In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch excoriated his self-absorbed society – but the book's legacy is questionable
- Written by Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne
A cultural critic rails against a society that worships celebrity and prizes images over ideas. A progressive intellectual attacks the dominance of corporate elites. A curmudgeonly academic condemns his society’s ignorance of its past and the dumbing down of public education. A psychologically astute writer explores the conflicts eddying around gender and sexuality.
Who are these disparate thinkers, you ask? Not four contemporary pundits, but a single controversialist, writing almost half a century ago.
The American historian Christopher Lasch[1], who died in 1994, authored a series of books that established him as one of his nation’s leading public intellectuals. The most influential of these, first published in 1979, was The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations[2].
This blockbuster earned Lasch audiences with President Jimmy Carter, a National Book Award, and a spread in People magazine, where he shared top billing with Olivia Newton-John. The book was contentious in its time, drawing flak from feminists and Lasch’s erstwhile friends on the Left. It received qualified support from some conservatives, who were otherwise antagonistic to his anti-capitalist principles. Reissued in 2018, this important work warrants a new look.
The Culture of Narcissism’s era now seems very distant. The Vietnam War had ended in American failure only four years earlier. Carter’s presidency was lurching toward its own failure in the midst of an energy crisis, soaring inflation and Cold War tensions. The Reagan revolution was yet to take the nation rightwards. A spirit of decline prevailed as the nation’s pride, confidence and optimism were under threat.
Lasch’s book gave this diminished condition a new diagnosis. The United States was in the grip of a narcissistic culture, a malign transformation of its individualist traditions. Whereas the individualist aspired to the Protestant virtues of self-reliance and self-discipline, the narcissist was self-absorbed and self-indulgent, seeking shallow sociability, pleasure and packaged self-awareness. Modern narcissists have a therapeutic sensibility, Lasch argued, seeing mental health as “the modern equivalent of salvation,” but they feel empty and inauthentic.