On Narcissism

Well, as the Lord's providence would have it, as found an absolute treasure in a Newtown 2nd hand bookstore today! It's a book by Christopher Lasch I've heard good things about entitled: The Culture of Narcissism.

In it, he draws two important distinctions: 1) a distinction between the clinical condition of narcissism and the cultural condition of narcissism, and b) a line of distinction between the all-time human condition of selfishness (which I would root in a condition called sin!), and the modern cultural condition of narcissism.

I really believe that this is a serious problem today, and it's that it's important to read the culture today in order to speak truth to it. So, here we go with a few quotes:

"A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future." (Preface)

"To live for the moment is the prevailing passion -- to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity." (pg 5)

"'Love' as self-sacrifice or self-abasement, 'meaning' as submission to a higher loyalty - these sublimations strike the therapeutic sensibility as intolerable oppressive, offensive to common sense and injurous to personal health and well-being." (pg13)

"The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers. The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the 'herd', and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence." (pg 21)

"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 psychriatic label." (pg 32)

"In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Its 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively to the malaise of industrial civilization. Is your job boring and meaningless? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void; hence the attempt to surround the commodities with an aura of romance..." (pg 72,73)

"Because the narcissist has so few inner resources, he looks to others to validate his sense of self. He needs to be admired for his beauty, charm, celebrity, or power -- attributes that usually fade with time. Unable to achieve satisfying sublimations in the form of love and work, he finds that he has little to sustain him when youth passes him by." (pg210)

"The best hope of emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in a recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in a recognition of others not as projections of our own desires but as independent being with desires of their own. More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits." (pg242)

Again, I do want to stress that this is something which Christians should take seriously. Why? Well because we want to share the good news of the one who can restore relation to the ultimate Other, the others around us, the self within, and the other world in which we live. This post is coming!