/ BOOKS BY Christopher Lasch The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (1962) The New Radicalism in America (1965) The Agony of the American Left (1969) The World of Nations (1973) Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977) The Culture of Narcissism (1979) The Minimal Self (1984) The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations Christopher Lasch Knihovna FSS MU Brno 424072090 7 ft" ~£*" W-W-Norton & Company AW York London 4240720907 30 : The Culture of Narcissism mode of analysis makes all radicalism, all forms of politics that seek to create a society not based on exploitation, automatically suspect. In spite of its idealization of the public life of the past, Sennett's book participates in the current revulsion against politics—the revulsion, that is, against the hope of using politics as an instrument of social change. Sennett's eagerness to restore a distinction between public and private life, moreover, ignores the ways in which they are always intertwined. The socialization of the young reproduces political domination at the level of personal experience. In our own time, this invasion of private life by the forces of organized domination has become so pervasive that personal life has almost ceased to exist. Reversing cause and effect, Sennett blames the contemporary malaise on the invasion of the public realm by the ideology of intimacy. For him as for Marin and Schur, the current preoccupation with self-discovery, psychic growth, and intimate personal encounters represents unseemly self-absorption, romanticism run rampant. In fact, the cult of intimacy originates not in the assertion of personality but in its collapse. Poets and novelists today, far from glorifying the self, chronicle its disintegration. Therapies that minister to the shattered ego convey the same message. Our society, far from fostering private life at the expense of public life, has made deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marriages increasingly difficult to achieve. As social life becomes more and more warlike and barbaric, personal relations, which ostensibly provide relief from these conditions, take on the character of combat. Some of the new therapies dignify this combat as "assertiveness" and "fighting fair in love and marriage," Others celebrate impermanent attachments under such formulas as "open marriage" and "open-ended commitments." Thus they intensify the disease they pretend to cure. They do this, however, not by diverting attention from social problems to personal ones, from real issues to false issues, but by obscuring the social origins of the suffering—not to be confused with complacent self-absorption—that is painfully but falsely experienced as purely personal and private. i II The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time Narcissism as a Metaphor of the Human Condition Recent critics of the new narcissism not only confuse cause and effect, attributing to a cult of privatism developments that derive from the disintegration of public life; they use the term narcissism so loosely that it retains little of its psychological content. Erich Fromm, in The Heart of Man, drains the idea of its clinical meaning and expands it to cover all forms of "vanity," "self-admiration," "self-satisfaction," and "self-glorification" in individuals and all forms of parochialism, ethnic or racial prejudice, and "fanaticism" in groups. In other words, Fromm uses the term as a synonym for the "asocial" individualism which, in his version of progressive and "humanistic" dogma, undermines cooperation, brotherly love, and the search for wider loyalties. Narcissism thus appears simply as the antithesis of that watery ldve for humanity (disinterested "love for ;the stranger") advocated by Fromm under the name of socialism. Fromm's discussion of "individual and social narcissism," appropriately published in a series of books devoted to "Religious Perspectives," provides an excellent example of the inclination, in our therapeutic age, to dress up moralistic platitudes in psychiatric garb. ("We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man . . . and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.") Whereas Sennett reminds us that narcissism has more in common with self-hatred than with seif-admiration, Fromm loses sight even of this well-known clinical fact in his eagerness to sermonize about the blessings of brotherly love. As always in Fromm's work, the trouble originates in his 31 i 32 : The Culture of Narcissism misguided and unnecessary attempt to rescue Freud's thought from its "mechanistic" nineteenth-century basis and to press it into the service of "humanistic realism." In practice, this means that theoretical rigor gives way to ethically uplifting slogans and sentiments. Fromm notes in passing that Freud's original concept of narcissism assumed that libido begins in the ego, as a "great reservoir" of undifferentiated self-love, whereas in 1922 he decided, on the contrary, that "we must recognize the id as the great reservoir of the libido." Fromm slides over this issue, however, by remarking, "The theoretical question whether the libido starts originally in the ego or in the id is of no substantial importance for the meaning of the concept [of narcissism] itself." In fact, the structural theory of the mind, set forth by Freud in Group Psychology and in The Ego and the Id, required modifications of his earlier ideas that have a great deal of bearing on the theory of narcissism. Structural theory made Freud abandon the simple dichotomy between instinct and consciousness and recognize the unconscious elements of the ego and superego, the importance of nonsexual impulses (aggression or the "death instinct"), and the alliance between superego and id, superego and aggression. These discoveries in turn made possible an understanding of the role of object relations in the development of narcissism, thereby revealing narcissism as essentially a defense against aggressive impulses rather than self-love. Theoretical precision about narcissism is important not only because the idea is so readily susceptible to moralistic inflation ' but because the practice of equating narcissism with everything selfish and disagreeable militates against historical specificity. Men have always been selfish, groups have always been ethnocentric; nothing is gained by giving these qualities a psychiatric label. The emergence of character disorders as the most prominent form of psychiatric pathology, however, together with the change in personality structure this development reflects, derives from quite specific changes in our society and culture—from bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the inner life, the cult of consumption, and in the last analysis from changes in family life and from changing patterns of socialization. All this disappears from sight if narcis- Tbe Narcissistic Personality of Our Time : 33 sism becomes simply "the metaphor of the human condition," as in another existential, humanistic interpretation, Shirley Suger-man's Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism. The refusal of recent critics of narcissism to discuss the etiology of narcissism or to pay much attention to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject probably represents a deliberate decision, stemming from the fear that emphasis on the clinical aspects of the narcissistic syndrome would detract from the concept's usefulness in social analysis. This decision, however, has proved to be a mistake. In ignoring the psychological dimension, these authors also miss the social. They fail to explore any of the character traits associated with pathological narcissism, which in less extreme form appear in such profusion in the everyday life of our age: dependence on the vifcafi'oils warmth providedby others combined with a fear