The Culture of Narcissism

Abstract

The big-selling Culture of Narcissism by the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch started off with an indictment of the “awareness movement” for betraying the New Left counterculture from which it sprang. The Protestant work ethic stood as one of the most important underpinnings of American culture. The spirit of self-improvement lived on, in debased form, in the cult of “self-culture”—proper care and training of mind and body, nurture of the mind through “great books,” development of “character.” The Culture of Narcissism , like its predecessor, Haven in a Heartless World , has much more information about social-science theories of the family than about family life itself. In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others. The fear that haunted the social critics and theorists of fifties—that rugged individualism had succumbed to conformity and “low-pressure sociability”—appears in retrospect to have been premature.