BOURGEOIS VALUES, NO BOURGEOISIE? THE CULTURAL CRITICISM OF CHRISTOPHER LASCH

...influence comes from member unions' gratitude to left-wing organizations that helped in legislative fights...

...The "classical" bourgeois family has unmistakably disappeared, but Lasch, with his focus on deeper psychic constellations, claims considerably more than this...

...In Haven in a Heartless World, he describes how in order to get rid of Freud's pessimism and alleged "biologism," the neo-Freudians of the cultural school in the'30s and'40s and Talcott Parsons and his followers in the '50s adulterated Freud, eliminating his insistence on the importance of the unconscious, the primacy of infant experience, and the in308 evitablity of repression and intrapsychic conflict as constants in the universal resistance offered by human nature to the most ambitious efforts to "socialize" it...

...Lasch is clearly right to argue against the "devaluation of the past" and to insist that it is "a political and psychological treasury from which we draw the reserves (not necessarily in the form of 'lessons') that we need to cope with the future...

...The public response to The Culture of Narcissism itself, which, like its predecessors in the 1950s, has made the bestseller lists and received enormous attention, suggests as much...

...What is questionable is Lasch's weird amalgam of all the groups he dislikes—capitalists, corporation executives, bureaucrats, New Left students, psychotherapists, humanistic psychologists, educational radicals, hippies, and feminists—on one side of the barricades—confronting on the other side, well, it's not quite clear just whom: presumably, a few radical intellectuals of Lasch's kidney and perhaps the workingman resentful of a "middle-class liberalism that has already destroyed his savings, bused his children to distant schools, undermined his authority over them, and now threatens to turn even his wife against him...

...His case has been made before but not with such close attention to the actual literature of family sociology and the practice of the therapeutic professions making use of it...

...This is an honorable position that I largely share myself...

...In Lasch's view, the decline of the family has resulted in the culture of narcissism, and the major agents of its decline have been the "helping professions" who with their claims of therapeutic expertise have breached the family's protective walls, coming between parents and children, husbands and wives, men and women...

...Even if he is right, his argument is suspiciously circular, for he fails to present any evidence independent of clinical material that the family is in so parlous a state...

...The discussions of sports, education, crime, and other subjects that make up the bulk of the later book can therefore be regarded as diagnoses of expressions or manifestations of a general "culture of narcissism," although Lasch neglects to trace the precise links between these areas and underlying characterological dispositions...

...Doubtless, this is a manifestation of the very oversensitivity to fashion that Lasch indicts, but not every idea becomes fashionable...

...This is reported by William Ringle, Washington correspondent for the Gannett Newspapers: Inside the AFL-CIO attitudes toward the political left are "softening tremendously," says Albert Shanker, a vice president of the labor organization...

...Indeed, Lasch acknowledges his intellectual debt to these writers at the same time that he criticizes the datedness of many of their observations in the light of more recent cultural tendencies carrying us, in his view, even further into decadence...

...His identification of "socialism" with decentralization and local community control points in the same direction...

...Reading Larch's cultural criticism, one is frequently reminded of the attacks on "mass culture" so prominent in the 1950s, of C. Wright Mills's exposes of the degeneration of the goal of success into crass self-salesmanship, of the alarm regularly expressed by educators over the increasing anti-intellectualism and semiliteracy of the young, of philippics against romantic escapism in popular entertainment going back to the 1930s, of familiar diagnoses of American fears of aging and documentations of cruel and indifferent treatment of old people...

...But why then does Christopher Lasch fail to go beyond early capitalism as a standard by which to judge our own fallen 312 times...

...In claiming a basic continuity between the initial separation of home and work and the allegedly contemporary expropriation of child-rearing skills by the experts, Lasch seems to be looking back not merely to the heyday of bourgeois values but to the traditional society disrupted by capitalism and all the other modern revolutions...

...Lasch refers to the therapeutic professions as part of a "new ruling class," but, in contrast to neoconservative "new class" theorists, he sees them not as anticapitalist but rather as a product of "monopoly capitalism" in its bureaucratized form, which has created the welfare state to stabilize it...

...But Lasch is determined to present himself as a radical of the left, even a revolutionary, despite the obviously conservative tenor of so much of his indictment of contemporary culture...

...But von Mises is too easy a target, permitting Lasch to ignore his kinship with noneconomic cultural conservatives who have little love for capitalism, such as Aries, Robert Nisbet (at least before his recent neoconservative polemicizing), Peter Berger, John Lukacs and, most of all, Philip Rieff, from whom Lasch derives his central argument, if not its specifics, about the spread of the therapeutic ethos...