of dependerice, a sense-.of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and1 unsatisfied oral cravings. Nor do they discuss what might be called the secondary characteristics of narcissism: pseudo self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor. Thus they deprive themselves of any basis on which to make connection's between the narcissistic personality type and certain characteristic patterns of contemporary culture, such as the intense fear of old age and death, altered sense of time, fascination with celebrity, fear of competition, decline of the play spirit, deteriorating relations between men and women. For these critics, narcissism remains at its loosest a synonym for selfishness and at its most precise a metaphor, and nothing more, that describes the state of mind in which the world .appears as a mirror of the self. Psychology and Sociology Psychoanalysis deals with individuals, not with groups. Efforts to generalize clinical findings to collective behavior always encounter the difficulty that groups have a life of their own. The collective mind, if there is such a thing, reflects the needs of the group as a whole, not the psychic needs of the individual, which in fact have to be subordinated to the demands of collective living. Indeed it is precisely the subjection 34 : Tbe Culture of Narcissism of individuals to the group that psychoanalytic theory, through a study of its psychic repercussions, promises to clarify. By conducting an intensive analysis of individual cases that rests on clinical evidence rather than common-sense impressions, psychoanalysis 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. Every society reproduces its culture—its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience—in the individual, in the form of personality. As Dürkheim said, personality is the individual socialized. The process of socialization, carried out by the family and secondarily by the school and other agencies of character formation, modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing social norms. Each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood—the trauma of separation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, the pain of competing with others for the mother's love—in its own way, and the manner in which it deals with these psychic events produces a characteristic form of personality, a characteristic form of psychological deformation, by means of which the individual reconciles himself to instinctual deprivation and submits to the requirements of social existence. Freud's insistence on the continuity between psychic health and psychic sickness makes it possible to see neuroses and psychoses as in some sense the characteristic expression of a given culture. "Psychosis," Jules Henry has written, "is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture." Psychoanalysis best clarifies the connection between society and the individual, culture and personality, precisely when it confines itself to careful examination of individuals. It tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so. Freud's extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, history, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of society, but his clinical investigations constitute a storehouse of indispensable ideas, once it is understood that the unconscious mind represents the modification of nature by culture, the imposition of civilization on instinct, Freud should not be reproached [wrote T. W. Adornol for having neglected the concrete social dimension, but for being all too untroubled by I Tbe Narcissistic Personality of Our Time : 3 5 the social origin of . . . the rigidity of the unconscious, which he registers with the undeviating objectivity.of the natural scientist.....In making the leap from psychological images tqhistprical reality, he forgets what he himself discovered—that all reality undergoes modification upon entering the unconscious—and is thus misled into positing such factual events as the murder of-the father by the-primaThorde.*.''" Those who wish to understand-contemporary narcissism as a social and cultural phenomenon^mustfiiurn first to the growing body of clinical writing on the .subject, whichr makes no claim to social or cultural significance and deliberately repudiates the proposition that "changes in contemporary culture," as Otto Kernberg writes, "have effects on patterns of object relations."f In the clinical literature, narcissism serves as more than a meta-phoric term for self-absorption. As a psychic formation in which "love rejected turns back to the self as hatred," narcissism has come to be recognized as an important element in the so-called character disorders that have absorbed much of the clinical attention once given to hysteria and obsessional neuroses. A new * "On... its home ground," Adorno added, "psychoanalysis carries specific conviction; the further it removes itself from that sphere, the more its theses are threatened alternately with shallowness or wild over-systcmatization. If someone makes a slip of the tongue and a sexually loaded word comes out, if someone suffers from agoraphobia or if a girl walks in her sleep, psychoanalysis not merely has its best chances of therapeutic success but also its proper province, the relatively autonomous, monadological individual as arena of the unconscious conflict between instinctual drive and prohibition. The further it departs from this area, the more tyrannically it has to proceed and the more it has to drag what belongs to the dimension of outer reality into the shades of psychic imminence. Its delusion in so .doing is not dissimilar from that '.omnipotence, of-thought' tyhieh' it itself criticized as infantile." •> ■; \- . ;-. i t Those who argue, in opposition-.to.the thesis, of the present study, that there has been no underlying change in the. structure of personality, cite this passage to support the contention that although "weldo see certajn^ynjDtpjm constellations and personality disorders more or* less frequently than in'Freud's day, . . . this shift in attention has occurred primarily becauset61'''tu1tivate''a protective shallowness in emotional relations. They lack the capacity to mourn, because the intensity of their rage against lost love objects, in particular against their parents, prevents their reliving happy experiences or treasuring them in memory. Sexually promiscuous rather than repressed, they nevertheless find it difficult to "elaborate the sexual impulse" or to approach sex in the spirit of play. They avoid close involvements, which might release intense feelings of rage. Their personalities consist largely of defenses against this rage and against feelings of oral deprivation that originate in the pre-Oedipal stage of psychic development. Often these patients suffer from hypochondria and complain 38 : The Culture of Narcissism g of a sense of inner emptiness. At the same time they entertain fan- |. tasies of omnipotence and a strong belief in their right to exploit | others and be gratified. Archaic, punitive, and sadistic elements ft predominate in the superegos of these patients, and they conform | to social rules more out of fear of punishment than from a sense of f guilt. They experience their own needs and appetites, suffused | with rage, as deeply dangerous, and they throw up defenses that f; are as primitive as the desires they seek to stifle. | On the principle that pathology represents a heightened ver- l| sion of normality, the "pathological narcissism" found in charac- | ter disorders of this type should tell us something about narcis-sism as a social phenomenon. Studies of personality disorders j| that occupy the border line between neurosis and psychosis, |I though written for clinicians and making no claims to shed light g on social or cultural issues, depict a type of personality that ought