The Minimal Self

...Like the Frankfurt School theorists from whom he drew some of his ideas on the family, he was stuck with a deeply pessimistic portrait of American life...

...He skillfully evokes the mirage-like character of the contemporary world of images, and spells out the link between the fleeting nature of experience and our current infatuation with victimization and survivalism...

...They claimed the family would survive only if it perfected the provision of emotional services — a view that justified their own intervention in family affairs...

...If the struggle to reconcile oneself to separation is historically universal — biologically and not culturally based—then a consumer culture can never expunge it...

...Lasch promptly turned the award down on the grounds that it judged commercial, not literary, belue and partook of the very consumer culture his book meant to condemn...

...Like Riesman, Lasch was signaling the erosion of the self in a consumer culture of mass-produced "life-styles...

...But if the psychic sources of autonomous adulthood had indeed atrophied in the wake of therapeutic intervention, it was not evident why there was any reason to hope...

...Haven in a Heartless World (1977) picked up one key strand of The New Radicalism: its critique of liberal intellectuals...

...Instead he wishes merely to enjoy life without his interference...

...In a bold theoretical concluding section he then works through Freud and invokes Niebuhr to suggest that a stable core of selfhood can itself survive the onslaught of cultural agencies devoted to its dissolution...

...With Freud, Niebuhr deflated reason...

...Credo quia absurdum, the paradox of religious experience in the past, has little meaning in a world where everything seems absurd, not merely the miracles associated with religious faith and practice...

...a view of the self that can comprehend, in the final words of the book, "both our fallen state and our surprising capacity for gratitude, remorse, and forgiveness, by means of which we now and then transcend it...

...In a society based so largely on illusions and appearances, the ultimate illusions, art and religion, have no future...

...The mid-twentieth-century child, by contrast, "no longer wishes to succeed the father...

...The Minimal Self breaks decisively with the determinist tenor of much of Haven and Culture and firmly rejects the Freudian view of religion as compensatory illusion...

...But for Lasch it is time for the left to embrace "what remains valuable in the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition...

...Putting in a good word for guilty conscience in 1984 is as outrageous to the conventional liberal wisdom as Niebuhr's own invocation of original sin was a generation ago...

...Lasch showed how the notion of the nuclear family as a haven of emotional solace in the urban industrial jungle was fostered by a rising elite of social scientists and helping professionals...

...These state-sponsored experts invaded the family, sapped its autonomy, and subverted the psychic mechanism by which bourgeois society had managed to create self-disciplined children: the painful struggle to transcend the father...

...Again Lasch had exposed the pretensions of liberal intellectuals, but he had also boxed himself into a corner...

...The child and the adult, as Freud observed, inevitably try to recapture the "oceanic" feeling that the infant experienced in the womb...

...It manages to do simultaneous justice to the social-historical analysis of the consumer culture and the therapeutic state while avoiding the conclusion that advertisers and other experts have snatched the autonomy of their victims...

...He brilliantly subverted the conventional distinction between radical, alienated intellectuals and liberal policy intellectuals by showing that both groups debased intellect itself in their yearning either for the' 'real life'' of the masses or for influence and power at the upper reaches of society...

...They imagined themselves riding the wave of history when they should have engaged in the humbler task of clarifying values...

...He was left in the apparent contradiction of hoping for radical change while yearning for the psychic strength of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie...

...Human beings were poor judges of their own motives...

...It was not a simple, rational entity that a person possessed and ordered a-bout...

...They missed the deeper level of historical and psychological insight: American culture was producing not selfishness, in Lasch's view, but a faltering sense of selfhood...

...The "people" were apparently impotent in the face of the "machinery of organized domination...

...The Culture of Narcissism still exuded the hopelessness of Haven in a Heartless World...

...He did not turn down President Carter's invitation to consult on the "national malaise," or People's request for an "interview" that drew the sting from his book by reducing it to a description of the "me decade...

...The Culture of Narcissism broadened the argument by bringing back the alienated intellectuals from Haven in a Heartless World...

...Blending Freud and Niebuhr he issues a cogent appeal for a resurgent liberalism built on a firm sense of human limits — the only sound basis, he holds, for an enduring sense of selfhood, and a long-term politics of reform...

...Lasch was left in the position of ironic detachment that Culture itself identified as one of the key products of a narcissistic culture...

...Niebuhr shared Freud's view that the self was always at war with itself...

