{"id":1541,"date":"2017-11-04T03:25:15","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T00:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1541"},"modified":"2020-09-01T13:04:51","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T10:04:51","slug":"lasch-social-influences-on-narcissism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1541\/lasch-social-influences-on-narcissism\/","title":{"rendered":"Lasch, Social Influences on Narcissism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. In Freud’s time, hysteria and obsessional neurosis carried to extremes the personality traits as\u00adsociated with the capitalist order at an earlier stage in its develop\u00adment\u2014acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality. <\/p>\n

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In our time, the preschizophrenic, bor\u00adderline, or personality disorders have attracted increasing atten\u00adtion, along with schizophrenia itself. This “change in the form of neuroses has been observed and described since World War II by an ever-increasing number of psychiatrists.” According to Peter L. Giovacchini, “Clinicians are constantly faced with the seem\u00adingly increasing number of patients who do not fit current diag\u00adnostic categories” and who suffer not from “definitive symptoms” but from “vague, ill-defined complaints.” “When I refer to ‘this type of patient,’ ” he writes, “practically everyone knows to whom I am referring.” The growing prominence of “character disorders” seems to signify an underlying change in the organiza\u00adtion of personality, from what has been called inner-direction to narcissism.<\/p>\n

Allen Wheelis argued in 1958 that the change in “the patterns of neuroses” fell “within the personal experience of older psychoanalysts,” while younger ones “become aware of it from the dis\u00adcrepancy between the older descriptions of neuroses and the problems presented by the patients who come daily to their of\u00adfices. The change is from symptom neuroses to character disor\u00adders.” Heinz Lichtenstein, who questioned the additional asser\u00adtion that it reflected a change in personality structure, nevertheless wrote in 1963 that the “change in neurotic patterns” already constituted a “well-known fact.” In the seventies, such reports have become increasingly common. “It is no accident,” Herbert Hendin notes, “that at the present time the dominant events in psychoanalysis are the rediscovery of narcissism and the new emphasis on the psychological significance of death.” “What hysteria and the obsessive neuroses were to Freud and his early colleagues … at the beginning of this century,” writes Michael Beldoch, “the narcissistic disorders are to the workaday analyst in these last few decades before the next millennium. Today’s pa\u00adtients 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.” These pa\u00adtients suffer from “pervasive feelings of emptiness and a deep dis\u00adturbance of self-esteem.” Burness E. Moore notes that narcissistic disorders have become more and more common. According to Sheldon Bach, “You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias, and familiar neuroses. Now you see mostly narcissists.” Gilbert J. Rose maintains that the psycho\u00adanalytic outlook, “inappropriately transplanted from analytic practice” to everyday life, has contributed to “global permis\u00adsiveness” and the “over-domestication of instinct,” which in turn contributes to the proliferation of “narcissistic identity disor\u00adders.” According to Joel Kovel, the stimulation of infantile crav\u00adings by advertising, the usurpation of parental authority by the media and the school, and the rationalization of inner life accom\u00adpanied by the false promise of personal fulfillment, have created a new type of “social individual.” “The result is not the classical neuroses where an infantile impulse is suppressed by patriarchal authority, but a modern version in which impulse is stimulated, perverted and given neither an adequate object upon which to sat\u00adisfy itself nor coherent forms of control\u2026 The entire complex, played out in a setting of alienation rather than direct control, loses the classical form of symptom\u2014and the classical therapeutic opportunity of simply restoring an impulse to consciousness.”<\/p>\n

