“[The] collapse of our common life…has freed the imagination from external constraints but exposed it more directly than before to the tyranny of inner compulsions and anxieties.”
Précis: The purposefully contrary but peerless Christopher Lasch—social critic, historian, Marxist/Freudian theorist—follows up his surprise bestseller The Culture of Narcissism with an even more explicitly—in fact, thorough-goingly—Freudian analysis of the current (mid-80s) cultural scene. Self-consciously rejecting not only liberalism and conservatism, as currently conceived, but the very language of contemporary politics, Lasch forges a new matrix for the politico-cultural state from Freud’s model of the human psyche. Meant in part as a clarification and extension of its putatively misunderstood predecessor, The Minimal Self precises the notion of narcissism explored in that work; explains this pathology’s dominance of late-industrial, managerial capitalism; and traces its etiology through Freud’s theories of psychological development and prevailing social conditions. Along the way, Lasch explores related themes: the emergence of a survival mentality, moralization of the Holocaust, and the minimalist aesthetic in art.
After rejecting the “liberal” and “conservative” responses (defenses of rationalism and authority, respectively) to the current cultural sickness, Lasch paints a sympathetic portrait of the “Neo-Freudian” New Left—and proceeds to dismiss it as well. Narcissism, the attempt to obliterate the distinction between self and world, is rooted in the inevitable and universal anxieties attending the detachment of desires from their gratifications—the emergence of self—at birth. The culture of consumption and the division of labor together encourage narcissistic responses both by weakening our sense of the world’s reality and by abetting our illusions of limitless gratification. Coping with these anxieties, then, requires not the strengthening of authoritative sanctions; nor increased reliance on our rationalism; nor technological emancipation from work, the subordination of work to play, or mystical reunion with Mother Nature; but practical experience with the world—the kind of mastery of our surroundings currently discouraged by productive and consumptive patterns in which the link between man-made objects and man’s labor has been severed. Such practical wisdom (phronesis) respects our fundamental tension between dependence on nature and the ability to transcend it.
The present volume having been written, in contrast to TCoN and the subsequent The Revolt of the Elites, as a book rather than as a series of re-worked essays, it sacrifices some of those books’ range for a much tighter focus.
Production, Consumption, and Narcissism
Critiques of mass consumption are common enough, but Lasch interestingly links his to a critique of mass production, insisting that “[c]onsumerism is only the other side of the degradation of work—the elimination of playfulness and craftsmanship from the process of production.” Mass production discourages practical mastery of the world, while the “second nature” of disposable commodities contributes to its unreality. Consumerism promotes, then, not hedonism but “a state of uneasiness and chronic anxiety.” While ostensibly stimulating human potential in multiplying the available options, the “pluralist conception of freedom” underwriting mass consumption actually undermines the meaning of choice by strenuously refusing to pass judgment on it, “by denying that its exercise leads to any important consequences.”
Are there not some compensations of large-scale industrial production that might be weighed against the costs: “the loss of autonomy and popular control, a tendency to confuse self-determination with the exercise of consumer choices, a growing ascendency of elites, the replacement of practical skills with organized expertise”? In fact, Lasch denies any connection at all between technological advancement and “material and social progress”: that modern surgery has contributed to an increase in either longevity or physical well-being; that human control over the physical environment has been anything more than “superficial” or “short-term”; that industrial technology has in practice (no matter what the theory) expanded the range of options.
The elite critique of mass consumption, then, which sees the issue as one of decline of high culture and the culprit as democratization, is doubly flawed, since the expansion of democracy is also illusory. True, authoritarian social controls have indeed been abandoned, but only in favor of therapeutic ones: the use of psychiatric counseling and observation in “neutralizing” wage and supervision grievances; the “subordination of instruction to testing and counseling” in the school system; the rise of technocracy in politics and its consequent commodification (choice among the pre-selected options determined by the managerial elite); the use of opinion surveys to stigmatize and pathologize unpopular political positions.
