Narcissism and Its Discontents

Ellen Herman

Reviews in American History, Volume 43, Number 4, December 2015, pp.

723-728 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2015.0105

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 NARCISSISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Ellen Herman

Elizabeth Lunbeck. The Americanization of Narcissism. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 2014. 384 pp. Notes and index. $35.00.

Christopher Lasch began his famous 1979 lament, The Culture of Narcissism, by
defending history as “a political and psychological treasury from which we
draw the reserves . . . that we need to cope with the future.” It was the end
of the “me decade,” and, according to Lasch, disdain for the past was visible
everywhere. “The waning of the sense of historical time” was symptomatic
of a crisis that had traded the serious business of political engagement for
the trivialities of self-awareness and improvement. Therapeutic quests, from
the professionalization of mental health to social movements like feminism
and gay liberation, were disturbing signs of “diminishing expectations,” a
term that summarized Lasch’s declension narrative while suggesting that
self-absorption was a thinly disguised form of emotional impoverishment,
psychological desperation, and abandonment of the higher expectations that
had prevailed in the past. To celebrate authenticity and explore new realms of
personal expression was to embrace promises at once fraudulent and danger-
ous. The problem with Americans was that they had too many choices. With-
out the moral compass provided by a firm tether to posterity, Lasch argued,
abundance loosened restraint and demeaned social bonds between parents
and children, husbands and wives, teachers and students, and democratic
citizens and government. More was definitely less.
In her brilliant new book, Elizabeth Lunbeck takes on Lasch directly, along
with a gaggle of other mid-century social critics who were equally dismayed
by the excesses of modern mass consumption, the 1960s counterculture, and
the sexual revolution. Her goal is to reveal the serious historical misunder-
standings of psychoanalysis at the heart of the narcissism debate, along with
the gendered assumptions that infused and distorted its approach to human
development and well-being. The book does two things simultaneously: it
excavates the shaky foundations of social criticism in the 1970s, arguing that
such criticism ignored intellectual traditions that treated narcissism as neces-
sary to psychological health; and it retells the story of the “psychoanalytic
century.” Lunbeck’s exploration is original, bracing, and extremely illuminat-

Reviews in American History 43 (2015) 723–728 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press
724 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / DECEMBER 2015

ing—a remarkable feat considering the torrent of words devoted to Freud in

the United States and to mid-century critics like Christopher Lasch, William
Whyte, Daniel Bell, David Reisman, and Philip Rieff. The Americanization of
Narcissism is feisty and provocative. It is also a careful, nuanced, and deeply
researched examination of the confusing concept of narcissism and its strange
career in popular culture and the history of psychoanalysis.
Social critics like Lasch warned that the “affluent society” of the early Cold
War decades had provoked a spiral of insatiable desire among members of
the baby boom. Coddled by permissive parents and raised on a diet of sicken-
ing commodities and shallow consumer experiences, from sugary breakfast
cereals to rock concerts, Americans who came of age during the long 1960s
cast aside personal inhibitions in the name of liberation. Their reward was
to be swept away on a tidal wave of narcissism. This narcissism was evident
not only in clinicians’ overcrowded offices, but in shocking rates of juvenile
delinquency, consumer debt, and hedonistic sexuality, not to mention scorn
for history and authority.
The social critics of the 1970s were influential for the same reason that earlier
critics of modernity had been influential. There was something very persuasive
about their ideas. They linked large economic and political developments—the
consolidation of corporate capitalism and the rise of the administrative and
welfare states after the Civil War—to new ideas about childhood and child
rearing, kinship’s changing shape and functions, and the observation that
modernity delivered large doses of alienation and disorientation. The rapid
increase in the scale of corporate power and public bureaucracy during the
first half of the twentieth century posed real challenges for workers, parents,
and citizens, and it raised serious questions about how individualism could
survive in an age of mass organizations. Critics of mass consumption such
as Lasch had no patience for exploring the pleasures that consumers might
seek in their possessions or the freedoms they might find in the newly com-
modified experiences available to them. For “me decade” critics, the market
offered only bogus comforts. Its expansion was synonymous with increasing
materialism, and increasing materialism was synonymous with increasing
selfishness. Economic growth and abundance lurked behind the epidemic of
narcissistic personalities.
The fact that Lasch and others despised psychobabble and blamed thera-
peutic practices for undermining American self-control did not prevent them
from relying heavily on the theorist widely considered to be the chief architect
of therapeutic culture: Sigmund Freud. They drew especially on his tragic
argument in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): that social order required
repression, which inevitably thwarted human happiness. For Lasch and the
others, psychological and political maturity meant confronting this bitter re-
ality with a stoicism and discipline that can only be described as manly. The
HERMAN / Narcissism and Its Discontents 725