...I have the impression, in fact, that I have been listening to Iasch's bill of indictment for most of my life and I wasn't born, alas, yesterday...

...The familiarity of Lasch's complaints certainly in no way reduces their cogency, but it does cast doubt on the up-to-the-minute contemporaneity with which he introduces his case...

...in the earlier period, "the density of society left no room for the family...

...The beginnings of these developments carry us back to the preindustrial world, to the very origins of capitalism and the bourgeoisie...

...This raises the "possibility in some unions of fairly significant infiltration of groups that say, 'We're helping you on labor laws, we're helping you on these various social programs, we'd like you to work with us on the reduction of defense expenditures...

...If at times he sounds a bit like Harriet Van Horne keening in midtown Manhattan over the lost graces of life, he more often recalls the best work of Erich Fromm, David Riesman, Paul Goodman, and other outstanding practitioners of the genre that came to be known in the 1950s as "social criticism...

...The narcissistic search for gratification that Lasch sees as the terminal phase of a "dying culture" indeed represents what Philip Rieff calls a "remissive" casting off of the "interdicts" of the old culture rather than evidence of the birth of a new one...

...has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it," but, except perhaps for a few years in the late '50s and early '60s, rhetoric to that effect has been around as long as I can remember...

...If the invasion of the family began with the birth of the modern world, why look back for an alternative image to present no further than to the halfway house of the bourgeois family...

...The subtitle of The Culture of Narcissism, for example, is "American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations...

...Lasch occasionally reminds one of the man who, when asked why he kept hitting himself on the head with a hammer, replied, "Because it feels so good when I stop...

...We're indebted to John Herling's excellent Labor Letter (April 7, 1979) for the following piquant item: In a speech before the right-wing National Strategy Information Center, Albert Shanker, AFT president, declared that the AFL-CIO attitudes toward the political left are "softened tremendously...

...Such jeremiads are scarcely in short supply these days, although Lasch brings to his task uncommon gifts of psychological penetration, historical perspective, and literary eloquence...

...This world was doubtless less "heartless" than that of 19th-century bourgeois capitalism, at least for the nobility and the relatively wealthy...

...Shanker was the first labor leader to address it...

...He praises, for example, Richard Sennett's critique of narcissism but condemns Sennett for his "revulsion against politics," a revulsion that is scarcely equal to Lasch's own...

...The main thematic chapter of The Culture of Narcissism examines the psychoanalytic clinical evidence showing the increasing frequency of a narcissistic personality type very different from the older kind of neurotic identified by Freud and his early followers...

...His main theme was that the AFL-CIO is becoming more susceptible to pressures from the left to reduce its support for a strong U.S...

...Were not the liberations also at least partially implicit in the values of personal freedom and responsibility themselves...

...Asked to identify the organizations he was talking about, Shanker did not, except to call one a "Washington think tank...

...Philippe Aries has shown in Centuries of Childhood that the family scarcely existed as a separate social group before the 18th century...

...If the decline of the extended family was exaggerated by Parsons and his followers, as indicated by several sociological studies Lasch cites, it is even less credible that the nuclear family itself has been fatally debilitated, however much this outcome may have been desired by the advocates of "liberated life-styles" abetted by family sociologists and "permissive" therapists...

...There have been popular radical movements affirming traditional values before...

...Presumably, celebrity cults, "how to" manuals, and recent avant-garde fiction—all discussed by Laschreflect rather than shape the narcissistic personality, or at most contribute to its secondary reinforcement...

...Drawing on the theories of Melanie Klein and Otto Sternberg, Lasch argues that the new type does not suffer from specific hysterical symptoms rooted in sexual repression but from more general "character disorders" consisting of lack of a sense of purpose in life, confused identity, and inability to form permanent satisfying relations with others...

...He takes pains to differentiate his own views from those of such an old-fashioned neoclassical economist as Ludwig von Mises, who, like Milton Friedman, criticizes state bureaucracy without acknowledging the bureaucratization promoted by private enterprise...

...But a future American socialist movement would probably demand more not less help from the "helping professions...

...I recently heard Bennett Berger describe a father he had interviewed in a revivalist Christian commune in California who remarked with selfsatisfaction that since becoming a "Christian" he had beaten his son over a thousand times and that both of them were "the better for it...

...These naive fellows apparently are simple meliorists rather than root-and-branch radicals...

...I am grateful to Lasch for noting that my own widely accepted criticism of the oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology was frequently misunderstood by rebels against "establishment sociology" as a celebration of individual creativity and autonomy, whereas its actual intention was to assert a deeper determinism undercutting the sociological and rooted in the stressful interaction of biology and culture as understood by Freud...