The reported increase in the number of narcissistic patients does not necessarily indicate that narcissistic disorders are more common than they used to be, in the population as a whole, or that they have become more common than the classical conver\u00adsion neuroses. Perhaps they simply come more quickly to psychi\u00adatric attention. Ilza Veith contends that “with the increasing awareness of conversion reactions and the popularization of psy\u00adchiatric literature, the ‘old-fashioned’ somatic expressions of hys\u00adteria have become suspect among the more sophisticated classes, and hence most physicians observe that obvious conversion symptoms are now rarely encountered and, if at all, only among the uneducated.” The attention given to character disorders in recent clinical literature probably makes psychiatrists more alert to their presence. But this possibility by no means diminishes the importance of psychiatric testimony about the prevalence of nar\u00adcissism, especially when this testimony appears at the same time that journalists begin to speculate about the new narcissism and the unhealthy trend toward self-absorption. The narcissist comes to the attention of psychiatrists for some of the same reasons that he rises to positions of prominence not only in awareness move\u00adments and other cults but in business corporations, political orga\u00adnizations, and government bureaucracies. For all his inner suffer\u00ading, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipula\u00adtion of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem. Although he may resort to therapies that promise to give meaning to life and to overcome his sense of emptiness, in his professional career the narcissist often enjoys considerable success. The man\u00adagement of personal impressions comes naturally to him, and his mastery of its intricacies serves him well in political and business organisations where performance now counts for less than “visi\u00adbility,” “momentum,” and a winning record. As the “organiza\u00adtion man” gives way to the bureaucratic “gamesman”\u2014the “loy\u00adalty era” of American business to the age of the “executive success game”\u2014the narcissist comes into his own.<\/p>\n

In a study of 250 managers from twelve major companies, Michael Maccoby describes the new corporate leader, not al\u00adtogether unsympathetically, as a person who works with people rather than with materials and who seeks not to build an empire or accumulate wealth but to experience “the exhilaration of run\u00adning his team and of gaining victories.” He wants to “be known as a winner, and his deepest fear is to be labeled a loser.” Instead of pitting himself against a material task or a problem demanding solution, he pits himself against others, out of a “need to be in control.” As a recent textbook for managers puts it, success today means “not simply getting ahead” but “getting ahead of others.” The new executive, boyish, playful, and “seductive,” wants in Maccoby’s words “to maintain an illusion of limitless options.” He has little capacity for “personal intimacy and social commit\u00adment.” He feels little loyalty even to the company for which he works. One executive says he experiences power “as not being pushed around by the company.” In his upward climb, this man cultivates powerful customers and attempts to use them against his own company. “You need a very big customer,” according to his calculations, “who is always in trouble and demands changes from the company. That way you automatically have power in the company, and with the customer too. I like to keep my op\u00adtions open.” A professor of management endorses this strategy. “Over-identification” with the company, in his view, “produces a corporation with enormous power over the careers and destinies of its true believers.” The bigger the company, the more impor\u00adtant he thinks it is for executives “to manage their careers in terms of their own . . . free choices” and to “maintain the widest set of options possible.”*<\/p>\n

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*It is not only the gamesman who “fears feeling trapped.” Seymour B. Sarason finds this feeling prevalent among professionals and students training for profes\u00adsional careers. He too suggests a connection between the fear of entrapment and the cultural value set on career mobility and its psychic equivalent, “personal growth.” ” ‘Stay loose,’ ‘keep your options open,’ ‘play it cool’\u2014these cautions emerge from the feeling that society sets all kinds of booby traps that rob you of the freedom without which growth is impossible.”<\/p>\n

This fear of entrapment or stagnation is closely connected in turn with the fear of aging and death. The mobility mania and the cult of “growth” can themselves be seen, in part, as an expression of the fear of aging that has become so intense in American society. Mobility and growth assure the individual that he has not yet settled into the living death of old age.<\/p>\n

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According to Maccoby, the gamesman “is open to new ideas, but he lacks convictions.” He will do business with any regime, even if he disapproves of its principles. More independent and resourceful than the company man, he tries to use the company for his own ends, fearing that otherwise he will be “totally emascu\u00adlated by the corporation.” He avoids intimacy as a trap, prefer\u00adring the “exciting, sexy atmosphere” with which the modern exec\u00adutive surrounds himself at work, “where adoring, mini-skirted secretaries constantly flirt with him.” In all his personal relations, the gamesman depends on the admiration or fear he inspires in others to certify his credentials as a “winner.” As he gets older, he finds it more and more difficult to command the kind of attention on which he thrives. He reaches a plateau beyond which he does not advance in his job, perhaps because the very highest posi\u00adtions, as Maccoby notes, still go to “those able to renounce adoles\u00adcent rebelliousness and become at least to some extent believers in the organization.” The job begins to lose its savor. Having little interest in craftsmanship, the new-style executive takes no plea\u00adsure in his achievements once he begins to lose the adolescent charm on which they rest. Middle age hits him with the force of a disaster: “Once his youth, vigor, and even the thrill in winning are lost, he becomes depressed and goalless, questioning the pur\u00adpose of his life. No longer energized by the team struggle and unable to dedicate himself to something he believes in beyond him\u00adself, \u2026he finds himself starkly alone.” It is not surprising, given the prevalence of this career pattern, that popular psychol\u00adogy returns so often to the “midlife crisis” and to ways of combat\u00ading it.<\/p>\n