conversation about narcissism in the 1970s, Lunbeck bluntly points out, sys-
tematically identified all things therapeutic with all things feminine, equating
states of need and dependence with women and accusing women of eroding
civic responsibility, compassion, and other public virtues that directed atten-
tion to the world beyond the self.
The sexist biases of 1970s social criticism had a long history. In a terrific
chapter on “self-love,” Lunbeck probes Freud’s famous infatuations and pas-
sionate intimacies with male colleagues, including Wilhelm Fliess, Sándor
Ferenczi, and Carl Jung. These extensively documented relationships illus-
trate that his own need for other men’s affection and approval was the kind
of dependence that really bothered Freud. Seeking gratification from other
men made self-love blur into homoeroticism and masturbation into explicit
homosexuality—transgressive associations that Freud described forthrightly
and that would also shadow narcissism throughout its twisted history. In
contrast, Freud’s relationship to the army of women who made his career
possible, from his wife Martha and daughter Anna to domestic servants and
close female colleagues, naturalized women’s caring labor so seamlessly
that there was no reason at all to contemplate his dependence on them or to
find it in any way troubling. It was simply expected that nurturing women
who cooked, cleaned, and raised his children would allow Freud to write,
travel, and treat patients. Even as these women toiled away, Freud mused
frequently about women’s passivity, dependence, and the narcissistic vanity
that prompted them to attract attention to themselves through clothing and
physical display. In the early twentieth century, the belief that women were
inclined, by nature, to both manifest and meet basic human needs was so
pervasive as to be unremarkable.
By the 1970s, however, this was no longer so. Feminists were systematically
probing the gender division of labor, contesting the attribution of distinctive
psychologies to men and women, and articulating bold new conceptions of
gender equality in law and in life. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that
so few feminists have weighed in on the “me decade” debate, especially con-
sidering that complaints about narcissism were also complaints about unruly
women whose determination to move beyond the family yielded little for
them and less for children. The ironic inversion through which Lasch made
masculine independence the precondition for social cohesion, while feminine
caretaking supposedly nourished irresponsibility and bad behavior, is not
lost on Lunbeck.
Lunbeck points out repeatedly that the kind of “self-sovereignty” that social
critics revered and mourned not only equated individuality with masculinity
but implied an individuality so radically separate as to be virtually autistic.
Theirs was “an unrealizable fantasy of independence and autonomy that
serves as foil to the modern’s purported neediness and enmeshment,” she
726 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / DECEMBER 2015

concludes. “This popular strain of commentary is nothing but the narcissism

of the theorist, revealing his desire to inhabit a persona without needs and
attachments” (p. 271).
It is perhaps unsurprising that the developmental syndrome we now call
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was first codified in the Diagnostic and Sta-
tistical Manual in 1980, the year after Lasch’s book was published. From its
beginnings, autism was noted in children whose emotional and interpersonal
experiences appeared remote, solitary, and cut off, and were therefore not really
emotional and interpersonal at all. Autism has always been diagnosed much
more frequently in boys and men than in girls and women, a pattern that
indicates the uncomfortable proximity between gender conventions and the
self-sovereignty that Lunbeck rejects as delusional. One recent theory, popu-
larized by British researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, is that autism amounts to a
highly concentrated version of masculinity, denoting “an extreme male brain.”
If the chief error of the 1970s’ narcissism debate was to define that concept
wholly in terms of pathology, and pathology largely in terms of feminization,
Lunbeck argues that the same cannot be said about the narcissism debate that
had taken place among psychoanalysts. Havelock Ellis, the pioneering British
sexologist, is usually credited with coining the term “narcissism” in 1898, but
members of the psychoanalytic community embraced narcissism as a key term
from the start. They made it central to their quest to understand the dizzying
array of deviations that characterized so-called normal human psychology. In
1914, Freud interpreted narcissism as both a “perversion” indelibly linked to
homosexuality and an expression of the normal instinct for self-preservation
present in “every living creature.” He described the newborn’s state of “primary
narcissism” as one in which “His Majesty the Baby” imperiously imagined
himself all-powerful, a subjective state no less real for being directly at odds
with the objective state of dependence in which all infants lived.
Freud’s colleagues and followers faithfully pursued the narcissism question
during the following decades. Paul Federn used the term “healthy narcissism”
in the 1930s, and theorists including Sándor Rádo, Otto Finichel, Joan Riviere,
and Annie Reich considered how narcissism was implicated in the practices
of self-scrutiny that accompanied normal human development. By the time
the “me decade” of the 1970s rolled around, however, this intellectual tradi-
tion had been obscured and marginalized. The fit between narcissism and
pathology was so tight that it was difficult to discern any avenue, even within
psychoanalysis, through which narcissism might be rehabilitated.
That is when Heinz Kohut, the hero of Lunbeck’s story, enters the picture.
A Viennese-born psychoanalyst whose American career unfolded in Chicago,
Kohut pioneered a brand of self-psychology in the 1960s and 1970s. His ac-
complishment, which Lunbeck argues revolutionized psychoanalysis, was
to diminish the power of drives and normalize narcissism by carving out a
HERMAN / Narcissism and Its Discontents 727