...It is possible to recognize what has been lost by this decline without idealizing the past—the bourgeois family itself was an ideal—and certainly without seeming to advocate a restoration of the old order, just as one can recognize that freedom and justice are most prized as values under tyranny without wishing for tyranny in order to recover a more intense appreciation of them...

...It is a pity, however, that Lasch fails to draw on the work of Gdza Roheim, Weston La Barre, and George Devereux, all of them Freudians who also did anthropological fieldwork, in refuting Malinowski's argument against the universality of the Oedipus complex, which so greatly influenced the cultural revisionists of Freud...

...The family is a tough and resilient social formation not likely to succumb to the shafts of trendy shrinks and pop sociologists...

...Rieff has observed that "we know that old ideals do not simply repeat themselves...

...The individual never establishes secure "object relations" by learning to cope with parents who discipline the child rather than indulging his or her every impulse...

...The narcissistic personality is primarily the effect of the disintegration of the family recounted at length in Haven in a Heartless World...

...The question of social and historical causation is a more troublesome one than the problem of representativeness...

...Lasch thus squares his attack on the "triumph of the therapeutic" (Philip Rieff) and his affirmation of traditional bourgeois values with his own political radicalism and his rejection of apolitical or conservative critics of the self-promoting pretensions of the professions...

...But are sexual repression, the sovereignty of paternal authority, the subordination of women, and the inculcation of guilt in child-rearing necessarily intrinsic to the values Lasch wishes to revive...

...Shanker discussed the threat to organized labor's traditional support for a strong defense and the military in a talk Wednesday (March 28) sponsored by the dominantly right-wing, promilitary, strongly anti-communist National Strategy Information Center...

...The student revolutionaries of the ' 60s were unusual in that, as Barrington Moore, Jr...

...On the issue of how or whether psychiatric patients are representative of the total population, Lasch observes that "every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying chracter structure...

...I understand that it has even been taken quite seriously in psychotherapeutic circles...

...Families were not yet havens for the individual, "refugees from the invasion of the world" (Aries), but were thoroughly penetrated by and hardly separable from "circles of relatives, friends, clients, proteges, debtors, etc...

...Parents still control almost exclusively the child's life and growth for his or her first three or four years, the crucially formative period according to psychoanalysis...

...His chapters on these topics originally appeared as separate articles, which are brought together under the "culture of narcissism" rubric and preceded by an account of the "narcissistic personality" based on recent psychoanalytic theory and clinical evidence...

...Gevalt...

...Maybe the present really does indicate that "bourgeois society...

...Part of the...

...Not on the part of AFL-CIO President George Meany, not on the part of Secretary-Treasurer Lane Kirkland," said Shanker, who is also president of the 500,000-member American Federation of Teachers...

...It is a sad reflection on the ahistorical blindness of the social sciences embracing even their own disciplines that it takes a professional historian to point out the lack of novelty in the fashionable calls to "liberation" of recent years, which were, as Lasch insists, mostly pushing at unlocked doors...

...A kind of primitive, Marxist class solidarity on these economic issues and 'forget about this defense stuff' becomes very appealing to a bunch of people who lost a battle" [with lines drawn on a worker-management basis...

...That child-beating father in California worries me...

...Haven in a Heartless World focuses on the family, particularly the attacks on the traditional bourgeois family purveyed at least since the 1920s by psychiatrists, sociologists, marriage counselors, and legal reformers...

...W. Norton, 1979), amount to an extended moral denunciation of contemporary American life, its frantic hedonism, vulgar opportunism, and pervasive hollow anxiety...

...Some of these excesses seem to me to amount to a kind of acting out, a testing of extremes, rather than to the final dissolution 313 of the old culture...

...Lasch's major point is that the decline of a parental authority, which is the source of both love and discipline, impoverishes the part of the superego Freud called the ego ideal and also deprives the individual of the psychological resources acquired in the struggle to gain freedom from the control of the parents...

...Must we be liberated from our liberation from these things in order to overcome the discontents of narcissism...

...Lasch would certainly deplore such an outcome, but ideas as well as actions often have unanticipated consequences...

...military and an anti-communist foreign policy...

...A movement chiefly animated by Lasch's values would in practice be more likely to resemble George Wallace's right-wing populism rather than one centered on traditional socialist ideas...

...In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch extends his survey of American culture from the family to changing definitions of success, advertising, and the public-relations style in politics, professional sports, education, criminal justice, fashions in pediatrics and child-rearing manuals, feminism and the "sexual revolution," and attitudes toward aging...

