centers, most of which offer the most perfunctory kind of care. They eat junk food, listen to junk music, read junk comics, and spend endless hours playing video games, because their parents are too busy or too harried to offer them proper nourishment for their minds and bodies. They attend third-rate schools and get third-rate moral advice from their elders,” since their parents “hesitate to ‘impose’ their moral standards on the young or to appear overly ‘judgmental.’”

Although the children of Lasch’s narcissists express both shock and confusion over the disorder of their family lives and the declining civility around them, their response so far has been largely one of retreat — into congratulatory, therapeutic reassurances, into the cocoon of increasingly large homes where the demands of domesticity and family life can be outsourced and distracting entertainments easily obtained. This is a technologically sophisticated world that nevertheless increasingly lacks opportunities for genuine connection. It is a world where parents fret about negative, outside influences on children yet do little to stop children (or themselves) from watching hour after hour of the television that celebrates those very influences. Demanding constant praise and immediate feedback, and without knowing where, at any given moment, they rest on the tumultuous yet finely calibrated scale of success, Americans are, in the end, even more anxious and unhappy than the narcissists Lasch first described. Whether or not these anxieties will become a permanent feature of our culture remains to be seen. But as Lasch’s book reminds us, their influence is not likely to disappear. It is likely to grow even more powerful in ways now beyond our ability to imagine.