The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism is a book that prophetically identifies a bunch of very twenty-first century cultural traits while also providing a bizarre and sometimes self-contradictory account of how they came into being. This is a largely because about half of it goes into long tangents about psychoanalytic theory citing Freud and Melanie Klein and so on, and accommodating psychoanalysis into anything usually comes at a cost to coherence. The Culture of Narcissism therefore consists of a set of mostly interesting complaints about contemporary society and a set of mostly wild explanations for them.
Despite being published in 1979, the complaints are particularly fitting for the impact of the online world. The problem is that people are getting more angry with each other, more stupid, more inclined towards immediate gratification, more self-regarding, and generally more useless at life. Lasch describes ‘a type of personality that ought to be immediately recognisable, in a more subdued form, to observers of the contemporary cultural scene: facile at managing the impressions he gives to others; ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it; unappeasably hungry for emotional experiences with which to fill an inner void; terrified of ageing and death.’
Lasch offers two main explanations for this: one is that unfettered capitalism atomises society and erodes previous networks of social relationships, a void then filled by corporate and state bureaucracies which in turn makes people grasping, feckless and incompetent. The other is that in the absence of sound paternalistic authority figures, something goes developmentally wrong and we all end up with aberrant psyches, which in turn shape new, undesirable cultural norms which skew towards the short-term pursuit of self-interest at the expense of pretty much everything else. The first of these explanations is why Lasch is popular among post-liberals, who are over the “double liberalism” of economic neoliberalism and social progressivism, both of which they see as corrosive to the bonds that maintain a favourable human environment, and propose bringing back Culture in an economically left-of-centre, neoreactionary-lite kind of way.
Lasch writes that ‘Every society reproduces its culture – its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organising experience – in the individual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialised. The process of socialisation, carried out by the family and secondarily by the school and other agencies of character formation, modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing social norms.’
Even if the evidence suggests that people get socialised more by their peers than their family, this sounds reasonable enough so far. But that’s not how the argument continues. ‘Each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood – the trauma of separation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, the pain of competing with others for the mother’s love – in its own way, and the manner in which it deals with these psychic events produces a characteristic form of personality, a characteristic form of psychological deformation, by means of which the individual reconciles himself to instinctual deprivation and submits to the requirements of social existence. Freud’s insistence on the continuity between psychic health and psychic sickness makes it possible to see neuroses and psychoses as in some sense the characteristic expression of a given culture.’
Lasch takes psychoanalytic theory very, very seriously. He is clear that narcissism means mass literal pathological narcissism in a strictly Freudian sense, not metaphorical narcissism in the sense of people being unduly selfish and self-involved, or a social malaise with vaguely narcissistic characteristics. According to Lasch, ‘Theoretical precision about narcissism is important not only because the idea is so readily susceptible to moralistic inflation but because the practice of equating narcissism with everything selfish and disagreeable mitigates against historical specificity. Men have always been selfish, groups have always been ethnocentric; nothing is gained by giving these qualities a psychiatric label.’ He then proceeds to give a psychiatric label to all contemporary Americans.
This is frustrating. It also undermines his more credible argument about the structural impact of hyperliberalism: if the one true mechanism for how people become narcissists is actually something about bad breasts and absent patriarchs, what does it matter if, say, schools are dysfunctional? And it adds long passages of boring and entirely unsubstantiated psychoanalytic digression that you have to skip through to stay sane between the complaints about the decline of Man.
Complaint No. 1 might be summed up as ‘everyone is a bit useless’:
‘Having surrendered most of his technical skills to the corporation, [the average American] can no longer provide for his material needs. As the family loses not only its productive functions but many of its reproductive functions as well, men and women no longer manage to raise their children without the help of certified experts. The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence, in one area after another, and has made the individual reliant on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies.’
This seems reasonable. It’s the kind of thing the Unabomber might agree with, except he would argue that the correct response to the technologising push towards corporatism and away from individual autonomy would be to go and live in the woods and maybe bomb the odd software firm, while Lasch doesn’t really have a response. It’s trickier for Lasch because his anti-capitalist sympathies presumably entail more reliance on the state, not less, at least economically.
Complaint No. 2 might be summed up as ‘having no boundaries is bad for social relations’:
‘Conversation takes on the quality of confession. Class consciousness declines; people perceive their social position as a reflection of their own abilities and blame themselves for the injustices inflicted on them. Politics degenerates into a struggle not for social change but for self-realization.’
Most of this makes sense apart from the people blaming themselves for injustices and their social position. That definitely isn’t accurate now, even if it was previously. Class might be the last aspect of systemic injustice to be noticed, at least in American politics, but systemic injustice is definitely both noticed and the object of both social change and cynical self-realisation.
