Skip to main content

A Review Essay on Narcissism

Two new books about narcissism are getting some play in the press of late. Jeffrey Kluger's THE NARCISSIST NEXT DOOR comes to us from Riverhead Books. The other, THE AMERICANIZATION OF NARCISSISM by Elizabeth Lunbeck, hails from Harvard Un. Press.

Kluger, a science writer with TIME, wants to warn and forearm readers about the potential "monsters" in their own lives -- families, workplaces, neighborhoods. He also invokes such pop-cult examples as Donald Trump, who he says has the "insatiable hunger to be the largest, loudest, most honkingly conspicuous presence in any room."

Lunbeck. a professor of history at Vanderbilt, seems to want to take Christopher Lasch down a peg. It was Lasch who wrote THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM (1979), and Lunbeck says that Lasch's treatment of the term has made narcissism a cliché, "a highfalutin name for the old-fashioned complaint that modernity means a loosening of restraint."

I'm looking at this moment at a review essay by Laura Kipnis, whose black-and-white image adorns this blog post. Kipnis discusses both Lunbeck's and Kluger's book, in the August issue of HARPER'S. She discusses much else too, including a matter of Harvard dorm room assignment. [Christopher Lasch and future novelist John Updike roomed together at Harvard in the 1950s. Lasch gradually accepted the view that his roommate was the more talented writer of the room, and re-jiggered his own ambitions away from fiction toward history.]

Yet, Kipnis tells us, Lasch remained a novelist at heart, and the prototypical "narcissist" he discusses in his famous 1979 book is a literary character more than a diagnosis. It describes a narcissist as depression-prone, anxious, unable to maintain stable relationships with other human beings, an insomniac, and as a creature who must oscillate between a calculated pose of seduction and the nervous laughter of self deprecation. This makes him "one of the great characters of twentieth-century literature" [outdoing the characters invented by Lasch's old roommate?] but it doesn't make Lasch an accurate social critic.

Indeed, both Lunbeck and Kipnis believe that Lasch got a lot wrong, and that his influence has been baleful. But they make this point from different directions. Kipnis thinks the whole concept of narcissism is dangerously vague and needs reworking. Lunbeck believes on the other hand, that the concept as wielded for example by Austrian-born psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut in THE ANALYSIS OF THE SELF (1971)  is germane -- Lasch simply didn't understand it. Lasch wrote for example as if narcissism is necessarily a bad thing, editing out Kohut's views on the healthy aspects of narcissism, Lunbeck scores against him on this.

Kipnis, for her part, scores against Kluger for failing even to mention Lasch, although plainly laboring under his influence.














Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak