[2Wycked]

Prefatory matters:

Chapter One review here: Parts One & Two and my ROK review of the book here.



While I haven't banged the drum of narcissism as a metaphor for our current social malaise recently, I still think that much can be learned from a complete understanding of the subject. As such, I will be continuing my in-depth book review of "The Culture Of Narcissism" that I started some time ago.

The second chapter is entitled, "The Narcissistic Personality Of Our Time" and is broken into five subsections with the most important information coming at the beginning of the chapter.

Narcissism As A Metaphor For The Human Condition

One of the grave -- if not chief -- concerns with any discussion of psychology is how so many of its terms and concepts are at great risk for moral inflation. Lasch notes that many critics of the "new narcissism" simply dress up moral platitudes in psychiatric grab. This is a terribly misguided attempt at using the concept of narcissism as a tool for social analysis. For example, progressive critics of society have often criticized this "new narcissism" as standing in the way of brotherly love, eradication of ancient prejudices and reorganization of society. This critique is unsound: firstly, men have always been selfish and ethnocentric and secondly, it drains the term "narcissism" of any real clinical meaning and uses the term in service of humanistic dogmas.

In order for any psychiatric term to have any real meaning, it much be considered a clinical perspective: what is the etiology of narcissism? It isn't simply a metaphor for the human condition, but a wildly exaggerated form of real human wants and needs. Lasch sprinkles this chapter too liberally with all the various indicators of pathological narcissism, so I will just listen some salient ones here:

• dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence
• a sense of inner emptiness
• boundless repressed rage
• pseudo self-insight
• calculating seductiveness
• nervous, self-deprecating humor
• intense fear of old age and death
• altered, ahistorical sense of time
• fascination with celebrity
• fear of competition
• decline of play spirit
• lack of substantive convictions
  

Psychology and Sociology

Psychology deals with individuals, not groups. The trouble with trying to generalize clinical findings to groups is that groups have a life of their own. Individual psychic needs are necessarily subordinated to the demands of the group. It is precisely the demands of the group -- society, here -- that causes individuals to alter or displace their psychic needs, thus meaning that careful, intensive study of individuals -- using psychoanalysis, not common sense -- can tell us something about the inner workings of society.

Every society reproduces its culture (norms, assumptions, collective goals, etc.) in individuals in the form of personality. In other words, personality is merely the person socialized. The family is by far the primary agent of socialization, with schools, media and other agencies of character formation coming second. These institutions try -- in their own way -- to deal with the common and painful crises of childhood: separation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, competing with others for a mother's love. The way these crises are dealt with -- or not -- produces personality. In other words, personality can be seen as how a society chooses to prepare its children for the reality of existing as a finite human whose needs can only truly be met by others.

For the rest of the chapter, Lasch lays out and builds on some basic Freudian psychological analysis. He stresses the incredibly important point that psychoanalysis best explains the relationships between society, individuals, culture and personality when it confines itself to clinical appraisals of individuals. Psychoanalysis tells us the most about society when it makes no attempt to do so whatsoever. By careful, evidence-based assessments of individuals, psychoanalysis can tell us much about the patterns of behavior engendered in individuals by society.

Lasch makes an attempt to make sense of Freud's seminal -- but incredibly confusing -- work "On Narcissism." A quick summation is that Freud identifies two forms of narcissism: primary and secondary. I have talked about narcissism and codependency in my movie review of Fatso, but the distinction seems to turn on the ability of a person to distinguish between one's self and the rest of the world.

Newborns do not perceive their needs as coming from themselves, but as originating in their mothers. They do not yet possess the ability to understand that their mother has a separate existence from their own. Primary narcissism is characterized by this inability to separate the self from surrounding objects: the person doesn't understand that needs originate from within the self. This means their emotional maturity is arrested at the outset of infancy. Secondary narcissism develops after this crucial stage of human development meaning the secondary narcissist has the ability to recognize that needs originate within the self.



Narcissism In Recent Clinical Literature

More recent psychoanalytic literature has begun to emphasize the study of secondary narcissism, not primary narcissism. No longer did patients present -- as they did in Freud's time -- with well-defined neuroses. Now, the typical patient presents with diffuse dissatisfactions, purposelessness and unshakable feelings of emptiness and depression. Instead of crippling fixations or enervating phobias, the modern patient has violent oscillations of self-esteem and "acts out" conflicts instead of repressing or sublimating them.

Lasch reemphasizes that pathology simply represents a "heightened sense of normality." The personalities that present to modern psychiatrists are merely a reflect of social phenomenon. The patients are adept at managing impressions given to nursing and psychiatric staff, are ravenous for admiration of others but contemptuous of those he manipulates into giving him it and insatiably hungry for emotional experiences that attempt to fill an unfillable inner void.

He goes on to utilize more Freudian psychoanalysis of this particular sort of character. It is beyond the interest of this summation to break it apart, but what should be readily apparent is that this sort of person's intrapsychic world is so "thinly-populated" they experience extraordinarily intense feelings of inauthenticity and rage. Their psychic world consists only of the "grandiose self" and shadowy, flickering images of the self and others.

He further explains why this sort of personality results in so much personal anguish and discomfort. They are unable to truly intellectually or spiritually connect with the world because they care so little for the world if it doesn't relate to them. Their protective shallowness precludes any serious emotional connection with another person. They are chronically bored, eternally searching for an external salve for their inner disquiet, often using sex and new age therapies towards that end.



Social Influences On Narcissism

Every age develops its own distinct pathologies. In Freud's time, hysteria and obsessional neuroses were most prevalent and they reflected the prevailing values of industry and capitalism at the time. These pathologies were characterized by a certain acquisitiveness, a zealous devotion to work and a strong repression of sexuality.

Modern times have seen more preschizophrenic, borderline and personality disordered patients. Lasch cites several psychiatrists, noting this change has been happening since at least World War II. The seismic shift from symptom neuroses to character disorders represents the inner direction to narcissism.

Take note of these two important excerpts:

Quote:

Today's patients by and large do not suffer from hysterical paralyses of the legs or hand-washing compulsions; instead it is their very psychic selves that have gone numb or that they must scrub and rescrub in an exhausting and unending effort to come clean.

Quote:

According to Sheldon Bach, "You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias and familiar neuroses. Now you mostly see narcissists.

Lasch rebuts arguments that psychiatry has simply caught up to the real prevalence of character disorders, as this growing obsession with the self has been noted not just by psychiatrists, but journalists, politicians and corporate managers.

In a needlessly lengthy bit, he explains how this "new narcissist" is a perfect fit in many ways to the modern workplace. He further explains how our vastly "over-organized" society approximates the universal animosity that Hobbes called the state of nature. While interesting, these bits aren't terribly relevant to the general thrust of the chapter.

The Worldview of the Resigned

New forms of social organization require new personalities and ways of organizing experience. Narcissism provides us not with a cut-and-dry way of understanding modern society, but it helps us understand the impact of recent social changes. Narcissism -- in many ways -- represents the best way of coping with the anxiety of modern life, and the prevailing social zeitgeist that coaxes out narcissistic traits that reside in us all.

Through the institutions of the family and schools/media, social patterns reproduce themselves in personality. These patterns live on in the individual, buried beneath consciousness, even after these patterns are recognized to be unhealthy and unwanted. In many ways, this new narcissism that afflicts so many individuals is simply a way of merely surviving in a society that believes it has no future. As Lasch concludes, this ideology of narcissism is the faith of those without faith.