I to be immediately recognizable, in a more subdued form, to ob- s servers of the contemporary cultural scene: facile at managing the impressions he gives to others, ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it; unappeasa-bly hungry for emotional experiences with which to fill an inner void; terrified of aging and death. The most convincing explanations of the psychic origins of this borderline syndrome draw on the theoretical tradition established by Melanic Klein. In her psychoanalytic investigations of children, Klein discovered that early feelings of overpowering rage, directed especially against the mother and secondarily against the internalized image of the mother as a ravenous monster, make it impossible for the child to synthesize "good" and "bad" parental images. In his fear of aggression from the bad parents—projections of his own rage—he idealizes the good parents who will come to the rescue. Internalized images of others, buried in the unconscious mind at an early age, become self-images as well. If later experience fails to qualify or to introduce elements of reality into the child's archaic fantasies about his parents, he finds it difficult to distinguish between images of the self and of the objects outside the self. These images fuse to form a defense against the bad representations of the self and of objects, similarly fused in the form of The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time : 39 a harsh, punishing superego. Melanie Klein analyzed a ten-year-old boy who unconsciously thought of his mother as a "vampire" or "horrid bird" and internalized this fear as hypochondria. He was afraid that the bad presences inside him would devour the good ones. The rigid separation of good and bad images of the self and of objects, on the one hand, and the fusion of self- and object images on the other, arose from the boy's inability to tolerate ambivalence or anxiety. Because his anger,was.so intense, he could not admit that he harbored aggressive feelings toward those he loved, "Fear and guilt^relating ta, his. destructive, phantasies moulded his whole emotional life." A child who feels so gravely threatened by. his own aggressive feelings (projected onto others ^d:\h.gn internalized again as inner "monsters") attempts to compensate himself for his experiences of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty, and omnipotence. These fantasies, together with the internalized images of the good parents with which he attempts to defend himself, become the core of a "grandiose conception of the self." A kind of "blind optimism," according to Otto Kernberg, protects the narcissistic child from the dangers around and within him—particularly from dependence on others, who are perceived as without exception undependable. "Constant projection of'all bad' self and object images perpetuates a world of dangerous, threatening objects, against which the 'all good1 self images are used defensively, and megalomanic ideal self images are built up." The splitting of images determined by aggressive feelings from images that derive from libidinal impulses makes it impossible for the child to acknowledge his own aggression, to experience guilt or concern for objects invested simultaneously with aggression and libido, or to mourn for lost objects. Depression in narcissistic patients takes the form not of mourning with its admixture of guilt, described by Freud in "Mourning and Melancholia," but of impotent rage and "feelings of defeat;.by .external .forces.", t < Because the intrapsychic world qf these pauents is so thinly populated—consisting only of the "grandiose self," in Kerriberg's words, "the devalued, shadowy, jrnages ofself and .others, and potential persecutors"—they "experience intense feelings of emptiness and inauthenticity. Although the narcissist can function in 40 : The Culture of Narcissism | the everyday world and often charms other people (not least with |c his "pseudo-insight into his personality"), his devaluation of oth- f ers, together with his lack of curiosity about them, impoverishes | his personal life and reinforces the "subjective experience of emp- f tiness." Lacking any real intellectual engagement with the f world—notwithstanding a frequently inflated estimate of his own I intellectual abilities—he has little capacity for sublimation. He | therefore depends on others for constant infusions of approval and admiration. He "must attach [himself] to someone, living an almost parasitic" existence. At the same time, his fear of emotional dependence, together with his manipulative, exploitive approach to personal relations, makes these relations bland, superficial, and deeply unsatisfying. "The ideal relationship to me would be a two month relationship," said a borderline patient. "That way there'd be no commitment. At the end of the two , months I'd just break it off." Chronically bored, restlessly in search of instantaneous intimacy—of emotional titillation without involvement and dependence—the narcissist is promiscuous and often pansexual as well, since the fusion of pregenital and Oedipal impulses in the service of aggression encourages polymorphous perversity. The bad images he has internalized also make him chronically uneasy 1 about his health, and hypochondria in turn gives him a special affinity for therapy and for therapeutic groups and movements. As a psychiatric patient, the narcissist is a prime candidate for interminable analysis. He seeks in analysis a religion or way of life and hopes to find in the therapeutic relationship external support for his fantasies of omnipotence and eternal youth. The strength of his defenses, however, makes him resistant to successful analysis. The shallowness of his emotional life often prevents him from developing a close connection to the analyst, even though he "often uses his intellectual insight to agree verbally with the analyst and recapitulates in his own words what has been analysed in previous sessions." He uses intellect in the service of evasion rather than self-discovery, resorting to some of the same strategies of obfuscation that appear in the confessional writing of recent decades. "The patient uses the analytic interpretations but deprives them quickly of life and meaning, so that The.N(^cisisHc'Pm^iáiiyr{f Our Time : 41 only meaningless wordsjare Jeft^The/words^áré then felt to be the patient's own possession^'.W;hic.h}he idealizes, and. which give him a sense of superiority." Although psychiatrists no longer-consider narcissistic disorders inherently..una^l^^^lQ^few ;pf thern take an optimistic view of the prospects fbr^úččess. According to Kernberg, the gre^t^r^n^n^Joj: making the attempt at all, in the face of the many difficulties presented by narcissistic patients, is the devastating effect of narcissism on the second half of their lives—the certainty of the terrible suffering that lies in store. In a society that dreads old age and death, aging holds a special terror for those who fear dependence and whose self-esteem requires the admiration usually reserved for youth, beauty, celebrity, or charm. The usual defenses against the ravages of age—identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one's immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past— can do nothing for the narcissist. Unable to derive whatever comfort comes from identification with historical continuity, he finds it impossible, on the contrary, "to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving a growing identification with other people's happiness and achievements is tragically beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities," Social Influences on Nqmjssism^ Everyage develops, it's own peculiar forms of pathology, which expřgsš"iri;#?ggerated form its underlying character structure. In^rtiud/^tinjje, hysteria Tand obsessional neurosis carried to;extremes'tp^perso'hality traits associated with the capitalist order ať^h'éérJ.