In Search of Selfhood

...The fading of a durable, common, public world, we may conjecture, intensifies the fear of separation at the same time that it weakens the psychological resources that make it possible to confront this fear realistically...

...The Catholic bishops, for example, have taken a courageous stand against nuclear devastation...

...Consequently, he insists in two chapters—"The Survival Mentality" and "The Discourse on Mass Death: 'Lessons' of the Holocaust"—we have come to consider the self "a helpless victim of external circumstances...

...Moreover, his two primary themes, selfhood and survival, are not connected at all clearly, nor does loose linkage of the essays—including the strange juxtaposition of chapters on the Holocaust and on Minimalist art—facilitate consistent and persuasive reasoning...

...In a time of troubles," heargues, "everyday life becomes an exercise in survival...

...In "The Politics of the Psyche," Lasch sets forth psychological models of three contemporary political mentalities, on the premise that "For many purposes psychoanalytic terminology now provides a more reliable guide to the political landscape than outmoded distinctions between Left and Right...

...What Lasch consistently misses are the realities of victimization and survival in our country...

...Confronted by the possibility of an atomic catastrophe, Lasch contends, the majority of us "think of ourselves...

...One finishes almost as one began, none the wiser about selfhood or survival in modern America...

...Many Americans have endured physical and sexual childhood abuse so terrible, damaging and destructive that their selves and psyches have been permanently warped...

...These speculations move Lasch to conclude that "The best hope of emotional maturity...

...Emotional equilibrium demands a minimal self, not the imperial self of yesteryear...

...Throughout, I felt Lasch was an author searching in vain for a significant thesis...

...For instance, Lasch often mentions "prevailing patterns of psychological relations or the prevailing definition of selfhood," although he makes no serious effort to show that these patterns and definitions are in any way prevalent...

...Lasch's invocation of the JudeoChristian tradition is repeated briefly at the close, where he argues for a "definition of selfhood as tension, division, conflict," and suggests that its problems are best solved with a guilty conscience...

...appears to lie in a creative tension between separation and union, individuation and dependence...

...Self-affirmation remains a possibility precisely to the degree that an older conception of personality, rooted in Judeo-Chris-tian traditions, has persisted...

...Selfhood implies a personal history, friends, family, a sense of place...

...In the process of coping we "learn the trick of observing [ourselves] as if the events of [our] lives were happening to someone else," techniques used in concentration camps and in corporate infighting...

...Her books, full of vivid detail and convincing case studies, make Lasch's abstractions and vague generalities deeply unsatisfying...

...A recent commentator on multiple personalities usefully observes that casualties of this disorder have suffered an "emotional Auschwitz": intense abuse adults inflicted on their young bodies and souls...

...Reading Lasch's tome is like eating cotton candy —one bite and the substance dissolves...

...When Lasch turns in the final chapters to the psyche and the self, he again fails to examine actual feelings and events...

...The Minimal Self as a whole is no more successful...

...The Minimal Self is difficult to summarize because its arguments are vague generalities ungrounded in reality, a failing that seems odd in a cultural historian...

...Another essay, "The Ideological Assault on the Ego," dissects the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown and the Freudian feminists, but without effectively linking them to the basic themes of the book...

...Alas, such abstractions persist throughout the book and do little to clarify either the contemporary nature and meaning of selfhood in the United States or the self's current prospects...

...Eager to attack the views of rivals —especially those he labels "pluralists," among them the late Richard Hofstadter and such contemporaries as Peter Cle-cak—Lasch consistently obscures his positions...

...Under these conditions, selfhood becomes a kind of luxury, out of place in an age of impending austerity...

...author, "The Protestant Temperament," "Four Generations" Living in the nuclear age, with Ronald Reagan as President, we are bound to attach importance to the subject of survival...

...Discussions of the superego and the ego ideal lead to an observation on narcissism's contemporary cultural dimensions: "In our time, the survival and therefore the reality of the external world...

...and on sexual mistreatment, in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware...

...Christopher Lasch, having earlier chronicled the assault on the family and the spread of narcissism in America, now explores the invasion of the self...

...It provides neither guidance for survival nor a clear sense of the current nature and meaning of selfhood...

...Readers who stay with him in hopes of finding hints for surviving our troubled and dangerous age will not be rewarded...

...To appreciate his inadequacies, one need only look at Alice Miller's recent works on narcissism and the inability to feel, in Prisoners of Childhood-, on corporal punishment, in For Your Own Good...

...His first psychopolitical category, the "party of the superego"—most closely associated with neoconservatives rather than the Radical Right, which he largely neglects—is balanced by the second, the "party of the ego," the "essence of the liberal, humanist tradition...

...The Inner History of Selfhood" explores the "distinction between self and not-self," concentrating on the formation of selfhood during infancy and emphasizing the separation of baby and mother...

...Under siege self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity...

...He attributes this to living "in a dangerous world dominated by large organizations," and "to the memory of specific events in 20th-century history that have victimized people on a mass scale...

...Thus, authentic selfhood "is the painful awareness of the tension between our unlimited aspirations and our limited understanding, between our original intimations of immortality and our fallen state, between oneness and separation...

...But Lasch overlooks these real-life, tangible victims...

...He calls the modern family a "product of egalitarian ideology, consumer capitalism and therapeutic intervention," tacitly assuming that a single form characterizes the institution and ignoring its many complex manifestations in our society...

...appears increasingly problematic...

...A key reason for its failure is Lasch's refusal to take a stand of his own...

...They are convinced they will be rescued from the fire, while sinners are incinerated and, ultimately, tormented forever in the Lord's celestial concentration camp...

...Otherwise, except for a few short references to apocalypticism, he is virtually silent on the powerful and omnipresent role of religion today in shaping divergent attitudes toward self and survival...

...as survivors and as victims or potential victims" simultaneously...

...It represents a dilution of true selfhood, which to Lasch is achieved by acknowledging " our separation from the original source of life," and struggling "to recapture a sense of primal union by means of activity that gives us a provisional understanding and mastery of the world without denying our limitations and dependency...

...He has read a vast amount of material, with the acknowledged assistance of four researchers, and excluding a brief final statement, thevolume largely summarizes other people's thoughts and arguments...

...both are contrasted to the "party of Narcissus" and the ego ideal, apparently corresponding to the New Left...

...Lasch's main thrust is that our shift from an agrarian to a corporate con-sumerist social system promoted narcissism and encouraged us "to piece together a technology of the self, the only apparent alternative to personal collapse...

...Here are some of the very people most confident of lasting out any nuclear holocaust, and numbers of them expect the world to end in the near future...

...Instead, he gives us an extremely abstract discussion of issues inspired by various psychoanalytic theories of selfhood and narcissism (though for unspecified reasons, he ignores Hans Ko-hut...

...This minimal (or narcissistic) self, we are told, is "uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union...

...But selfhood, says Lasch, should not be "subject to environmental determination, even under extreme conditions...

...Meanwhile, there has been a dramatic intrusion of Fundamentalist Protestant theology and practice into the mainstream of American politics, culture and behavior...