The Culture of Narcissism is one of those books that both could never be written today and is still written all the time. Insofar as the publishing industry continues to pump out hot takes on What Is Wrong: And How It Applies to Everything, it’s practically timeless. But what makes it unique today is who is writing it: not the latest pop psychologist or someone with dubious credentials as a lifestyle coach, but a highly regarded scholar in his time and someone who occupied that mythical status of “public intellectual” that the likes of Russell Jacoby still pine for. This does in fact improve its quality, so I don’t entirely mean to jest; however, the book is deeply steeped in the old boys club that was the circle of postwar public intellectuals, and this unfortunately burdens it with the condescending and reactionary quality of which it has rightly been accused.
But we’ll get to that. First, let’s acknowledge what is genuinely good about this book. Lasch was no neoliberal, and he had a knack for exposing the contradictions of mainstream liberalism that make it uninspiring at best and widely despised at worst. More importantly, he goes after capitalism. This is what keeps his critique of liberalism from being purely reactionary and positions him clearly on the left of economic issues. “The new modes of social control associated with the rise of progressivism,” he writes, “have stabilized capitalism without solving any of its underlying problems – the gap between wealth and poverty, the failure of purchasing power to keep pace with productivity, economic stagnation.”[1] Not surprisingly, the attack on the welfare state of the last half century has exposed a lot of Lasch’s alarm about the bureaucratic apparatus of “experts” as woefully off the mark. Yet some of his recommendations – including “localism” and “community action,” a loaded term at the time – are not dissimilar from the political activism of contemporary anarchists and other small left-aligned networks across the country. Ultimately, Lasch argues, “the struggle against bureaucracy therefore requires a struggle against capitalism itself.”[2]
Yet readers could be forgiven for having missed this, because the bulk of the book consists of Lasch galloping through a tour of American culture and focusing on the symptom of “narcissism” rather than the capitalist cause of this condition. Among the myriad manifestations of the epidemic of narcissism Lasch includes things as trivial as the introduction of pinch hitters in the American League and the increased use of hard court tennis surfaces, to things as serious as problems in the juvenile delinquency system and schizophrenia (emphasis mine).[3] In the Forward to the second edition, Lasch laments that what he meant by narcissism was not fully understood by the reading public and reduced to, as the back cover to the book itself puts it, “fall[ing] in love with ourselves.”[4] But such a misreading is inevitable when the reader is treated to a whirlwind of examples (with some fully unpacked and connected to deeper societal shifts, while others are merely glanced at), Lasch apparently assuming the previous analyses suffice to make the connections to capitalism obvious.
Humorously, Lasch criticizes other authors for the same kind of shallow, breezy analysis his own book is rife with.[5] But it wouldn’t have been hard to find examples of such laziness in the contemporary literature; as I’ve discussed elsewhere, postwar social science was rife with arguments backed up by little other than internal conversations among an extraordinarily small network of mostly white men. The Culture of Narcissism, originally published in 1979, is a late example of what this echo chamber tended to produce. Many have commented on how academics could never get such freewheeling, off-the-cuff work published today. Less frequently noted, however, is how these rising standards for evidence and rigorous research coincided with the arrival of women and minorities at high levels of the academy. The correlation would be difficult to prove, of course – but if we allow ourselves the same kind of speculation postwar academics regularly enjoyed, one could argue that it is hardly a coincidence that the bars were raised at precisely the time that women and minorities came knocking for admission to the smoking room.
It is therefore particularly rich that feminism is one subject where Lasch does slow down to do a deep dive of criticism. Lasch’s critique of feminism is wrapped up in his critique of liberalism, but it would not be accurate to leave it at that. Nor would it explain why it is feminism, rather than the re-emergence of classical liberal economics or the abandonment of the working class by the Democratic Party, that Lasch decides to devote the last portion of his book to. So we have arrived at the moment where we must dive into the brilliant mess that is Lasch’s antifeminism. Hold on to your butts.
We should begin by noting how, when it comes to structures of gender and power, Lasch appears to expect extraordinarily swift historical change. The Feminine Mystique, widely considered to have announced the full arrival of second wave feminism, was published in 1963. Radical feminism began to cohere a few years later, but did not really burst into public consciousness until 1968. Therefore, Lasch was writing The Culture of Narcissism only a decade and a half after the most recent remobilization of feminism and a mere decade after its most radical articulation appeared on the public stage.