The idea of a culture of narcissism applies especially well to the online social world. One of Lasch’s bugbears is the erosion of boundaries in social relationships and the tendency towards emotional oversharing. This seems particularly true now: social media rewards emotive content with engagement and validation, and the phenomenon of the confessional form in everything from autofiction to memoir to journalism has exploded, especially among women writers. But is this a product of pathological narcissism or a product of a set of incentives that alter our behaviour? Writing about yourself world is easy, quick copy, and therefore cheap copy in publishing and journalistic spheres financially hollowed by technology: you can bash out a few thousand words much faster when you don’t have to research or plan it, and people find it relatable. You could maybe argue that people seeking relatable emotion-bearing content is ‘unappeasable emotion-seeking’, but I don’t think it’s that so much as low-hanging fruit, as easy to consume as it is to produce – it doesn’t entail any imaginative work to access rewarding feels.
A side-effect of having these incentives is that people who probably do qualify as pathologically narcissistic get more airtime from them than they might otherwise have done. But that isn’t an argument for everyone suddenly being pathologically narcissistic: it’s more that the people who are now have a way of being very, very visible. Most people oversharing on social media are just acting in ways that appear to offer immediate gain in terms of engagement and validation. Whether it does actually succeed in making people feel more valid and connected is questionable; emotion-heavy discourse, as Lasch points out, makes for hostile, rancorous relations.
Complaint no. 3 is basically ‘People are getting more stupid’:
‘Sweeping social changes, reflected in academic practice, thus underlie the deterioration of the school system and the consequent spread of stupidity. Mass education, which began as a promising attempt to democratize the higher culture of the privileged classes, has ended up by stupefying the privileged themselves. Modern society has achieved unprecedented rates of formal literacy but at the same time it has produced new forms of illiteracy. People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts about their country’s history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary written texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights.’
Lasch is quite straightforward on what is wrong with education, which is that the watered down one-size-fits-all version of traditional education doesn’t do anything well. He doesn’t have any suggestions on improvements; basically everything is problematic either for being too elite or not elite enough. In particular, education is indulgent and demoralising, avoiding the potential confrontation of allowing students to experience challenge or failure and passing everyone regardless of effort or ability.
Complaint no. 4 is that parenting is too permissive:
‘Feeding schedules gave way to feeding on demand; everything now had to be geared towards the child’s “needs.” Love came to be regarded not as a danger but as a positive duty. Improved methods of birth control, according to the progressive creed, had freed parents from the burden of raising children, but this freedom in practice seemed to boil down to the obligation to make children feel wanted at every moment of their lives.’ Lasch mentions ‘debased versions of Freudian theory’ here by which I assume he means attachment theory; it isn’t clear what the correct Freudian theory says on childrearing. Parenting is also obsessed with authenticity: parents are encouraged to share their true feelings about any given situation instead of making a more detached, objective statement about it and children are free to express their negative emotions in the spirit of self-actualisation. This, Lasch says, ‘reflects the collapse of parental guidance and provides it with a moral justification. It confirms, and clothes in the jargon of emotional liberation, the parent’s helplessness to instruct the child in the ways of the world or to transit ethical precepts’ – instead, a panoply of outside experts take over in both state and commercial sectors.
This is only part of the picture, though. The main problem for Lasch is that parent and authority figures are devoid of authority – but he never details exactly what cultural code creates the correct kind of parental authority. If a family or social institution has an authoritative role regarding their charges, that must mean that they are doing some kind of behavioural shaping. Lasch never clarifies what this shape is supposed to look like; all we know is that it is no longer there. Perhaps this is because Lasch doesn’t actually think cultural codes around parenting or authority are that important, or that if they are it’s because they are the product of paternalistic authority, which has a character-forming magic in itself by means of some weird Freudian mechanics.
Overall, the issue isn’t the lack of a cultural code or superego so much as that we now have the wrong, bad sort: ‘The decline of institutionalised authority in an ostensibly permissive society does not, however, lead to a “decline of the superego” in individuals. It encourages instead the development of a harsh, punitive superego that derives most of its psychic energy, in the absence of authoritative social prohibitions, from the destructive, aggressive impulses within the id.’ By this I assume Lasch foresaw people screeching at each other on Twitter, which is generally a good demonstration of everything that is bad both in The Culture of Narcissism and in the world more generally.
If there’s a swathe of people online oversharing emotional content that probably won’t serve them well long-term, regularly picking fights with other people and posting stuff that crudely signals certain status-signifiers, that sounds as much like a bunch of five-year-olds jostling for status in the playground as pathological narcissism.
And an alternative to saying, ‘ah, that may be true but that’s what you get from arresting the correct individuation of the ego’ is to wonder if the reason people seem to act like increasingly like five-year-olds is that five-year-olds don’t have much executive function. Similarly, if lots of people are inclined towards self-gratification, lack emotional boundaries and underperform intellectually because learning involves too much effort, maybe that’s also more of an executive function problem than a literal pathological narcissism problem. Albert Ellis, the progenitor of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, a type of CBT, might have described Lasch’s various complaints as examples of low frustration tolerance – some examples from the Frustration Discomfort Scale via Wikipedia:
- Emotional intolerance, involving intolerance of emotional distress.