Í5'ri.st4ge^n its development—acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality. In our time, the preschizophrenic, borderline, or personality disorders have attracted increasing attention, along with schizophrenia itself. This "change in the form of neuroses has been observed and described since World War II by an ever-increasing number of psychiatrists." According to Peter 42 : The Culture of Narcissism L. Giovacchini, "Clinicians are constantly faced with the seem 1 1 ingly increasing number of patients who do not fit current diag- f nostic categories" and who suffer not from "definitive symptoms" | but from "vague, ill-defined complaints." "When I refer to 'this I type of patient,' " he writes, "practically everyone knows to , | whom I am referring." The growing prominence of "character f disorders" seems to signify an underlying change in the organiza- j tion of personality, from what has been called inner-direction to | narcissism. ■ § Allen Wheelis argued in 1958 that the change in "the patterns | of neuroses" fell "within the personal experience of older psycho- | analysts," while younger ones "become aware of it from the dis- I crepancy between the older descriptions of neuroses and the f problems presented by the patients who come daily to their offices. The change is from symptom neuroses to character disorders." Heinz Lichtenstein, who questioned the additional assertion that it reflected a change in personality structure, j nevertheless wrote in 1963 that the "change in neurotic patterns" j already constituted a "well-known fact." In the seventies, such ; reports have become increasingly common. "It is no accident," . Herbert Hendin notes, "that at the present time the dominant events in psychoanalysis are the rediscovery of narcissism and the new emphasis on the psychological significance of death." "What hysteria and the obsessive neuroses were to Freud and his early colleagues ... at the beginning of this century," writes Michael Bcldoch, "the narcissistic disorders are to the workaday analyst in these last few decades before the next millennium. Today's patients by and large do not suffer from hysterical paralyses of the legs or hand-washing compulsions; instead it is their very psychic selves that have gone numb or that they must scrub and rescrub in an exhausting and unending effort to come clean." These patients suffer from "pervasive feelings of emptiness and a deep disturbance of self-esteem." Burness E. Moore notes that narcissistic disorders have become more and more common. According to Sheldon Bach, "You used to see people coming in with handwashing compulsions, phobias, and familiar neuroses. Now you see mostly narcissists." Gilbert J. Rose maintains that the psychoanalytic outlook, "inappropriately transplanted from analytic The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time : 43 practice" to everyday life, has contributed to "global permissiveness" and the "over-domestication of instinct," which in turn contributes to the proliferation of "narcissistic identity disorders." According to Joel Kovel, the stimulation of infantile cravings by advertising, the usurpation of parental authority by the media and the school, and the rationalization of inner life accompanied by the false promise of personal fulfillment, have created a new type of "social individual." "The result is not the classical neuroses where an infantile impulse is suppressed by patriarchal authority, but a modern version in which impulse is stimulated, perverted and given neither an adequate object upon which to satisfy itself nor coherent forms of control. . . .The entire complex, played out in a setting of alienation rather than, direct control, loses the classical form of symptom—:and the classical therapeutic opportunity of simply restoring'an impulseto'consciousness." The reported increase in the number of narcissistic patients does not necessarily indicate that narcissistic disordersTare.more common than they used to be, in the population as a whole, or that they have become more commph than the classical conversion neuroses. Perhaps they simply come more quickly to psychiatric attention. Ilza Veith contends that "with the increasing awareness of conversion reactions and the popularization of psychiatric literature, the 'old-fashioned' somatic expressions of hysteria have become suspect among the more sophisticated classes, and hence most physicians observe that obvious conversion symptoms are now rarely encountered and, if at all, only among the uneducated." The attention given to character disorders in recent clinical literature probably makes psychiatrists more alert to their presence. But this possibility by no means diminishes the importance of psychiatric testimony about the prevalence of narcissism, especially when this testimony appears at the same time that journalists begin to speculate about the new narcissism and the unhealthy trend toward self-absorption. The narcissist comes to the attention of psychiatrists for some of the same reasons that he rises to positions of prominence not only in awareness movements and other cults but in business corporations, political organizations, and government bureaucracies. For all his inner.suffer-ing, the narcissist has many traits.that rnak£;.for success in 44 : The Culture of Narcissism i ... . i bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipula- I tion of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep '\ personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist i with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem. .}. Although he may resort to therapies that promise to give meaning t ~~ to life and to overcome his sense of emptiness, in his professional f career the narcissist often enjoys considerable success. The management of personal impressions comes naturally to him, and his ' mastery of its intricacies serves him well in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than "visi- . bility," "momentum," and a winning record. As the "organiza- \ tion man" gives way to the bureaucratic "gamesman"—-the "loy- j alty era" of American business to the age of the "executive success I game"—the narcissist comes into his own. [' , In a study of 250 managers from twelve major companies, [ Michael Maccoby describes the new corporate leader, not al- | together unsympathetically, as a person who works with people [■ rather than with materials and who seeks not to build an empire or accumulate wealth but to experience "the exhilaration of run- [ ning his team and of gaining victories." He wants to "be known as t. a winner, and his deepest fear is to be labeled a loser." Instead of | pitting himself against a material task or a problem demanding ;, solution, he pits himself against others, out of a "need to be in I control." As a recent textbook for managers puts it, success today means "not simply getting ahead" but "getting ahead of others." \ . The new executive, boyish, playful, and "seductive," wants in Maccoby's words "to maintain an illusion of limitless options." ' He has little capacity for "personal intimacy and social commit- v ment." He feels little loyalty even to the company for which he j; works. One executive says he experiences power "as not being i pushed around by the company." In his upward climb, this man cultivates powerful customers and attempts to use them against \ his own company. "You need a very big customer," according to \ his calculations, "who is always in trouble and demands changes \ from the company. That way you automatically have power in the company, and with the customer too. I like to keep my op- ' tions open." A professor of management endorses this strategy, \ It The Narcisiisiic Personality of Our Time : 45 "Overidentification" with the company, in his view, "produces a corporation with enormous power over the careers and destinies of its true believers." The bigger the company, the more important he thinks it is for executives "to manage their careers in terms of their own . . . free choices" and to "maintain the widest set of options possible."