This periodization is important because key to Lasch’s case against feminism is his argument that the demands of feminists cannot help but aggravate men’s fragile sense of masculinity. Mind you, Lasch makes sure to distance himself from this essentially “irrational male response to the emergence of the liberated woman,” signaling that he recognizes this reaction as unfounded and, since he is not one of those guys, can therefore be trusted as an objective observer.[6] Nonetheless, it is clear that Lasch thinks himself an exception and, more importantly, that men like him are never going to increase in supply. Without any discussion of socialization, or how we could expect something with historical roots as deep as misogyny to be gone within a decade or two, Lasch harps on the insecure responses of men, highlighting how women’s rejection of passivity will “appear to men as a form of aggression,” and women’s demand for emotional vulnerability from men will, likewise, appear to them as “threatening to their emotional security.”[7] Consequently, far from ending the war of the sexes, feminism actually “intensifies the problem to which it simultaneously offers the solution.”[8] Thus we are graced with a scholarly version of blaming the victim. This argument is rendered even more painful by Lasch adopting the posture of the enlightened male – bound by truth, he has no other choice other than to regretfully inform women that they can expect no more from most of men.
Lasch’s cover for these brazen and ahistorical assumptions is Freudianism. Too secular to point to God and too liberal to be comfortable with blaming Nature, Lasch falls back on Freud to provide an explanation of why things Just Are the Way They Are. “Rational arguments notoriously falter in the face of unconscious anxieties,” explains Lasch. “[W]omen’s sexual demands terrify men because they reverberate at such deep layers of the masculine mind, calling up early fantasies of a possessive, suffocating, devouring, and castrating mother.”[9] Unfortunately for Lasch, the days when profoundly sexist Freudian assumptions could be asserted in such a casual and self-justifying way were numbered, rendering these moments in the book almost as funny as they are offensive.[10] Yet Freud did even more work than simply this for Lasch – by locating the “problem” with feminist politics in the subconscious, Lasch can skirt around the inherently political nature of women’s subordination. In fact, Lasch explicitly dismisses the idea that men reacting negatively to feminism could have anything to do with protecting a position of power. “This blind and impotent rage, which seems so prevalent at the present time,” he writes, “only superficially represents a defensive male reaction against feminism. It is only because the recent revival of feminism stirs up such deeply rooted memories that it gives rise to such primitive emotions.”[11] Note the emphasis here – it is only because of Freudian masculinity that feminists have faced such backlash. So while Lasch acknowledges the ways women have been oppressed, he simultaneously claims that antifeminism, at root, has nothing to do with holding on to power – at least not in any way that history or politics can impact. The subconscious is forever, and cannot be altered.
Victim blaming and the assertion that misogyny is on some level fixed are frustrating arguments for any feminist (male or female) to hear. But Lasch compounds the insult by refusing to deal honestly with his imagined interlocuters. One could deduce from his use of Freud, of course, that he assumes certain gendered traits to be unalterable. But he does not directly make this argument, and only implicitly points to it in various asides and half-baked assertions (often classist) about the history of “the war between the sexes.” The closest he gets to acknowledging his own thinking on gender comes in the very last line on his chapter on feminism, where he decides to flippantly throw in the observation that “the abolition of sexual tensions is an unworthy goal in any case; the point is to live with them more gracefully than we have lived with them in the past.”[12] The reader can’t know what exactly Lasch means by this or, how numerous or powerful he thinks these ‘sexual tensions’ are, as he never explains.
And for good reason. Lasch would have known as well as anyone that coming forward with a full throttled defense of either the existence or desirability of unalterable traits and roles for men and women would not fly in the self-assuredly progressive, educated circles that not only his socio-economic background but his professional network consisted of. Hence the usefulness of Freud – with psychoanalytical theory still enjoying its postwar popularity, Lasch could lean on that authority and at the same time get away with never really saying what employing Freudian notions of gender implied. Let me be clear here that I neither know nor care how consciously Lasch made these various argumentative decisions. But that he declined to flesh out his personal take on what relations between men and woman ought to look like can hardly be considered an arbitrary oversight. But either way – whether the decision came on a level never fully grappled with or if he deliberately skirted the issue – to ask for a hearing from your peers (many of which are women and/or feminists) without squaring fully with them on what your position implies is an act of intellectual cowardice, and not one we should feel obliged to indulge.[13]
Complicating things further, Lasch seems to think that he should be regarded by feminists as some kind of ally. At several points he appears to validate the (apparently obvious) desirability of the goal of equality, another subtle way in which he denies that much of the population was engaged in actively opposing the idea.[14] Rather, as we’ve seen, he implies that some kind of fixed reality is the primary obstacle feminists face, as unfortunate as that may be. But if Lasch believes that late stage capitalism lies at the root of the culture of narcissism, why section off feminism for particular attention and attack? As a radical feminist, I agree with the critiques of liberal feminism that highlight how foolish it is to believe that women in powerful positions will somehow render that power more benevolent or aim to incorporate women into classist and racist structures instead of seeking to tear such structures down. But these are discussions to be had from within a community clearly committed to equality, and Lasch treats feminism as a whole as somehow one and the same as its liberal manifestations. Of course, the problem of focusing on symptom over disease dogs the entire book, but Lasch’s chosen priorities seem particularly fishy when he singles out feminism as an especially problematic aspect of widespread cultural decline.[15]
In the Forward to the second edition, Lasch laments that the success of his book simultaneously worked to “defeat its purpose,” reducing his arguments to the type of armchair psychoanalysis so trendy at the time.[16] Some of this would have been out of his capacities of foresight, such as the relatively rapid decline of Freud in academic circles. But he could have hardly justified surprise that audiences would completely miss that The Culture of Narcissism, as he writes, “rested, in part, on a Marxian analysis of modern capitalism.”[17] For all his populism, Lasch missed what so many other liberals and leftists then and now continue to miss – a radicalism that can work radical change has to be declared unequivocally and in terms that make battle lines clear. And it cannot be distracted by diagnosing all the ways in which the left – however inadequate it may be at a given moment – is Doing It Wrong. It is right and necessary that we on the left must criticize each other. But the mistake we cannot afford to make is to believe that precise analysis is more important than solidarity.