Survivalism: the Discourse on Mass Death, Minimal Art, and Everyday Life
Another distinctive feature (though not obviously a narcissistic one) of the times, according to Lasch, is the emergence and especially the ubiquity of a “survival mentality.” Manifesting itself in political sloganeering, commerical advertisements, newspaper reports, pop-psychology and self-help manuals, personal memoirs, and science fiction, the rhetoric of survival represents the “normalization of crisis,” issuing from an awareness of the enormities of twentieth-century horrors, especially the death camps. But it also testifies to the loss of faith in cooperative political action—and here, though he doesn’t make it explicit, Lasch foreshadows the book’s later chapters on narcissism and its connection with the feeling of helplessness, of being the mere victim of circumstances. Likewise, the mystic anti-individualist ethic that emerges in Doris Lessing’s survivalist science fiction represents, as much as the self-styled survival guide Kurt Saxon’s arch-individualism, a narcissistic defense (see the final section below).
An alternative critique of survivalism correctly espies in some species of it a cheapening of life in its refusal to see anything as worth dying for. Unfortunately, however, this argument has been deployed in countering the advocates of (e.g.) nuclear disarmament and ecological conservation, who correctly recognize that there will be no survivors (of which to speak) of either nuclear war or environmental devastation.
Survivalism may be a natural response to Auschwitz and the Gulag, but its invasion of everyday life threatens to trivialize those atrocities; just as the “language of extremity, the only language appropriate to extreme situations, soon loses its force through repetition and inflation.” (“The destruction of the Jews of Eastern Europe did not become a ‘holocaust’ until the mid-sixties.”) Yet, on the other hand, the attempt to maintain the uniqueness of the Holocaust also jeopardizes our ability to imagine, and therefore to descry harbingers of, future atrocities, future genocides. “By locating the Holocaust in the past, by reserving it for the Jews, and by associating it with insane racial policies now universally condemned (officially at least), the most sober and responsible historians of the Holocaust, seeking to prevent the routinization of the language of atrocity, unavoidably obscure the point that the United State and the Soviet Union, in pursuit of legitimate national goals, under leadership not of criminals but of ordinary men in full possession of their mental faculties, even now prepare themselves to commit genocide against each other in the event of a nuclear war.” Attempts to draw moral lessons—particularly lessons for “everyday” survival—from the Holocaust per se are equally misguided: that barbarity can have meaning only within the context of “a moral order transcending it.”
It is not surprising to find the minimal self appearing in the arts, as well: the “protagonists” of the novels of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, dominated by external circumstances; the affectless pop art of Warhol, Lichtenstein, et alia; the incorporation of randomness by conceptualists like Robert Barry; and the “opposition to subject-matter” of abstract painter Ad Reinhardt. “The survival of art, like the survival of everything else, has become problematic, not…because mass communications have usurped the representational function of art, nor…because reality outstrips the artistic imagination, but because the weakening of the distinction between the self and its surroundings…makes the very concept of reality, together with the concept of the self, increasingly untenable.”
“The Politics of the Psyche”
The idea that men are animated by different and sometimes competing “parts”–or faculties, or essences–is at least as old as Plato’s tripartite division into nous (intellect), thymos (passion), and epithumia (appetite); and Freud’s version–ego, id, superego–can be seen as an attempt to supplant the traditional Western organization (at least reason and desire, thymos making an occasional showing) with a new model. Lasch follows Freud: id is the faculty of the unconscious and of primitive drives; ego of realism, perception, cognition, and organization; the superego of internalized fear of punishment. In utero, we are all id, but the separation of our desires from the source of their gratification occasioned by birth initiates the distinction between self and not-self (the distinction on which all future ones are based), and therefore the emergence of the ego. The resulting separation anxiety is the crucible in which human personality is forged. The superego emerges last, originating not, as sometimes thought, in the external world, as a strict internalization of parental authority; but in the id, in the “individual’s own aggressive impulses, directed intially against his parents…projected onto them, reinternalized as aggressive and domineering images of authority, and finally redirected in this form against the ego.”
The emerging infant ego (purportedly) responds to the separation anxiety of birth with defense mechanisms: over-idealization of the source of gratification (mother); dissociation of “the frustrating…[and] pleasure-giving aspects of the adults who take care of” it; fantasies of ecstatic reunion with the mother; and grandiose illusions of omnipotence. Narcissism, then, is not egoism or selfishness but the (vain) longing to recapture that oneness that precedes birth and annul separation anxiety. This denial of the external world, in its refusal to accept that the source of gratification lies outside oneself, manifests itself in “a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires”—clinical narcissism.
