Enough About You

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When Christopher Lasch’s landmark book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was first published in 1979, narcissism was not a term with much popular currency. The book played a large role in changing that, and in the decades since its publication the wide-ranging cultural critique at its core has been embraced by conservatives and liberals alike. While there are sections of The Culture of Narcissism that now seem dated—or at least a product of their time—much of the material in the original edition is so spot-on and even prophetic that it could have been written this year. What follows is a general sampling of particularly timely or prescient passages from a book that has become a sort of Silent Spring of America’s psychological journey inward. —The Editors

This book describes a way of life that is dying—the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.

Economic man . . . has given way to the psychological man of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism. The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. His sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos brings him no sexual peace. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of 19th-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.

Storm warnings, portents, hints of catastrophe haunt our times. The Nazi holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the depletion of natural resources, well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have fulfilled poetic prophecy, giving concrete historical substance to the nightmare, or death wish, that avant-garde artists were the first to express. Impending disaster has become an everyday concern, so commonplace and familiar that nobody any longer gives much thought to how disaster might be averted. People busy themselves instead with survival strategies, measures designed to prolong their own lives, or programs guaranteed to ensure good health and peace of mind.