When it came to matters of class and capitalism, Lasch seemed like a sincere ally. And so that’s something. But like so many white men before and since, he could not grasp the centrality of sexism and racism; at one point he even surmised that “[t]he ideology of white supremacy, however, no longer appears to serve any important social function.”[18] And at times his alarm about feminism dipped into the hysterical, such as the moment when he argues for the Marquis de Sade as a kind of foresighted prophet of the liberal feminist world of sex.[19] Clearly, our contemporary world of men, women, trans people, sex and friendship were all beyond his imagination – but not beyond his nightmares. Consequently, despite some genuine gems and insightful moments, The Culture of Narcissism reads like one long extended monologue of a 1970s version of a concern troll – and neither feminists nor leftists should be expected to engage with it.
[1] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 224.
[2] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 235.
[3] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 106, 107, 156-159, 170-172.
[4] This leads one to wonder of course if Lasch had any control at all over the publicity for his book; while things like cover design are often left to the publishers, it still seems odd that in a second edition Lasch would not object to PR slogans that exactly reproduce what he complains about in the Forward.
[5] At one point, for example, Lasch writes in the footnotes that “For historians, ‘social control’ serves the same purpose in the seventies that ‘status anxiety’ served in the fifties. It offers a comprehensive, all-purpose explanation that fits every case and contingency and can now be manipulated with little thought” (169).
[6] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 189.
[7] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 196, 197.
[8] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 198.
[9] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 203.
[10] The most entertaining/horrifying moment of this kind is when Lasch cites an example of a woman who, having been raised by her doting single mother, internalized the role of the father/phallus while also feeling inadequate because of her “awareness of her femininity” (173). The entire passage really needs to be read to be appreciated but, basically, “I want to be a penis but I can’t because vagina.” Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.
[11] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 205.
[12] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 206.
[13] Lasch went on of course to write more about feminism and gender issues later in life, but for this essay I’ve limited my scope to the The Culture of Narcissism. Insofar as he might deal more honestly with these issues in future writings, I applaud that but stand by my assessment of how he handles it in this text.
[14] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 190, 203, 205.
[15] Interestingly, the subtitle to the book is “American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations,” and yet Lasch clearly argues that the problem with feminism is precisely that it teaches women to expect more from men than could ever be possible.
[16] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, xvi.
[17] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, xx.
[18] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 116.
[19] Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 69.
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I read The Culture of Narcissism around the time it was first published (which was the year I graduated from college). After all that time, I didn’t remember its substance really at all, so I appreciated this piece (which the post’s author clearly put time and thought into).
A couple of small comments on the context, for lack of a better word. Robin Marie says that Freud was still his enjoying his postwar popularity in the U.S. in 1979. I’d say yes and no. He was still being read in certain curricula, but his popularity in academic circles, at least, was not what it had been a couple of decades earlier, I’d say.
“Many have commented on how academics could never get such freewheeling, off-the-cuff work published today.” My impression is that some established academics still publish some pretty freewheeling work today (I confess I don’t have specific examples in mind, just an overall impression); they do it with trade presses (not university presses), as Lasch himself did in this case. Of course trade presses also publish very serious, heavily researched work by academics who aspire to reach a broad audience. A lot hangs on the definitions of “freewheeling” and “off the cuff,” and those of course are subjective terms, but if an academic who is as well known in 2021 as Lasch was in 1979 wanted to publish a breezy work of opinionated social commentary, I don’t think he or she would have enormous difficulty finding a publisher today. But I could be wrong.
correction: “he or she or they”
A potent “with ‘friends’ like these, who needs enemies!” critique! I always have read _Minimal Self_ as a sharper book by Lasch about these matters than Culture of Narcissism, particularly because as I recall he distinguishes more clearly there between, as you note, the possibilities of a radical/socialist feminism and the limitations of a corporate liberal one. I’ve always found Ellen Willis’s criticism of _Women and the Common Life_ intriguing along the lines of your close reading here. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-01-12-bk-17738-story.html.