...Psychiatrists, social workers, and child guidance experts had lofty intentions — to free children and wives from paternal autocracy — but instead they replaced the father with a new set of outside authorities...

...They could not see themselves as mortal beings tied to past and future generations by bonds of memory and sympathy...

...They abandoned their proper role as debunkers of progressive cant and as critics of the powerful...

...Lasch draws on Niebuhr to bring out the moral imperative implicit in Freud's standpoint: "Selfhood," Lasch writes, "is precisely the inescapable awareness of man's contradictory place in the natural order of things.'' Human beings are part of nature yet they transcend it...

...Paraphrasing The Nature and Destiny of Man he notes that "self-consciousness — the capacity to see the self from a point of view outside the self — distinguishes humanity from other forms of life.'' Selfhood is a process, not a possession...

...So is the potential for converting anxiety into a productive adulthood...

...His final, tacked-on claim that "the will to build a better society survived" the relentless spread of narcissism seemed unconvincing...

...In The Minimal Self he tries to restate the argument to avoid misunderstanding...

...The "minimal" or "narcissistic" self, Lasch argues, is not aggressively self-seeking, but confused about the boundaries between itself and the world...

...Radicals who preached liberation and liberals who touted expertise agreed that traditional democratic politics were outdated...

...More importantly, he moves beyond the historically rooted social and psychological analysis that marked all his previous work and begins to reflect on the ultimate meaning of human existence...

...Literary artists abandoned the effort to portray a stable self confronting a real world, and therapists preached a gospel of cool, passionless "openness...

...Richard Wightman Fox WITH The Culture of Narcissism in 1979 historian Christopher Lasch established himself as a major social critic...

...It was children like these who were capable in adulthood of calling bourgeois society itself into question...

...That might seem a trivial observation, but it is a liberating one for Lasch's analysis...

...with Freud too he paradoxically committed himself to the long-term quest for self-knowledge...

...It was a cauldron of impulses and desires, some self-seeking, some self-sacrificial...

...Lasch has always written in part as a moralist, but he has now embraced that role with a forthright discussion of the spiritual dimension of human life...

...They viewed the "people" either as a warm reservoir of virtue in which to immerse themselves or a faceless mass to manipulate...

...To grasp the originality of The Minimal Self it will help to look briefly at his earlier work...

...Intellectuals gave up, said Lasch, on political solutions for political problems...

...He preaches no return to religion as such, but he does insist that progressive politics must root itself in a "Judeo-Christian" view of human selfhood...

...The perennial tension in human existence between separation and reintegration — a tension that produces in Lasch's view the sublime achievements of both art and religion — continually renews the springs of human autonomy...

...Like Lionel Trilling, Lasch finds Freud indispensable because he offers a standpoint "beyond culture...

...The starting point for a lasting commitment to self-knowledge and moral responsibility, Lasch concludes, is a selfhood powerful enough to produce a "guilty conscience," a "painful awareness of the gulf between human aspirations and human limitations...

...The anxiety is built into human life...

...Modern intellectuals of both types, Lasch again argued, were thoroughly integrated into the culture of consumption...

...Lacking strong personal relationships, opposed on principle to long-term commitments — which liberal therapists had attacked as confining and antithetical to "growth" — they were terrified of dy8 February 1985: 87 ing...

...The consumer world of flickering images and rapidly outmoded fashions aggravates the self's uncertainty and promotes a desperate effort either to impose itself on the world or immerse itself passively in it...

...The book reached a mass audience, like ils early postwar model, David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, and received the American Book Award for "paperback current interest...

...Likewise he finds Reinhold Niebuhr helpful for grasping the full ambiguity of mature selfhood...

...The agencies of cultural domination can never create a uniform culture of narcissists...

...Cultural forces pose a massive obstacle to a mature resolution of the separation anxiety, but they are not at the root of the problem...

...Lasch ranged deftly across the whole cultural map to document the intertwining forces that created not a culture of hedonists, but a culture of men and women anxious about personal survival, afflicted with narcissistic personality disorders, and apathetic about the future...

...His classic New Radicalism in America (1965) was a critique of twentieth-century American liberal intellectuals, who in Lasch's view too often subordinated the quest for truth to the quest for experience...

...But these narcissistic reactions have not only a social but a biological derivation...

...People, the president, and many others misread his argument as one more attack on hedonism, another plea for rededication to traditional discipline...

...They no longer saw the people as citizens capable of organizing themselves for political goals...

...and it is a hard-won achievement...