In Wilfrid Sheed’s novel Office Politics,<\/em> a wife asks, “There are real issues, aren’t there, between Mr. Fine and Mr. Tyler?” Her husband answers that the issues are trivial; “the jockeying of ego is the real story.” Eugene Emerson Jennings’s study of manage\u00adment, which celebrates the demise of the organization man and the advent of the new “era of mobility,” insists that corporate “mobility is more than mere job performance.” What counts is “style . . . panache . . . the ability to say and do almost anything without antagonizing others.” The upwardly mobile executive, according to Jennings, knows how to handle the people around him\u2014the “shelf-sitter” who suffers from “arrested mobility” and envies success; the “fast learner”; the “mobile superior.” The “mobility-bright executive” has learned to “read” the power rela\u00adtions in his office and “to see the less visible and less audible side of his superiors, chiefly their standing with their peers and supe\u00adriors.” He “can infer from a minimum of cues who are the centers of power, and he seeks to have high visibility and exposure with them. He will assiduously cultivate his standing and opportu\u00adnities with them and seize every opportunity to learn from them. He will utilize his opportunities in the social world to size up the men who are centers of sponsorship in the corporate world.”<\/p>\n

Constantly comparing the “executive success game” to an ath\u00adletic contest or a game of chess, Jennings treats the substance of executive life as if it were just as arbitrary and irrelevant to success as the task of kicking a ball through a net or of moving pieces over a chessboard. He never mentions the social and economic repercussions of managerial decisions or the power that managers exercise over society as a whole. For the corporate manager on the make, power consists not of money and influence but of “momentum,” a “winning image,” a reputation as a winner. Power lies in the eye of the beholder and thus has no objective reference at all.*<\/p>\n

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* Indeed it has no reference to anything outside the self. The new ideal of success has no content. “Performance means to arrive,” says Jennings. Success equals suc\u00adcess. Note the convergence between success in business and celebrity in politics or the world of entertainment, which also depends on “visibility” and “charisma” and can only be denned as itself. The only important attribute of celebrity is that it is celebrated; no one can say why.<\/p>\n

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The manager’s view of the world, as described by Jennings, Maccoby, and by the managers themselves, is that of the narcis\u00adsist, who sees the world as a mirror of himself and has no interest in external events except as they throw back a reflection of his own image. The dense interpersonal environment of modern bureaucracy, in which work assumes an abstract quality almost wholly divorced from performance, by its very nature elicits and often rewards a narcissistic response. Bureaucracy, however, is only one of a number of social influences that are bringing a nar\u00adcissistic type of personality organization into greater and greater prominence. Another such influence is the mechanical reproduc\u00adtion of culture, the proliferation of visual and audial images in the “society of the spectacle.” We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enor\u00admous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as a suc\u00adcession of images or electronic signals, of impressions recorded and reproduced by means of photography, motion pictures, tele\u00advision, and sophisticated recording devices. Modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions\u2014and our own\u2014were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen au\u00addience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. “Smile, you’re on candid camera!” The intrusion into everyday life of this all-seeing eye no longer takes us by surprise or catches us with our defenses down. We need no reminder to smile. A smile is per\u00admanently graven on our features, and we already know from which of several angles it photographs to best advantage.<\/p>\n

