Summary of Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The end of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the belief that many other things are ending too. The Nazi holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the depletion of natural resources, and well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have all fulfilled poetic prophecy.
#2 The prevailing passion of today is to live for the moment, to live for yourself rather than for your predecessors or posterity. We are losing the sense of historical time, and this distinction is what makes the contemporary cultural revolution so different from previous outbreaks of millenarian religion.
#3 The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, but for the feeling of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.
#4 The Weathermen, and the American culture that produced them, were a product of their time. They were a mix of violence, danger, drugs, sexual promiscuity, and moral and psychic chaos.

Sujets

• Personality disorder
• Psychopathology
• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669382072
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The end of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the belief that many other things are ending too. The Nazi holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the depletion of natural resources, and well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have all fulfilled poetic prophecy.

#2

The prevailing passion of today is to live for the moment, to live for yourself rather than for your predecessors or posterity. We are losing the sense of historical time, and this distinction is what makes the contemporary cultural revolution so different from previous outbreaks of millenarian religion.

#3

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, but for the feeling of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.

#4

The Weathermen, and the American culture that produced them, were a product of their time. They were a mix of violence, danger, drugs, sexual promiscuity, and moral and psychic chaos.

#5

The 1970s were marked by the rise of narcissism in American culture. The world is a mirror for the narcissist, who depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience.

#6

In the nineteenth century, the American imagination was captured by the promise and threat of an escape from the past. The West represented an opportunity to build a new society unencumbered by feudal inhibitions, but it also tempted men to throw off civilization and revert to savagery.

#7

The growth of bureaucracy creates an intricate network of personal relationships, and it makes the unbridled egotism of the American Adam untenable. Meanwhile, it erodes all forms of patriarchal authority and weakens the social superego.

#8

Modern society has no future, and thus no sense of obligation or duty beyond the present. The therapeutic sensibility reflects this mindset, and thus encourages patients to sacrifice their needs and interests for those of others.

#9

Rubin’s memoir describes the positive effects of his therapeutic regimen. He lost weight, and health foods, jogging, yoga, sauna baths, chiropractors, and acupuncturists helped him feel young at age thirty-seven. He learned to put sex in its proper place and to enjoy it without investing it with symbolic meaning.

#10

The new left, unlike the old left, did address the issue of personal crisis, and in the brief period of its flourishing in the mid-sixties, began to explore the connections between culture and politics.

#11

The popularity of the confessional mode testifies to the new narcissism that runs through American culture. The act of writing already requires a certain detachment from the self, and the objectification of one’s own experience makes it possible for the deep sources of grandiosity and exhibitionism to find access to reality.

#12

The confessional form allows an honest writer like Exley or Zweig to provide a harrowing account of the spiritual desolation of our times, but it also allows a lazy writer to indulge in the kind of immodest self-revelation which ultimately hides more than it admits.

#13

The unreliable, partially blinded narrator is another literary device that has been used for a long time in literature. In modern writing, however, the author warns the reader that his version of the truth is not to be trusted.

#14

The media have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers. The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, and make it more and more difficult for the average man to accept the banality of everyday existence.

#15

The man of ordinary abilities tries to warm himself in the reflected glow of the stars. He tries to vicariously experience the fame and prestige that others have because he believes that proximity to these people will bring him luck.

#16

The inner hunger that leads to drug and fantasy consumption is never satisfied. Personal relations founded on reflected glory and the need to be admired are ultimately insubstantial.

#17

The preoccupation with the self that defines the moral climate of contemporary society stems from the search for self-fulfillment. The conquest of nature and the search for new frontiers have given way to the search for self-fulfillment.

#18

The new therapies are expensive, and because they are often for the rich, Schur assumes that they only concern issues that are trivial and unimportant to the poor.

#19

The American consciousness movement, which stems from a desire to address personal issues, actually provides self-defeating solutions. It advises people not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependence on others, and to live for the moment.

#20

Sennett’s argument that politics has become a matter of self-realization is too simplistic. While men have never perceived their interests with perfect clarity, they have always projected aspects of themselves into the political realm, and this has always been the case.

#21

Sennett’s book shares the same ideology as the Tocquevillian, pluralistic tradition from which it evidently derives. It exalts bourgeois liberalism as the only civilized form of political life and public discourse, and dismisses all attempts to go beyond liberalism as the politics of narcissism.

#22

The apocalyptic imagination is endemic to modernism, and it can be seen in the current belief in the futility of political solutions and the inadequate response to disaster that is so characteristic of our age.

#23

The superego, society’s agent in the mind, is made up of internalized representations of parents and other authorities, but it is important to distinguish between those representations which derive from pre-Oedipal impressions and those based on later impressions and reflecting a more realistic assessment of parental powers.