...remarks in his most recent book, they were "the first revolutionary hedonists," but Lasch avoids full acknowledgment of the left's traditional commitment to collectivism in whose name so many of the trends he most dislikes have been justified...

...The ringing declarations of independence from the nuclear family, sexual repression, male dominance, and the possessiveness of the marriage tie that filled the air in the '60s and still echo around us simply pushed to further extremes what had already been central themes of psychiatric and sociological commentary 30 or 40 years earlier...

...But as Lasch sees it, the therapeutic professionals have not done this simply in their own interest: they have acted as agents of corporate capitalism, extending and intensifying the assault upon individual independence and self-reliance that began with the rise of a market society over two centuries ago...

...Aries, it so happens, is a man of the far right, a royalist and Catholic reactionary...

...Because new doctrines and reforms displacing traditional values and practices have managed peacefully to coexist with capitalism, they are therefore defined as expressions of capitalist class interests...

...Only a "socialist revolution," he insists, can create a new culture and overcome 311 the tyranny of the therapeutic ethic and of bureaucracy, both of which are but new forms of the ancient enemy, capitalism itself...

...Even the recognition that character neuroses were displacing symptom neuroses dates back to the late 1930s and was invoked then by neoFreudians to justify their modifications of Freudian doctrine...

...Lasch is generally chary about acknowledging his affinities even with moderate conservatives...

...But he said some of a new generation of labor leaders who have not personally experienced, or are not convinced of, the menace of communism enter into alliances for political support from leftwing groups...

...Lasch certainly does not share his medievalist, anti-Enlightenment outlook, which probably explains why he rarely cites Aries's enormously influential book on the social history of the family...

...Mass acceptance of Lasch's outlook might multiply that father by millions...

...Marcuse, after all, was taken in by the countercultural youth revolt, which I.aschrightly, I think—regards as part of the problem rather than of the solution...

...Also, National Low Income Housing Coalition, Inter-Religious Housing Coalition, Fund for an Open Society, National Housing Conference, National Coalition for Disease Prevention & Environmental Health, Conference on Economic Progress, National Council of Senior Citizens, National Symphony Orchestra, Committee for National Health Insurance, COIN, The New Leader, Committee on the Present Danger, National Council on Crime & Delinquency, National Assembly of National Voluntary Health & Social Welfare Organizations...

...I am not objecting, let me make it plain, to Lasch's combination of cultural conservatism with a politics of the left...

...Yet this could not help but be true of any changes falling short of the total revolutionary elimination of capitalism...

...I could not agree more with Lasch's claim for the general social and cultural significance of the psychoanalytic evidence: By conducting an intensive analysis of individual cases that rests on clinical evidence rather than common-sense impressions, psy309 choanalysis tells us something about the inner workings of society itself, in the very act of turning its back on society and immersing itself in the individual unconscious...

...I find all this supremely unconvincing, although I share Lasch's dislike for narcissism and the therapeutic ideology that legitimates it as well as his respect for the bourgeois values of self-help and the work ethic...

...An enormous fund of unfocused hostility and aggressiveness accumulates, easily converted into a self-hatred that is warded off by selfaggrandizing fantasies...

...This accounts, one supposes, for the curmudgeonly lack of charity he displays toward other writers whose criticisms resemble his...

...He scornfully dismisses a pair of "revisionist" sociologists for their naivete in believing that it is possible to revive the social solidarity of the medieval village as described by Aries "without sacrificing equality, individuality, and personal freedom," but it is not really clear just how or why Lasch differs from them...

...Had he done so, he would have been less vulnerable to the charge that he absolutizes the bourgeois patriarchal family and passes too lightly over the unnecessary suffering it imposed on human beings against which Freud himself protested...

...There is also a problem of historical timing...

...Because they supported the AFL-CIO when others did not (no businessman backed the AFL-CIO on labor law reform, he noted) "strong temporary relationships which may become permanent" resulted...

...Lasch is much too good a historian not to know all this...

...Far from taking a new tack, recent feminist and liberationist critics of the family have merely gone further in the same direction in suggesting that people are perfectly capable both of improving their "relatedness" to others and achieving greater "self-realization" in a world of loose, transitory personal ties free of normative and institutional constraints...

...In any case, the enemy is by now securely ensconced within: Lasch himself notes that recent years have witnessed a "protestant" revolt against the priestly psychiatric profession...

...The Culture of Narcissism remains a collection of loosely related essays in contrast to Haven in a Heartless World, a more coherent book in which originally discrete essays have been reworked into a unity...