* According to Maccoby, the gamesman "is open to new ideas, but he lacks convictions." He will do business with any regime, even if he disapproves of its principles. More independent and resourceful than the company man, he tries to use the company for his own ends, fearing that otherwise he will be "totally emasculated by the corporation." He avoids intimacy as a trap, preferring the "exciting, sexy atmosphere" with which the modern executive surrounds himself at work/fwKere adbring, mini-skirted secretaries constantly flirt with him." In all his personal relations, the gamesman depends on the admiration or fear he inspires in others to certify his credentials as a[^'winner." As he gets older, he finds it more and more difficult to command the kind of attention on which he thrives. He reaches a plateau.'beybnd-which he does not advance in his job, perhaps because the very highest positions, as Maccoby notes, still go to "those ablefo renounce adolescent rebelliousness and become at least to some extent believers in the organization." The job begins to lose its savor. Having little interest in craftsmanship, the new-style executive takes no pleasure in his achievements once he begins to lose the adolescent charm on which they rest. Middle age hits him with the force of a *lt is not only the gamesman who "fears feeling trapped." Seymour B. Sarason finds this feeling prevalent among professionals and students training for professional careers. He too suggests a connection between the fear of entrapment and the cultural value set on career mobility and its psychic equivalent, "personal growth." " 'Stay loose,' 'keep your options open,' 'play it cool'—these cautions emerge from the feeling that society sets all kinds of booby traps that rob you of the freedom without which growth is impossible." This fear of entrapment or stagnation is closely connected in turn with the fear of aging and death. The mobility mania and the cult of "growth" can themselves be seen, in part, as an expression of the fear of aging that has become so intense in American society. Mobility and growth assure the individual that he hits not yet settled into the living death of old age. 46 : The Culture q[ Narcissism f disaster: "Once his youth, vigor, and even the thrill in winning 1 are lost, he becomes depressed and goalless, questioning the pur- ft' pose of his life. No longer energized by the team struggle and un- % able to dedicate himself to something he believes in beyond him- fr self, ... he finds himself starkly alone." It is not surprising, 4 given the prevalence of this career pattern, that popular psycho!- g ogy returns so often to the "midlife crisis" and to ways of combat- || ing it. H" In Wilfrid Sheed's novel Office Politics, a wife asks, "There arc f real issues, aren't there, between Mr. Fine and Mr. Tyler?" Her | husband answers that the issues are trivial; "the jockeying of ego m is the real story." Eugene Emerson Jennings's study of manage- ]| ment, which celebrates the demise of the organization man and » the advent of the new "era of mobility," insists that corporate f. "mobility is more than mere job performance." What counts is ** "style . . . panache . . . the ability to say and do almost anything I without antagonizing others." The upwardly mobile executive, ) according to Jennings, knows how to handle the people around him—the "shelf-sitter" who suffers from "arrested mobility" and -f, envies success; the "fast learner"; the "mobile superior." The | "mobility-bright executive" has learned to "read" the power rela- \ tions in his office and "to see the less visible and less audible side | of his superiors, chiefly their standing with their peers and supe- { riors." He "can infer from a minimum of cues who are the centers I of power, and he seeks to have high visibility and exposure with ? them. He will assiduously cultivate his standing and opportu- [' nities with them and seize every opportunity to learn from them. I He will utilize his opportunities in the social world to size up the | men who are centers of sponsorship in the corporate world." t Constantly comparing the "executive success game" to an ath- | letic contest or a game of chess, Jennings treats the substance of f. executive life as if it were just as arbitrary and irrelevant to sue- | cess as the task of kicking a ball through a net or of moving pieces I over a chessboard. He never mentions the social and economic t repercussions of managerial decisions or the power that managers | exercise over society as a whole. For the corporate manager on the make, power consists not of money and influence but of "momen- r The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time •. 47 wm," a "winning image," a reputation as a winner. Power lies in the eye of the beholder and thus has no objective reference at all.* The manager's view of the world, as described by Jennings, Maccoby, and by the manágeřsthemselves, is that of the narcissist, who sees the world as a mirror of himself and has no interest tft external events except as they throw track a reflection of his family, which in turn originates in " changing modes of production. Industrial production takes the father out of the home and diminishes the role he plays in the conscious life of the child. The mother attempts to make up to the child for the loss of its father, but she often lacks practical experience of childrearing, feels herself at a loss to understand what the child needs, and relies so heavily on outside experts that her attentions fail to provide the child with a sense of security. Both parents seek to make the family into a refuge from outside pressures, yet the very standards by which they measure their success, and the techniques through which they attempt to bring it about, derive in large part from industrial sociology, personnel management, child psychology—in short, from the organized apparatus of social control. The family's struggle to conform to an externally imposed ideal of family solidarity and parenthood creates an appearance of solidarity at the expense of spontaneous feeling, a ritualized "relatedness" empty of real substance. Because these family patterns are so deeply rooted in the social conditions created by modern industry, they cannot be changed by prophylactic or "educational" reforms designed to The Socialization of Reproduction and the Collapse of Authority : 177 improve the quality of communication, diminish tensions, and promote interpersonal skills. Such reforms, by extending the sway of the health and welfare professions, usually do more harm than good. The injunction to feel spontaneous emotion does not make it easier to feel. In any case, the psychological patterns promoted by the family are reinforced by conditions outside the family. Because those patterns seem to find their clearest expression in the pathology of narcissism, and ultimately in schizophrenia, we should not jump to the conclusion that the family produces misfits, people who cannot function efficiently'in mod-era industrial society.