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The Culture of Narcissism Revisited
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18048 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
4,534 Words |
| Author
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Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch is Alonzo Watson Professor of History at the
University of Rochester. |
Thanks to Tom Wolfe and a whole pack of lesser journalists, the seventies had already come to be known as the "me decade" by the time The Culture of Narcissism appeared in 1979. Many commentators understandably read the book as one more account of the self-centered attitudes that seemed to have replaced the social concerns of the sixties. Journalists have taught us to think of decades as the standard unit of historical time and to expect a new set of cultural trends at ten-year intervals. If the sixties were the Age of Aquarius, the age of social commitment and cultural revolution, the seventies soon gained a reputation for self-absorption and political retreat.
Reviewers greeted The Culture of Narcissism as another "jeremiad" against self-indulgence, a summing-up of the seventies. Those who found the book too gloomy predicted that it would soon be outdated in any case, since the new decade that was about to begin required a new set of trends, new slogans and catchwords, to distinguish it from its predecessors.
As it turned out, the eighties did not see a revival of altruism and civic spirit, as many commentators predicted. Yuppies, who set the cultural tone of that decade, were not known for their unselfish devotion to the public good. Now that another new decade is beginning, I am asked whether "the I's still have it," in the words of the New York Times. Are few still a nation of narcissists? Or have we finally begun to rediscover a sense of civic obligation? These are the wrong questioned, I think; but even if they were the right ones, they are questions that are quite irrelevant to the issues addressed in The Culture of Narcissism.
Culture and Personality
Narcissism, as I had come to understand it, was not just another name for selfishness. Nor was The Culture of Narcissism conceived of as a book about the "me decade" or the retreat from the political activism of the sixties. It grew out of an earlier study of the American family, Haven in a Heartless World, which had led me to the conclusion that the family's importance in our society had been steadily declining over a period of more than a hundred years. Schools, peer groups, mass media, and the "helping professions" had challenged parental authority and taken over many of the family's child-rearing functions. I reasoned that changes of this magnitude, in an institution of such fundamental importance, were likely to have far-reaching psychological repercussions. The Culture of Narcissism was an attempt to analyze those repercussions - to explore the psychological
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