legitimate place for gratification in healthy self-regard and relationships. The

“Americanization” of Lunbeck’s title refers to Kohut’s ultimately victorious
project: enshrining concern for self alongside concern for others in the defini-
tion of psychological well-being and happiness. Unlike Lasch and his allies,
who worried that economic change and consumer culture had weakened the
American character, the economy that interested Kohut was an internal and
emotional one in which enduring needs and desires were necessarily satisfied
by people rather than things.
As even a passing acquaintance with psychoanalysis suggests, the Freudian
story of development wove relationships into the fabric of every developing
self. Many psychoanalysts called these “objects,” which explains why “object
relations” theorists at mid-century held that early life relationships, especially
between mothers and infants, became central, permanent features of the
child’s developing personality. “Selfobjects” was the term that Kohut used to
describe how we invariably experience others (generous, stingy, disapproving,
loving) as parts of our selves. For most psychoanalysts, these relationships,
vital and dynamic within each individual, constituted the real meanings of
supply and demand. Fortunate babies had parents who met their demands
with satisfactory emotional supplies, while others experienced degrees of
deprivation and frustration. In comparison to this interior economy, tangible
goods and commercial exchange paled. For Kohut and his followers, the ap-
propriate response to narcissism was sustained empathy and interpersonal
support, not condemnation or austerity.
At the same time as Kohut, Otto Kernberg upheld the opposite tradition
within psychoanalysis, highlighting the pathological dimensions of narcissism.
Kernberg was another Viennese psychoanalyst who came to the United States,
by way of Chile, in 1961. His work on narcissism coincided with the polemics
against the “me decade,” and critics, including Lasch, constantly referenced
his work to support their own. According to Lunbeck, they misunderstood
Kernberg, just as they misunderstood Kohut and earlier psychoanalytic think-
ers. Kernberg’s clinical approach emphasized directly confronting narcissists
in treatment, where their rage could be exposed as the product of intense
loneliness and scarcity, rather than abundance, and where emotional provision
might begin to fill the emptiness.
While he conceded that narcissism could be severely debilitating, Kernberg’s
narcissism was not the widespread cultural phenomenon that so alarmed
social critics. It was a relatively rare clinical condition that deserved skilled
treatment, and Kernberg disagreed that economic developments had anything
much to do with creating it. Throughout her book, Lunbeck presents Kohut
and Kernberg as exemplars of dueling psychoanalytic traditions on narcis-
sism; but they were united in their conviction that the quality of early life
relationships was psychologically momentous, even determining. The social
728 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / DECEMBER 2015

changes and cultural shifts of the postwar era that animated social critics like
Lasch could, for Kohut and Kernberg, neither explain narcissism’s origins nor
suggest any meaningful cure.
Lunbeck joins other distinguished scholars who have seen in the Freudian
intellectual tradition a precious if paradoxical resource for feminism. From
Gayle Rubin’s 1975 “The Traffic in Women”1 and Nancy Chodorow’s The Re-
production of Mothering (1978) to Mari Jo Buhle’s Feminism and Its Discontents
(1998), leading feminist intellectuals have wrestled with Freud’s complex
legacy. In my view, it is Lunbeck who has heeded Christopher Lasch’s call to
treat history as a source of knowledge and faith, even as she has taken him
sharply to task for his nostalgic longings. For decades, feminist historians
have produced mountains of empirical evidence that cast grave doubt on the
existence of earlier social worlds in which relationships between men and
women were stable, reciprocal, and untroubled by the injustices of our own
sex/gender revolution.
The Americanization of Narcissism adds enormously to our understanding
of narcissism, psychoanalysis, and the style of social criticism that Lasch
represents. Lunbeck meticulously recovers an important historical debate,
compiling its details, as only the most gifted historians can, into insights that
are fascinating, important, and truly original. Hers is a fierce voice, deeply
engaged, never wistful. In the book’s conclusion, Lunbeck notes that, by the
1980s, the vast majority of teenagers reported agreeing with the statement, “I
am an important person,” whereas only a tiny minority had done so in the
1950s. Doing justice to history, for Lunbeck, requires that we consider such
facts thoughtfully, without treating signs of enhanced personal regard as proof
positive that social order is in decline. By making the case that self-love is
compatible with and, indeed, a necessary component of social concern, and by
showing that it has deep roots in psychoanalysis, Lunbeck offers an overdue
rejoinder to Lasch and anyone who defines historical consciousness as grief
for lost worlds that never were.

Ellen Herman is professor of history and faculty co-director, Wayne Morse

Center for Law and Politics, University of Oregon. Her most recent book is
Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States (2008). Her
current research is on the history of autism.

1. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in
Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (1975), 157–210.