{"id":1539,"date":"2017-11-04T04:08:29","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T01:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1539"},"modified":"2020-09-01T12:55:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T09:55:02","slug":"lasch-psychology-and-sociology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1539\/lasch-psychology-and-sociology\/","title":{"rendered":"Lasch, Psychology and Sociology"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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Psychoanalysis deals with individ\u00aduals, not with groups. Efforts to generalize clinical findings to col\u00adlective behavior always encounter the difficulty that groups have a life of their own. The collective mind, if there is such a thing, reflects the needs of the group as a whole, not the psychic needs of the individual, which in fact have to be subordinated to the demands of collective living. Indeed it is precisely the subjection of individuals to the group that psychoanalytic theory, through a study of its psychic repercussions, promises to clarify. By con\u00adducting an intensive analysis of individual cases that rests on clinical evidence rather than common-sense impressions, psycho-analysis tells us something about the inner workings of society it\u00adself, in the very act of turning its back on society and immersing itself in the individual unconscious.<\/p>\n

Every society reproduces its culture\u2014its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience\u2014in the individ\u00adual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialized. The process of socialization, 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. Each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood\u2014the trauma of separation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, the pain of competing with others for the mother’s love\u2014in 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. “Psychosis,” Jules Henry has written, “is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture.”<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis best clarifies the connection between society and the individual, culture and personality, precisely when it confines itself to careful examination of individuals. It tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so. Freud’s extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, his\u00adtory, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of soci\u00adety, but his clinical investigations constitute a storehouse of indis\u00adpensable ideas, once it is understood that the unconscious mind represents the modification of nature by culture, the imposition of civilization on instinct.<\/p>\n

Freud should not be reproached [wrote T. W. Adorno] for having neglected the concrete social dimension, but for being all too untroubled by the social origin of … me rigidity of the unconscious, which he regis\u00adters with the undeviating objectivity of the natural scientist. … In mak\u00ading the leap from psychological images to historical reality, he forgets what he himself discovered\u2014that all reality undergoes modification upon entering the unconscious\u2014and is thus misled into positing such factual events as the murder of the father by the primal horde.*<\/p>\n

*”On … its home ground,” Adorno added, “psychoanalysis carries specific con\u00adviction; the further it removes itself from that sphere, the more its theses are threatened alternately with shallowness or wild over-systematization. If someone makes a slip of the tongue and a sexually loaded word comes out, if someone suf\u00adfers from agoraphobia or if a girl walks in her sleep, psychoanalysis not merely has its best chances of therapeutic success but also its proper province, the relatively autonomous, monadological individual as arena of the unconscious conflict be\u00adtween instinctual drive and prohibition. The further it departs from this area, the more tyrannically it has to proceed and the more it has to drag what belongs to the dimension of outer reality into the shades of psychic immanence. Its delusion in so doing is not dissimilar from that ‘omnipotence of thought’ which it itself criticized as infantile.”<\/p>\n

Those who wish to understand contemporary narcissism as a social and cultural phenomenon must turn first to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject, which makes no claim to social or cultural significance and deliberately repudiates the proposition that “changes in contemporary culture,” as Otto Kernberg writes, “have effects on patterns of object relations.”+<\/p>\n

+ Those who argue, in opposition to the thesis of the present study, that there has been no underlying change in the structure of personality, cite this passage to sup\u00adport the contention that although “we do see certain symptom constellations and personality disorders more or less frequently than in Freud’s day, . . . this shift in attention has occurred primarily because of a shift in our clinical emphasis due to tremendous advances in our understanding of personality structure.”<\/p>\n

In light of this controversy, it is important to note that Kernberg adds to his observation a qualification: “This is not to say that such changes in the patterns of intimacy [and of object relations in general] could not occur over a period of sev\u00aderal generations, if and when changes in cultural patterns affect family structure to such an extent that the earliest development in childhood would be influenced.” This is exactly what I will argue in chapter VII.<\/p>\n

In the clinical literature, narcissism serves as more than a metaphoric term for self-absorption. As a psychic formation in which “love rejected turns back to the self as hatred,” narcissism has come to be recognized as an important element in the so-called character disorders that have absorbed much of the clinical atten\u00adtion once given to hysteria and obsessional neuroses. A new theory of narcissism has developed, grounded in Freud’s well-known essay on the subject (which treats narcissism\u2014libidinal in\u00advestment of the self\u2014as a necessary precondition of object love) but devoted not to primary narcissism but to secondary or patho\u00adlogical narcissism: the incorporation of grandiose object images as a defense against anxiety and guilt. Both types of narcissism blur the boundaries between the self and the world of objects, but there is an important difference between them. The newborn in\u00adfant\u2014the primary narcissist\u2014does not yet perceive his mother as having an existence separate from his own, and he therefore mis\u00adtakes dependence on the mother, who satisfies his needs as soon as they arise, with his own omnipotence. “It takes several weeks of postnatal development . . . before the infant perceives that the source of his need . . . is within and the source of gratification is outside the self.”<\/p>\n

Secondary narcissism, on the other hand, “attempts to annul the pain of disappointed [object] love” and to nullify the child’s rage against those who do not respond immediately to his needs; against those who are now seen to respond to others beside the child and who therefore appear to have abandoned him. Patho\u00adlogical narcissism, “which cannot be considered simply a fixation at the level of normal primitive narcissism,” arises only when the ego has developed to the point of distinguishing itself from sur\u00adrounding objects. If the child for some reason experiences this separation trauma with special intensity, he may attempt to reestablish earlier relationships by creating in his fantasies an omni\u00adpotent mother or father who merges with images of his own self. ”Through internalization the patient seeks to recreate a wished-for love relationship which may once have existed and simulta\u00adneously to annul the anxiety and guilt aroused by aggressive drives directed against the frustrating and disappointing object.”<\/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 Psychoanalysis deals with individ\u00aduals, not with groups. Efforts to generalize clinical findings to col\u00adlective behavior always encounter the difficulty that groups have a life of their own. The collective mind, if there is such a thing, reflects the needs of the group […]<\/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":[3616,3624,3618,3622,3608,3617,3625,3615,3611,3619,3621,3609,3612,3613],"class_list":["post-1539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-character-formation","tag-clinical-evidence","tag-collective-mind","tag-durkheim","tag-fear-of-abandonment","tag-intensive-analysis","tag-neuroses","tag-process-of-socialization","tag-psychic-health","tag-psychoanalytic-theory","tag-psychoses","tag-sense-impressions","tag-social-existence","tag-social-norms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539","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=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}