In the The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984, ISBN 0-393-01922-5), Christopher Lasch supplemented The Culture of Narcissism, and refined his analysis of cultural narcissism. The earlier book covered economic, political, educational, and social structures, and the psychological experience of living in a consumerist world of superficial exchanges. In that situation people don't know how to value anything and cannot identify values worth having. The Minimal Self deals more with cultural and psychological issues, with some attention to the political and social movements that came out of the Counterculture of the 1960's. (He addressed a few points about the Counterculture, the New Left and the New Age in the Afterword of the 1991 Norton paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism). His method, again, is a review of the social and psychological effects of living in a late capitalist, postmodern society.
This time, he pays more attention, on the one hand, to the experience of alienation and fear, and on the other hand, to the emerging politics of the narcissistic self.
His first main clarification of narcissism is identify it as a cultural response to fears about survival, at two levels - survival as a distinct person, and survival in itself. The second and third Chapters deal with the Survival Mentality, and the Discourse of Mass Death. The Survival Mentality looks at survival themes in the arts and the media. There has been a shift in thinking, so that for many people, survival has become success. There is a pervasive sense of oppression, and for many, victim-hood has become the defining characteristic of personal identity. The Discourse of Mass Death looks at cultural responses to the reality of mass death, the extermination of populations of disposable people. Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps used the Biblical term "holocaust" to identify the event. He argues that this was partly a response to the debasement of the term genocide, (from ethnic slaughter to any ethnic conflict) and partly a response to a horrifying insight. The Holocaust was a radical slaughter of people who had been systematically dehumanized in a totalitarian regime. He moves on to discuss the debasement of the term totalitarian, originally conceived by Hannah Arendt as a monstrous use of power to render people valueless and superfluous, to a synonym for an authoritarian regime. His argument is that totalitarianism and the Holocaust represent a deep break in the human condition, calling for a renewal of religious faith and a commitment to decent social conditions.
Article comments
1 - pogblog
I haven't read the books you reference, but appreciate your thorough and lucid review.
I have always found Freud's a rather narrow, prissy, sour, and mechanical view of the personality. His fears of 'the black-tide of the occult' leaving out about half of semi-conscious human experience. He seems absent of the most interesting and important part, hopefully hub, of any personality to me -- humor, from layered & tasty trifle to obsidian.
Jung's views, though turgid to make them seem sufficiently scholarly, were at least more organic -- seemed wrought of the complex living creature.
To one of your central themes -- perhaps we could imagine a less adolescent Narcissus looking up from his pool and seeing his own humanity reflected in the miens of others? His empathy awakened, the culture, economy, and politics would change radically. About which more another time.
Thanks again for stirring the Thoughts Soup.
2 - Tony Dalmyn
Lasch refers to Jung in generally unfavourable terms in The Minimal Self. He identifies him negatively as in influence in the tranformation of psychoanalysis into a "cult of personal health and fulfilment which occurred more rapidly and went further in America than anywhere else" and as an influence in humanistic psychologies and growth therapies - which makes him one of the high priests of the party of Narcissus. He gives Jung some credit on two issues. First he says "Even Jungian mysticism, in some of its manifestations, at least, had a certain affinity with liberal traditions of moral striving and spiritual self-help." Second he noted that Jung addressed himself to the impoverishment of the spiritual imagination, which is pervasive in modern society. He doesn't care for the way that Jung addressed the issue. Jung sought to restore "the illusion of faith ... by enabling the patient to construct a private religion made up of the decomposing remnants of former religions", a method which Lasch describes as "spiritual eclecticism. Lasch says Freud's idea of analysis is a search for insight, while Jung promoted a new "religio-ethical system."