Three distintively modern features encourage narcissistic defenses: “the emergence of the egalitarian family, so-called; the child’s increasing exposure to other socializing agencies besides the family; and the general effect of modern mass culture in breaking down distinctions between illusions and reality.” Thus emancipation of the child from parental, particularly paternal, authority, accompanied by the colonization of family functions by “other socializing agencies,” in exposing the child to early sexual indoctrination (and increasingly, perhaps, exploitation) while undermining his confidence in adult authority, weakens resistance to narcissistic “fantasies of sexual and generational interchangeability” and to the illusion of omnipotence. Thus the cult of consumerism promotes not hedonism but uneasy self-consciousness; and surrounds individuals with fantasies, illusions, and disposable commodities; weakening, then, both the sense of self and the sense of a durable external world. “Even science, which takes as its task precisely the disenchantment of the world, helps to reactivate infantile appetites and the infantile need for illusions by impressing itself on people’s lives as a never-ending series of technological miracles, wonder-working drugs and cures, and electronic conveniences that obviate the need for human effort.”
Lasch goes on to parse contemporary reactions to the culture of narcissism in terms of Freud’s partition of the psyche: the party of the ego, corresponding more or less to the “liberal, humanist tradition,” places its confidence in the powers of human reason and increase in enlightenment; the party of the superego, corresponding most closely to “the position of those labeled neoconservatives,” “regard[s] a restoration of the social superego and of strong parental authority as the best hope of social stability and cultural renewal”; and the so-called New Left, which Lasch can’t quite bring himself to identify with the id but which he does say “originate[s] in the central contention…that ‘our politics begin with our feelings.’” He identifies it instead with the so-called ego ideal, the variously described “heir to the state of primary narcissism” (Freud’s term).
Lasch proceeds to critique all three. The strengthening of moral prohibitions is counterproductive if it is based only on fear, which it must be in a culture which cannot inspire “confidence, respect, [or] admiration.” The party of the ego, on the other hand, slides inexorably into technocratic social control, since on the one hand, liberal humanism rejects authoritative traditions (dominance by the superego); and on the other, its therapeutic morality ultimately “destroys the idea of moral responsibility,” a conclusion vainly disavowed by (e.g.) the game- and group-therapists, but openly endorsed by behaviorists like Skinner. Their disagreement is only cosmetic, since both “[share] the liberal faith that the problems of modern social organization are administrative and psychological, not economic and political.” More significantly, they both share a faith in technological or “scientific” emancipation from our natural condition of psychic conflict, a faith rooted once again in “the illusion of infantile omnipotence.”
Finally, the New Left, to whom Lasch is most sympathetic, appreciates the need for a genuine “cultural revolution.” But its neo-Freudian exponents—Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and the Freudian feminists—although they appreciate that “[n]either liberalism nor Marxism provides an adequate explanation of the destructiveness” of modern culture, each ultimately makes a wrong diagnosis. Thus Marcuse rightly rejects the “tender-minded” psychoanalytic radicalism of the 1930s that wrongly emphasized cultural determinants of character at the expense of biological ones, but misfires in locating the source of human unhappiness in the subordination of the “pleaure principle” to the “performance principle.” This leads him to advocate the “technological abolition of work” and to see the division of labor and proliferation of technology as liberating, rather than as the original sources of both labor alienation and narcissistic responses to the external world (resp.). Brown, contrariwise, sees the existence of the death instinct (Thanatos, of which Lasch is skeptical) and its striving for a resting point as implying a condemnation of restless activity and ultimately the endorsement of “play”—overlooking, then, any “virtue in the impulse to master our surroundings.” Finally, the Freudian feminists (Stephanie Engel, Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Jessica Benjamin) see in modern narcissistic tendencies a salutary “feminine” desire for “mystical union with nature,” and correspondingly decry “substitute gratifications” for a sense of connection with Mother Nature. But such gratification, particularly purposeful activity, “becomes pathological not when it serves to compensate us for earlier losses but when it serves to deny those losses.”