* In many ways it do'esa' good fob of preparing the child for the condition's he-- wSU erieourtter when he leaves home. Other institutions—for-exampfS, the school and the adolescent peer group^mefel^ patterns by satisfying expectations-created' fey4th%^f&fe8yVJAssies Henry writes, "There is a constant interplayibe'tween !each family and the culture at large, one reinforci^ unique'family upbringing gives rise to needs in the. child that are satisfied by one or another aspect of the adolesce'ht-and-school-culture." According to Henry and other observers of American culture, the collapse of parental authority reflects the collapse of "ancient impulse controls" and the shift "from a society in which Super Ego values (the values of self-restraint) were ascendant, to one in which more and more recognition was being given to the values of the id (the values of self-indulgence)." The reversal of the normal * Kenneth Keniston, Philip Slater, and other Parsortian critics of American culture have argued that the nuclear family, in Keniston's words, "produces deep discontinuities between childhood and adulthood." The critique of "privatism," which has emerged as one of the dominant themes in recent cultural radicalism, finds an obvious target in the nuclear family, which ostensibly encourages a predatory and anachronistic individualism and thus cripples children for the demands of cooperative living in a complex, "interdependent" society. Often associated with the radical psychiatry of R. D. Laing and Wilhelm Reich arid with urgent calls for a cultural revolution, this criticism of the nuclear family merely updates and clothes in the latest liberationist jargon an indictment of the family first articulated by social workers, educators, penal reformers, and other social pathologists, and used by these experts to justify their appropriation of familial functions. By associating itself with psychiatric'triti'ctsmloW thus reaffirms one of the strongest tendencies" in the-society it claims to criticize. 178 : The Culture of Narcissism relations between the generations, the decline of parental discipline, the "socialization" of many parental functions, and the "self-centered, impulse-dominated, detached, confused" actions of American parents give rise to characteristics that "can have seriously pathological outcomes, when present in extreme form," but which in milder form equip the young to live in a permissive society organized around the pleasures of consumption. Arnold Rogow argues, along similar lines, that American parents, alternately "permissive and evasive" in dealing with the young, "find it easier to achieve conformity by the use of bribery than by facing the emotional turmoil of suppressing the child's demands." In this way they undermine the child's initiative and make it impossible for him to develop self-restraint or self-discipline; but since American society no longer values these qualities anyway, the abdication of parental authority itself instills in the young the character traits demanded by a corrupt, permissive, hedonistic culture. The decline of parental authority reflects the "decline of the superego" in American society as a whole. These interpretations, which lucidly capture the prevailing styles of parental discipline, their impact on the young, and the connections between the family and society, need to be modified in one important detail. The changing conditions of family life lead not so much to a "decline of the superego" as to an alteration of its contents. The parents' failure to serve as models of disciplined self-restraint or to restrain the child does not mean that the child grows up without a superego. On the contrary, it encourages the development of a harsh and punitive superego based largely on archaic images of the parents, fused with grandiose self-images. Under these conditions, the superego consists of parental introjects instead of identifications. It holds up to the ego an exalted standard of fame and success and condemns it with savage ferocity when it falls short of that standard. Hence the oscillations of self-esteem so often associated with pathological narcissism. The fury with which the superego punishes the ego's failures suggests that it derives most of its energy from aggressive drives in the id, unmixed with libido. The conventional oversimplification which equates superego and id with "self-restraint" and "self- Tie Socialization of Reproduction'and'the Collapse' of Authority ; 179 indulgence," treating them as if they were radically opposed, ignores the irrational features of the superego and: the alliance between aggression and a punishing conscience., The decline of parental authority and of externa! sanctions in general, while in many ways it weakens the superego, paradoxically reinforces the aggressive, dictatorial elements inithe superego and thus makes it more difficult than ever for instinctual desires to find acceptable outlets. The "decline of the superego" in a permissive society is better understood as the creation of a new kind of superego in which archaic elements predominate. The social changes that have made it difficult for children to internalize parental authority have not abolished the superego but have merely strengthened the alliance of superego and Thanatos—that "pure culture of the death instinct," as Freud called it, which directs against the ego a torrent of fierce, unrelenting criticism. The new permissiveness extends largely to expression of li-bidinal instincts, not to aggression, A bureaucratic society that stresses cooperation, interpersonal give and take, cannot allow many legitimate outlets for anger. Even in the family, which is supposed to allow expression to feelings denied expression elsewhere, anger threatens the precarious equilibrium that members of the family try so hard to preserve. At the same time, the mechanical quality of parental care, so notably lacking in affect, gives rise in the child to ravenous,oral cravings and to a boundless rage against those who fail to'gratify' them.: Much of this anger, fiercely repressed by the ego^ finds its way into the superego, with the results described by .Henry and Yela Lowenfeld. The inhibiting, controlling, and guiding function of the supeijego, which largely merges with the ego, is weakened through the weakness :of the parents, through indulgent educatioh}?wh:ich"Fails'to train the ego, and through the general social climate of permissiveness.;.:; . : ButVhe severe superego of early childhood still lives'In the individual. The controlling function of the superego which draws its strength from the ientification with strong parental figures, and which can protect the individual from conscious and unconscious guilt feelings, functions poorly; its punishing and self-destructive power still seems to affect many. The result is restlessness, discontent, depressive moods, craving for substitute satisfactions. 180 : The Culture of Narcissism In Heller's Something Happened, which describes with such a multitude of depressing details the psychodynamics of family life today, the father believes, with good reason, that his rebellious adolescent daughter wants him to punish her; and like so many American parents, he refuses to give her this satisfaction or even to recognize its legitimacy. Refusing to be maneuvered into administering punishment, he wins psychological victories over his ^daughter, on the contrary, by giving in to her wishes and thereby avoiding the quarrels she seeks to provoke. Yet both his children, notwithstanding his desire, in his son's case at least, to adopt the part of the "best friend," unconsciously regard him as a tyrant. He muses in bewilderment: "I don't know why [my son] feels so often that I am going to hit him when I never do; 1 never have; I don't know why both he and my daughter believe I used to beat them a great deal when they were smaller, when I don't believe I ever struck either one_of them at all." The parent's abdication of authority intensifies rather than softens the child's fear of punishment, while identifying thoughts of punishment more firmly than ever with the exercise of arbitrary, overwhelming violence.