The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to recon\u00adstruct a personal history. Bourgeois families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the family’s status, whereas today the family album of photographs verifies the individual’s existence: its docu\u00admentary record of his development from infancy onward pro\u00advides him with the only evidence of his life that he recognizes as altogether valid. Among the “many narcissistic uses” that Sontag attributes to the camera, “self-surveillance” ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self-scrutiny but because it renders the sense of selfhood dependent on the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world.<\/p>\n

By preserving images of the self at various stages of develop\u00adment, the camera helps to weaken the older idea of development as moral education and to promote a more passive idea according to which development consists of passing through the stages of life at the right time and in the right order. Current fascination with the life cycle embodies an awareness that success in politics or business depends on reaching certain goals on schedule; but it also reflects the ease with which development can be elec\u00adtronically recorded. This brings us to another cultural change that elicits a widespread narcissistic response and, in this case, gives it a philosophical sanction: the emergence of a therapeutic ideology that upholds a normative schedule of psychosocial devel\u00adopment and thus gives further encouragement to anxious self-scrutiny. The ideal of normative development creates the fear that any deviation from the norm has a pathological source. Doc\u00adtors have made a cult of the periodic checkup\u2014an investigation carried out once again by means of cameras and other recording instruments\u2014and have implanted in their clients the notion that health depends on eternal watchfulness and the early detection of symptoms, as verified by medical technology. The client no longer feels physically or psychologically secure until his X-rays confirm a “clean bill of health.”<\/p>\n

Medicine and psychiatry\u2014more generally, the therapeutic outlook and sensibility that pervade modern society\u2014reinforce the pattern created by other cultural influences, in which the in\u00addividual endlessly examines himself for signs of aging and ill health, for tell-tale symptoms of psychic stress, for blemishes and flaws that might diminish his attractiveness, or on the other hand for reassuring indications that his life is proceeding according to schedule. Modern medicine has conquered the plagues and epi\u00addemics that once made life so precarious, only to create new forms of insecurity. In the same way, bureaucracy has made life pre\u00addictable and even boring while reviving, in a new form, the war of all against all. Our overorganized society, in which large-scale organizations predominate but have lost the capacity to command allegiance, in some respects more nearly approximates a condition of universal animosity than did the primitive capitalism on which Hobbes modeled his state of nature. Social conditions today en\u00adcourage a survival mentality, expressed in its crudest form in di\u00adsaster movies or in fantasies of space travel, which allow vicarious escape from a doomed planet. People no longer dream of over\u00adcoming difficulties but merely of surviving them. In business, ac\u00adcording to Jennings, “The struggle is to survive emotionally”\u2014to “preserve or enhance one’s identity or ego.” The normative con\u00adcept of developmental stages promotes a view of life as an obstacle course: the aim is simply to get through the course with a mini\u00admum of trouble and pain. The ability to manipulate what Gail Sheehy refers to, using a medical metaphor, as “life-support sys\u00adtems” now appears to represent the highest form of wisdom: the knowledge that gets us through, as she puts it, without panic. Those who master Sheehy’s “no-panic approach to aging” and to the traumas of the life cycle will be able to say, in the words of one of her subjects, “I know I can survive … I don’t panic any more.” This is hardly an exalted form of satisfaction, however. “The current ideology,” Sheehy writes, “seems a mix of personal survivalism, revivalism, and cynicism”; yet her enormously pop\u00adular guide to the “predictable crises of adult life,” with its superficially optimistic hymn to growth, development, and “self-actualization,\u201d\u00a0 does not challenge this ideology, merely restates it in more “humanistic” form. “Growth” has become a euphemism for survival.<\/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 Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. In Freud’s time, hysteria and obsessional neurosis carried to extremes the personality traits as\u00adsociated with the capitalist order at an earlier stage in its […]<\/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":[3642,3648,3650,3643,3646,3647,3655,3649,3645,3651,3644,489,3585,3073],"class_list":["post-1541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-allen-wheelis","tag-character-disorders","tag-character-structure","tag-fanatical-devotion","tag-herbert-hendin","tag-inner-direction","tag-neurosis","tag-personality-disorders","tag-personality-structure","tag-personality-traits","tag-peter-l-giovacchini","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-social-influences","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541","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=1541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}