...Indeed, he frequently cites earlier critics of American culture and often 310 perceptively shows their limitations, arguing, for example, that the complaints in the 1950s against conformism and the decline of individualism overlooked the survival of a Hobbesian world of narcissistic egoism beneath the mask of pretended warmth and other-direction (in Riesman's phrase...

...The autonomy and self-reliance of the individual and of the family that once shaped the individual's character have been progressively undermined by remote external authorities: capitalist enterprises, centralized state bureaucracies and, finally, the professional reformers and experts who have "proletarianized parenthood" and "socialized reproduction...

...The dissolution of parental authority does not eliminate the superego but fixates it at the preOedipal level where the mother is unconsciously perceived as a devouring vampire and the father as a capriciously violent, threatening monster...

...Fascism" was the name they were known by between the two world wars...

...Yet Lasch barely mentions Marcuse or Ivan Illich, whose rejections of contemporary society are often very close to his own, probably because he sees them as a bit too far-out, not to say passe...

...But the evidence in that book for changes in the family comes itself from the clinical data of psychiatry and from the putative impact of the injunctions of the therapeutic professions against which Lasch directs such heavy fire...

...One of the best things to come out of the 1960s was surely the delegitimation of the self-serving claims of the professions, especially medicine, but Lasch dismisses the work of Goffman, Szasz, Eliot Freidson, and David Rothman for failing to "rise above the level of a consumers' movement...

...Those "who want to soften the position of the AFL-CIO in international affairs" had been "tremendously strengthened" as a result of the fight over labor law reform and common site picketing and social issues, he said...

...Lasch's intransigent radicalism is a familiar posture, although his targets are less saliently political than the reformist parties and trade unions toward which that posture has often been adopted in the past...

...I, too, would like to see the sort of revival that Lasch envisages, but I doubt that his affectation of a Marxist vocabulary is sufficient to ensure against a "praxis" with the potentiality of breaking through the limits assumed by his "theory...

...they are reborn...

...Here is the list of organizations which are being aided by the AFLCIO, to which Shanker refers: Joint Council on Economic Education, Consumer Energy Council of America, No Greater Love, CARE, Atlantic Council, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Full Employment Action Council, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, National Urban Coalition, Coalition of Labor Union Women, National Urban League, United Negro College Fund, AsianAmerican Free Labor Institute, National Rural Housing Coalition...

...Lasch is actually upholding what Marxists have long derided as "bourgeois individualism," while claiming that it has degenerated into narcissistic egoism and minimizing the responsibility of antibourgeois political and cultural movements for this development...

...Lasch's Freudianism is a major strength of his cultural criticism, providing it with a foundation that makes it more than a cantankerous catalogue of complaints...

...The reference to "bourgeois society" strikes an odd note, because the major thrust of Lasch's argument is to give added force to the description of our age as "postbourgeois," a far more accurate label (favored in particular by the late George Lichtheim) than "postcapitalist" or "postindustrial...

...The first sentence of the Preface refers to the end of the confidence expressed in the phrase "the American Century," and Lasch goes on to enumerate the fiscal woes of New York City, Vietnam, and the exhaustion of natural resources, as well as sundry other crises afflicting other "capitalist countries...

...But there are rebirths and rebirths...

...But Lasch's Marxist brand of functionalism or systems theory is as tautological as other versions...

...To Lasch, the therapeutic professions have completed a long historical evolution that began with the separation of home and work as industrialism spread along with the growing dependence of people on the market for the necessities of life...

...But Lasch scarcely resolves any of the difficulties that have long plagued efforts to relate "personality and culture...

...The therapeutic professions have scarcely seen themselves as providing new support for capitalism, for they have often been in the vanguard of what anticapitalist tendencies have existed in America and, for that matter, elsewhere...

...Possibly they are victims of the cunning of the "dialectic...

...Within an hour" at its last meeting the AFL-CIO board "contributed large sums of money to organizations that it never would have given a nickel to before and that it has basic disagreements with," he said...

...The private NSIC numbers among its members many retired generals and admirals and leading military strategists...

...One may readily doubt that the family is actually as weakened as Lasch contends even among the educated and affluent who are receptive to the advice of applied social science, let alone among workers and most sections of the middle class...

...But his trend toward narcissistic decadence obviously peaked when American "expectations" were still high and on his own evidence long antedates these recent events...

...Have these values been totally eroded, to the point of transformation into their opposites, by the remissive excesses of the culture of narcissism...

...Patients, in short, suffer from ailments that are more widely prevalent in milder forms...

...If the end result is that everyone aspires to be his or her own therapist, the power of the helping professions is undermined...

...Lasch here draws on Klein...