* The Family's Relation to Other Agencies of Social Control i Society reinforces these patterns not only through "indulgent education" and general permissiveness but through advertising, demand creation, and the mass culture of hedonism. At first glance, a society based on mass consumption appears to encourage self-indulgence in its most blatant forms. Strictly considered, however, modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt. It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones. By * In the school studied by Jules Henry, an eleven-year-old boy wrote gratefully that his father "teaches me [baseball and] other sports [and] gives me as much as he can," but complained that "he never gives me a spanking when I've done wrong." Henry observes: "What this child seems to be saying is that the father. . . cannot give what the child feels he needs in order to make him a person: just punishment for his wrongdoing. It is startling for people in a permissive culture to learn that not to be given pain can be felt as a deprivation. Yet it is more painful for some children to bear guilt unpunished than to get a spanking." The Socialization of Reproduction and the Collapse of Authority : 181 surrounding the consumer with images of the good life, and by associating them with the glamour of celebrity and success, mass culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, in his fantasies, in a life of exquisite comfort and sensual refinement. Yet the propaganda of commodities simultaneously makes him acutely unhappy with his lot. By fostering grandiose aspirations, it also fosters self-denigration and self-contempt. The culture of consumption in its central tendency thus recapitulates the socialization earlier provided by the family. Experiences with authority—in school, at work; in the political realm—complete the citizen's training in uneasy acquiescence to the prevailing forms of control. Here again, social control promotes neither self-indulgence nor the guilty,self-criticism formerly inflicted by a moralistjciStiper^ restless dissatisfaction,ylnjthe schoolH.$ife-Jrasjnes&corporation, and the courts of law, authprities conceal their power behind a facade of benevolence.' Posing as friendly helpers, they discipline their subordinates as seldom as possible! seeking instead to create a friendly atmosphere in whichtev&'i^^eW$e>i^speak#:hi^ mind. Jules Henry found that high schboT^tedcfters actually feared quiet and restraint in their classrooms,, just{^ihg;fheiffaHurevt'b enforce order on the grounds that imposition of silence interferes with spontaneous expression and creates unnecessary fears. "A quiet classroom may be an awfully fearful situation for someone," said one teacher, whose classroom grew so noisy that the students ^themselves clamored for quiet. According to Henry, the classroom teaches children "their first lessons in how to live in the 'friendly,' 'relaxed' climates of the contemporary bureaucracies of business and government."* * When Ann Landers advised a high school student to complain to the principal about other students who carried on sexual activities in the cafeteria, she was told that the "principal is probably a gutless wonder" and that "the teachers know what goes on and who the offensive kids are, but they don't want to stir up any trouble so they keep quiet." The same column carried a letter from a sixteen-year-old girl who insisted that adolescents complaining of "being undcr-[lheir] parents' thumb" should consider themselves lucky not to have "parents who take the easy way out and don't stand up to their kids because they hate the hassle." 182 : The Culture of Narcissism The appearance of permissiveness conceals a stringent system of controls, all the more effective because it avoids direct confrontations between authorities and the people on whom they seek to impose their will. Because confrontations provoke arguments about principle, the authorities whenever possible delegate discipline to someone else so that they themselves can pose as advisers, "resource persons," and friends. Thus parents rely on doctors, psychiatrists, and the child's own peers to impose rules on the child and to sec that he conforms to them. If the child refuses to eat what his parents think he ought to eat, the parents appeal to medical authority. If he is unruly, they call in a psychiatrist to help the child with his "problem."* In this way, parents make their own problem—insubordination—the child's. Similarly at school, the child finds himself surrounded by authorities who wish only to help. If one of the students gets "out of line," they send him to a counselor for "guidance." The students themselves, according to Edgar Fricdenberg's study of the American high school, reject both authoritarian and libertarian measures and regard social control as "a technical problem, to be referred to the right expert for solution." Thus if a teacher finds an unruly student smoking in the washroom, he should neither "beat him calmly and coolly and with emotional restraint" or publicly humiliate him, on the one hand, nor ignore the offense, on the other hand, as a minor infraction that should not contribute to the student's reputation as a troublemaker. The teacher should refer him instead to the school psychiatrist. Beating him would make him more unmanageable than ever, in the students' view, whereas the psychiatric solution, in effect, enlists his own cooperation in the school's attempt to control him. Human Relations on the Job: The Factory as a Family Experts in personnel management have introduced similar tech- * "The community has expressed its concern for childhood by creating institutions," wrote Van Waters. "It is increasingly common for births to take place in hospitals, infant feeding has become an esoteric rite few parents would attempt The Socialization of Reproduction and the Collapse of Authority : !83 niques into the modern corporation, ostensibly as a means of "humanizing" the workplace. The Ideology of modern management draws on the same body .of therapebfic theory and practice that informs progressivc cducation and progressive chiidrearing. Recent efforts to "democratize" industrialreMions;bring to a full circle the development that began.;V^hen-e?perts in scientific management began to study group dy/nSh^csinthe office and factory in order to remove friction and raise putput>'Social scientists then applied the ideas first worked out in the study of small groups to study and treatment of the family, arguing that most domestic conflicts originated in the attempt to impose outmoded authoritarian controls on an institution that was evolving from an authoritarian to a democratic form. By the 1950s, almost all psychiatrists, social workers, and social scientists condemned the values associated with the traditional or authoritarian family. "Our textbooks," wrote one team of experts, "discuss the 'democratic' family system and the sharing of authority." In the late fifties and sixties, industrial relations experts began to extend these ideas to the problems of management. In The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), Douglas McGregor urged corporate executives to accept the "limits of authority." Defining authority, too crudely, as command sanctioned by force, McGregor argued that authority represented an outmoded form of social control in an age of "interdependence." Command remained effective, he reasoned, only so long as workers occupied a debased, dependent position in the industrial hierarchy and found it dif-ficult'to satisfy even their rnateriaj. needs. ^Thepsychiatrist Abraham Maslow had demonstrated j^at as, soon a,s human beings satisfy the basic need f% brea.d, shefter* an|.security,.' they devote their attention to satisfying-|l)e, need for "self-actualization." Yet industrial managers, jM/cGregor ca^pJa^'gej^stiN took a "carrot and stick" approach to the wdrker^^q^pjtifically assuming that people hate work and have,to bei;cJ3^r,ee,d,.