- Entitlement, involving intolerance of unfairness and frustrated gratification.
- Discomfort intolerance, involving intolerance of difficulties and hassles.
- Achievement, involving intolerance of frustrated achievement goals.
These are the same problems that Lasch identifies; Ellis’s three core irrational beliefs fit Lasch’s diagnosis of narcissism perfectly, but Ellis doesn’t even see them as pathological, just as a very human tendency to think unreasonably when circumstances allow. Ellis’s solution to this would be that people need to be a bit more reasonable and get better at tolerating frustration, and that this can be learned in therapy. If Lasch is correct in observing a society-level tendency towards these behaviours, it’s a similar complaint in many ways to The Coddling of the American Mind which sees them through a CBT lens. And if that is the case, maybe a postliberal-style society-level solution is a more workable idea than everyone being in therapy, even if it is a less batshit form of therapy than psychoanalysis.
The postliberals propose using the state to encourage and maintain a healthy ecology of tight, local social networks. David Goodhart describes postliberalism as seeing ‘people as embedded in relationships, and wider groups, and conceives of their wellbeing as being dependent on those relationships and the state of the wider communities they are part of. One might call this embedded individualism. Freedom does not already exist inside each individual, it has to be created.’
This goes against the conventional liberal assumption that you get indefinitely freer as constraints lessen. But maybe they have a point – it’s hard to act autonomously if you lack the tools of self-control that allow you to operate beyond immediate gratifications and discomforts. One of the things that lockdown has shown us is that people get worse at basic self-care like eating healthily and getting enough exercise when we’re cut off from real-life contact with other humans. I don’t think this is because of insecure maternal attachment or being terrified of death looming round the corner dressed as Covid – it’s that food is nice and comforting and exercise is hard and boring, and without the incentive to look okay for others, food is more likely to win out. If you ditch the constraints of social norms it’s harder to put the effort in. Maybe this is why loneliness is toxic: we rely, at least in part, on other humans and their behavioural expectations to self-regulate successfully, and self-regulation isn’t just good for social relations. It’s good for our own wellbeing too.
If you do what Lasch quite explicitly thinks is a bad thing, i.e. treat the overall framework of narcissism, superego, id etc very loosely and metaphorically rather than as Freud’s gospel truth, The Culture of Narcissism makes more sense. In a parallel-universe version of this book, what Lasch describes isn’t a culture of narcissism but a culture of low frustration tolerance. The superego works as a set of internalised social constraints on individual id-type desires, like a social domain of executive function. Without a set of shared cultural norms around behaviour which people are socialised into, that social domain of executive function gets lost at a cost to our overall executive function, and we behave more childishly. The top-down mechanism of too much capitalism and too much social liberalism making people incompetent and dependent makes sense, and the bottom-up mechanism of permissive parenting and education making people emotionally labile and entitled makes sense.
There are points where Lasch touches on this: ‘According to Henry and other observers of American culture, the collapse of parental authority reflects the collapse of “ancient impulse controls” and the shift “from a society in which Super Ego values (the values of self-restraint) were ascendant, to one in which more and more recognition was being given to the values of the id (the values of self-indulgence).”’ But his attachment to Freudian dogma stops him from developing it in an interesting way.
Even if the authority enforcing superego values turns out to be more social than parental, the complaint about the collapse of ancient impulse controls is one we see across history, and especially at points where civilisations do well enough to relax their more tiresome constraints that people don’t enjoy and edge onto the cusp of decline. That’s when you get Socrates or Tacitus or whoever lamenting the intellectual and moral laxity of the youth and declining public standards.
Creating superego values lies not in facilitating maternal attachment and psychic individuation so much as in imposing constraints and demands and, in doing so, scaffolding frustration tolerance. A society that demands as its social norms the restraint, for example, of negative emotions in the service of civility, or the obedience of its population in the dull, grinding service of certain societal goals, is a society dependent on individual-level ability to maintain a degree of emotional continence and persistent effort. But maybe there are individual-level benefits to this too: if you normalise high frustration tolerance behaviours and stigmatise low frustration tolerance behaviours, and, as a society with a shared, coherent belief in this, work collectively to encourage desirable behaviours when raising kids or teaching students, you aren’t expecting kids to magically develop self-control by osmosis.
I think you could probably argue that successful reactionary societies fit this description: Confucianism, for example, is a high frustration tolerance superego code. There are also plenty of unsuccessful reactionary societies but those tend to allow elements of low frustration tolerance in, e.g. you have to submit your individual desires to the greater good of your kinship network most of the time but it’s fine to beat your wife if she does anything vaguely irritating and also fine to kill your daughter if you find the embarrassment of her dating boys uncomfortable. And then there’s the direction of travel in Western progressivism, which is that any frustration discomfort is problematic. I think it’s this that Lasch is picking up on; it’s just a shame he didn’t read Ellis instead of Freud before writing The Culture of Narcissism.