{"id":1538,"date":"2017-11-04T04:33:32","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T01:33:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1538"},"modified":"2020-09-01T12:53:44","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T09:53:44","slug":"lasch-narcissism-as-a-metaphor-of-the-human-condition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1538\/lasch-narcissism-as-a-metaphor-of-the-human-condition\/","title":{"rendered":"Lasch, Narcissism as a Metaphor of the Human Condition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back to Christopher Lasch, The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

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Recent critics of the new narcissism not only confuse cause and effect, attributing to a cult of privatism developments that derive from the disintegration of public life; they use the term narcissism so loosely that it retains little of its psychological content. Erich Fromm, in The Heart of Man,<\/em> drains the idea of its clinical mean\u00ading and expands it to cover all forms of “vanity,” “self-admira\u00adtion,” “self-satisfaction,” and “self-glorification” in individuals and all forms of parochialism, ethnic or racial prejudice, and “fa\u00adnaticism” in groups. In other words, Fromm uses the term as a synonym for the “asocial” individualism which, in his version of progressive and “humanistic” dogma, undermines cooperation, brotherly love, and the search for wider loyalties. Narcissism thus appears simply as the antithesis of that watery love for hu\u00admanity (disinterested “love for the stranger”) advocated by Fromm under the name of socialism.<\/p>\n

Fromm’s discussion of “individual and social narcissism,” ap\u00adpropriately published in a series of books devoted to “Religious Perspectives,” provides an excellent example of the inclination, in our therapeutic age, to dress up moralistic platitudes in psychi\u00adatric garb. (“We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man . . . and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.”) Whereas Sennett reminds us that narcissism has more in common with self-hatred than with-self-admiration, Fromm loses sight even of this well-known clinical fact in his eagerness to sermonize about-the blessings of brotherly love.<\/p>\n

As always in Fromm’s work, the trouble originates in his misguided and unnecessary attempt to rescue Freud’s thought from its “mechanistic” nineteenth-century basis and to press it into the service of “humanistic realism.” In practice, this means that theoretical rigor gives way to ethically uplifting slogans and sentiments. Fromm notes in passing that Freud’s original concept of narcissism assumed that libido begins in the ego, as a “great reservoir” of undifferentiated self-love, whereas in 1922 he de\u00adcided, on the contrary, that “we must recognize the id as the great reservoir of the libido.” Fromm slides over this issue, however, by remarking, “The theoretical question whether the libido starts originally in the ego or in the id is of no substantial importance for the meaning of the concept [of narcissism] itself.” In fact, the structural theory of the mind, set forth by Freud in Group Psychol\u00adogy<\/em> and in The Ego and the Id,<\/em> required modifications of his earlier ideas that have a great deal of bearing on the theory of narcissism. Structural theory made Freud abandon the simple dichotomy be\u00adtween instinct and consciousness and recognize the unconscious elements of the ego and superego, the importance of nonsexual impulses (aggression or the “death instinct”), and the alliance be\u00adtween superego and id, superego and aggression. These discover\u00adies in turn made possible an understanding of the role of object relations in the development of narcissism, thereby revealing nar\u00adcissism as essentially a defense against aggressive impulses rather than self-love.<\/p>\n

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 militates against historical specificity. Men have always been selfish, groups have always been eth\u00adnocentric; nothing is gained by giving these qualities a psychiatric label. The emergence of character disorders as the most promi\u00adnent form of psychiatric pathology, however, together with the change in personality structure this development reflects, derives from quite specific changes in our society and culture \u2013 from bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the inner life, the cult of consumption, and in the last analysis from changes in family life and from changing patterns of socialization. All this disappears from sight if narcissism becomes simply “the metaphor of the human condition,” as in another existential, humanistic interpretation, Shirley Sugerman’s Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism.<\/em><\/p>\n

The refusal of recent critics of narcissism to discuss the eti\u00adology of narcissism or to pay much attention to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject probably represents a deliberate decision, stemming from the fear that emphasis on the clinical aspects of the narcissistic syndrome would detract from the con\u00adcept’s usefulness in social analysis. This decision, however, has proved to be a mistake. In ignoring the psychological dimension, these authors also miss the social. They fail to explore any of the character traits associated with pathological narcissism, which in less extreme form appear in such profusion in the everyday life of our age: dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and unsatisfied oral cravings. Nor do they discuss what might be called the secondary characteristics of narcissism: pseudo self-insight, calculating seductiveness, ner\u00advous, self-deprecatory humor. Thus they deprive themselves of any basis on which to make connections between the narcissistic personality type and certain characteristic patterns of contempo\u00adrary culture, such as the intense fear of old age and death, altered sense of time, fascination with celebrity, fear of competition, decline of the play spirit, deteriorating relations between men and women. For these critics, narcissism remains at its loosest a syn\u00adonym for selfishness and at its most precise a metaphor, and nothing more, that describes the state of mind in which the world appears as a mirror of the self.<\/p>\n

Back to Christopher Lasch, The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back to Christopher Lasch, The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time: Table of Contents Recent critics of the new narcissism not only confuse cause and effect, attributing to a cult of privatism developments that derive from the disintegration of public life; they use the term narcissism so loosely that it retains little of its psychological content. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[46],"tags":[3600,3606,3605,3602,3592,440,3590,3604,3587,3595,3591,3594,3598],"class_list":["post-1538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-brotherly-love","tag-disintegration","tag-eagerness","tag-emotional-development","tag-erich-fromm","tag-individualism","tag-intellectual-development-of-man","tag-loyalties","tag-narcissism","tag-racial-prejudice","tag-self-glorification","tag-self-hatred","tag-self-satisfaction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}