}ntb performing.it or enticed with material rewards. y,v: ....: . . t., without expert assistance; when children arc ill, they are cared for by specialists far better equipped than parents. . . . Atevcry stage in the child's life some modern organized agency will say to the parent: 'We can do this better than you can.' " ( I 184 : The Culture of Narcissism McGregor made it clear that he did not wish to see an abdication of managerial responsibility. Like Dr. Spock and Dr. Bruch, -he rejected the "permissive" approaches of his predecessors, which had allegedly contaminated early experiments in "human relations." Experience had overturned the assumption that "employee satisfaction" led to greater productivity or that "industrial health [flowed] automatically from the elimination of . . . conflict." The worker still needed direction, but he had to be approached as a partner in the enterprise, not as a child. The enlightened executive encouraged his subordinates to participate in group discussions, to "communicate" their needs and suggestions to management, and even to make "constructive" criticisms. Just as marriage counselors had learned to accept conflict as a normal part of domestic life, so McGregor tried to impress a similar point of view on corporate managers. He told them that they made a mistake in regarding the interests of the individual as opposed to those of the group. "If we look to the family, we might recognize the possibilities inherent in the opposite point of view." Research into small groups, according to McGregor, showed that groups function best when everyone speaks his mind; when people listen as well as speak; when disagreements surface without causing "obvious tensions"; when the "chairman of the board" does not try to dominate his subordinates; and when decisions rest on consensus.* These precepts, which by this time had be- * McGregor's influential book, so characteristic an expression of the culture of the fifties, not only complemented the psychiatric attack on the authoritarian family, which came to fruition in that decade, it restated many of the themes of the Parso-nian sociology of the family. In 1961, Parsons criticized David Riesman's analysis of the abdication of parental authority (in The Lonely Crowd) on the grounds that modern parents best equip the young for life in a complex industrial society when they encourage them to become self-reliant, instead of attempting to supervise every detail of the child's upbringing. Like Parsons, McGregor argues that what looked like an abdication of authority—in this case, managerial authority— represented instead a transition to a more effective, scientific, therapeutic form of control. Just as reactionary alarmists (sometimes in common with well-meaning but misguided social theorists) prematurely deplored the collapse of parental authority, so reactionary businessmen predictably denounced the new softness imported into business by industrial relations experts, demanding a crackdown on unions, a reversal of the New Deal, and a return to the good old days of industrial The Socialization of Reproduction atid the Collapse of'Authority : 185 come the common coin of the social sciences, summarize the therapeutic view of authority. The growing acceptance of that view, at all levels of American society, makes it possible to preserve hierarchical forms of organization in the guise of "participation." It provides a society dominated by corporate elites with an antieli-tist ideology. The popularization of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority, especially in the home and the classroom, while leaving domination uncriticized. Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation. As the ideas of guilt and innocence lose their moral and even legal meaning, those in power no longer enforce their rules by means of the authoritative edicts of judges, magistrates, teachers, and preachers. Society no longer expects authorities to articulate a clearly reasoned, elaborately justified code of law and morality; nor does it expect the young to internali.ze.jthe: morarstan^dard^iOf the community. It demands o.nly;c:dnfor^ everyday intercourse, sanc^oned,by ^sycliiatrife; definitions of normal behavior. '••^s>'K-.i':!1 ' In the hierarchies;df work and ppwcr3 as in the. family, the decline of authority does not lead to the cailapse of, social constraints. It merely deprives those constraints.of a rational basis. Just as the parent's failure to administer, just punishment to the child undermines the child's self-esteem rather than strengthening it, so the corruptibility of public authorities-—their acquies-* cence in minor forms of wrongdoing—reminds the subordinate of his subordination by making him dependent on the indulgence of those above him. The new-style bureaucrat, whose "ideology and character support hierarchy even though he is neither paternalistic nor authoritarian," as Michael Maccoby puts it in his study of autocracy. McGregor had no patience with this outmoded outlook. It rested, in his view, on a misunderstanding of authority and a simplification of the alternative modes of exercising power. "Abdication is not an appropriate antithesis to authoritarianism. . . . Only if we can free ourselves from the notion that we are limited to a single dimension—that of more or less authority—will we escape from our present dilemma." 186 : The Culture of Narcissism the corporate "gamesman," no longer orders his inferiors around; but he has discovered subtler means of keeping them in their place. Even though his underlings often realize that they have been "conned, pushed around, and manipulated," they find it hard to resist such easygoing oppression. The diffusion of responsibility in large organizations, moreover, enables the modern manager to delegate discipline to others, to blame unpopular decisions on the company in general, and thus to preserve his standing as a friendly adviser to those beneath him. Yet his entire demeanor conveys to them that he remains a winner in a game most of them are destined to lose. Since everyone allegedly plays this game by the same rules, no one can begrudge him his success; but neither can the losers escape the heavy sense of their own failure. In a society without authority, the lower orders no longer experience oppression as guilt. Instead, they internalize a grandiose idea of the opportunities open to all, together with an inflated opinion of their own capacities. If the lowly man resents those more highly placed, it is only because he suspects them of grandly violating the regulations of the game, as he would like to do himself if he dared. It never occurs to him to insist on a new set of rules. VIII The Flight from Feeling; , Sociopsychology of the Sex War Suddenly she wkhed she was with some other man mid not with Edward. . . . Pia looked at Edward. She looked at his red beard, bis immense spectacles. I don't like him, she thought. That red heard, those immense spectacles. ... Pia said to Edward that he was the only person she had ever loved for this long. "How long is it?" Edward asked. It was seven months, DONALD BARTHELME J think more and more . . . that there is no such thing as rationality in relationships. I think you just have to soy okay that's what you feel right now and what are we going to do about it. ... I believe everybody should really be able to basically do what they want to do as long as it's not hurting anybody else. LIBERATED BRIDEGROOM The Trivialization ofrP^j^^la^w^s.:' /Bertrind Russell once predicted that the socialization of; reproduction—the supersession of the family "by the state—woufd "make sex love itself more trivial," encourage "ascertain triviality in all personal relations," and "make it faf'more difficult' to take an interest in anything after one's own death," At first glance, recent developments appear to have refuted the. first part of this prediction. Americans today invest personal relations, particularly.the relations between men and women, with undiminished emotional importance. The 187