“The Case for a Guilty Conscience”
If there is a way out, then, it lies in the practical mastery—Aristotle’s phronesis—that is acquired through the kind of work in which instrumental reason has been subordinated to the cultivation of craft and virtue. “[T]he choice of means has to be governed by their conformity to standards of excellence designed to extend human capacities of self-understanding and self-mastery.” Lasch goes so far as to claim that politics, which for Aristotle were the “highest form of practice,” were not reduced to mere means-ends resolution until Thomas More and Machiavelli. “[F]or Aristotle and his followers…[the] rules and conventions [of politics were] designed not so much to solve the problems of social living as to encourage citizens to test themselves against demanding standards of moral excellence (for example, in contests of oratorical skill and physical process) and thus to develop their gifts to the highest pitch.”
Or, taking a psychoanalytic view, practical activity furnishes individuals with “transitional phenomena” which mediate between the unresponsive external world and the fantastic inner world of instant gratification. (Winnicott’s “transitional phenomena” are a generalization of his “transitional objects,” the teddy bears and security blankets that “provide children with libidinal gratification and serve as substitutes for the mother’s breast,” that ease the process of ego emergence. They serve as both substitute gratifications and, importantly, acknowledgments of the separation of want and satiety.) Mass-produced commodities cannot play this role, since they bear no connection either to personal craft or to a durable and realistic outer world. “Commodities cannot take the place of hand-made objects any more than science can take the place of practical worldly experience. Neither contributes to a sense of exploration and mastery.”
Of course, a reliance on transitional phenomena embodies a certain tension, since it recognizes both the human capacity for manipulating and directing the physical environment, and the limits of that ability—the awareness of which first elicits narcissistic responses. But Lasch sees in the “Western, Judaeo-Christian tradition” an individualism which defines selfhood precisely in terms of “tension, division, conflict.” Human freedom means, among other things, the freedom to fail—which is, incidentally, what is overlooked by the Freudian feminists’ emphasis on “mutuality and relatedness” at the expense of self-sufficiency. “The innocence of nature is harmony without freedom.” The “party of the ego,” for its part, fails to appreciate those limits; and the “party of the superego” confuses conscience—an awareness of the tension between “freedom and the capacity for destruction”—with submission to “a received body of authoritative moral law.”
Christopher Lasch has a gift for graceful prose, a knack for pithy phrasing and felicitous word choice that lend his writing a certain crispness, an economy, an elegance. I daresay I know of no equal in that regard. I will give him the last word, then, on the potential of human conscience, so conceived. Linking its emergence with the transition from the “idea that the dead call for revenge” to practices of “genuine mourning,” and the corresponding replacement of vindicative gods by loving and merciful ones, Lasch says of the new gods’ “morality of loving your enemy”:
Such a morality has never achieved anything like general popularity, but it lives on, even in our own enlightened age, as a reminder both of our fallen state and of our surprising capacity for gratitude, remorse, and forgiveness, by means of which we now and then transcend it.
Miscellaneous Quotations
“Competition, for example, now centers not so much on the desire to excel as on the struggle to avoid a crushing defeat.”
“[Contemporary] social arrangements…support a system of mass production and mass consumption [that] tend[s] to discourage initiative and self-reliance and to promote dependence, passivity, and a spectatorial state of mind both at work and at play.”
“All medical technology has done is to increase patients’ dependence on machines and the medical experts who operate these ‘life-support systems.’”
“I find it hard to imagine a less attractive prospect than a society made up of intellectuals.”
“The school system, the child-care professions, and the entertainment industry have now taken over many of the custodial, disciplinary, and educative activities formerly carried out by the family.”
“The mass media make an earnest effort to tell us who and what we are, indeed to generate a spurious sense of national identity, but they do this by telling us what programs we like to watch, what products we like to buy, what political candidates we plan to vote for, how many of us will marry, how many of get divorced, how long we will live, how many of us will die of cancer, how many of us will die in traffic accidents on a holiday weekend, how many of us will die in a nuclear war, how many of us will survive a nuclear war if adequate precautions are taken.”
[...] the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen.” (Lasch of course makes a similar point about choice in a culture that insists on the equality of all choices, though he traces this to [...]