Notes From Blunder ground

CONSIDER THE parallel problems of faith which bedevil both Christians and Freudians. The two groups subscribe to systems of thought which account for the origin, present behavior, and likely end of all humanity. Both rely for guidance on assertive, highly-trained, and often pessimistic experts. The substantive teachings of both systems are found in a series of books allegedly linked by a single author and a single author and a single point of view. Those outside are discouraged from converting by evident discrepancies between theory and practice.

The Minimal Self, Christopher Lasch's book of all-over-the-page analysis and erudite grumbling, represents one such discrepancy. A sociologist by profession. Lasch made his reputation several years ago with The Culture of Narcissism. In that book as in this, he tries to explain modern life by generalizing from Freud's theories of personality to the condition of society as a whole. He argues that contemporary culture fosters narcissistic personalities. The discrepancy comes when Lasch, as a faithful son of Sigmund, attacks writers who do just what he is doing Criticizing Herbert Marcuse, a noted re-interpreter of psychoanalytic thought, Lasch claims that

... psychoanalysis offers "the most concrete least concerns itself with developing a general theory of culture and sticks instead to clinical concepts.

Lasch lays down this rule only after breaking it for over 230 pages of thoroughly repellent prose.

Lasch's book is an attempt to describe today's Everyman as "a minimal or narcisstic self". This psychological construct is "above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union."

However, the author means not merely to describe personality but to identify and to help solve its problems. The subtitle of his book is "psychic Survival in Troubled Times." Lasch wants to help people recover a mature and realistic sense of personality. For this task, Freud is not enough. The author drags in the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition as well when he asserts that genuine self-affirmation

remains a possibility precisely to the degree that an older conception of personality, rooted in Judaeo-Christian traditions, has persisted alongside a behavioral or therapeutc conception.

Evidently Lasch feels himself capable not only of a wild expansion of Freudian thought but also of taking on and combining the problems of faith and interpretation involved in both systems.

Lasch's work must be seen less as an individual effort than as a late and rather dull development in a very long tradition of American thought. Lasch belongs to that school of intellectuals which insists on understanding life from a theoretical point of view. This school is in the habit of frequently changing its textbooks; but the form of its message (as opposed to the matter) remains constant. Whether one is religious, Marxist, or Freudian (to take these texts in historical, perhaps hysterical order), one is in possession of the truth: the welfare of the rest of the country, whether it likes it or not, depends on its being enlightened, converted, and, afterwards, being helped to lead its new life. Any adulteration of or addition to the message is tolerable so long as it gets through and so long as the citizens acquire or confirm the habit of theoretical thinking. Thus Lasch, embarking on a psychoanalytic critique of American politics, economics, literature and art, stops long enough to tell us that our "salvation" must come from those nifty Judaeo-Christian habits which Freud's work has done so much to undermine.

The evident silliness of such messages aside, the danger of this school is that the too-systematic quest for an abstract goal can lead one from mere intellectual confusion to damnable, personal corruption. It is through such hunting, so often mistaken for the pursuit of happiness, that cultured or half religious people are transformed into mere snobs, feminists to shrews, athletes to books, and scientists to subversives. Lasch has metamorphosed from a would-be thinker into a rather loose writer.

Lasch claims that two basic personality types. Narcissus and Prometheus, are prototypical in Modern society. Both are variants of the lower-case narcissistic self, which is unable to accept its postnatal existence separate from nature. Narcissisus continually seeks to rejoin nature, while Prometheus tries to impose his infantile fantasies of omnipotence on it. So far so good.

But this observation immediately plunges Lasch into the difficult work of splitting infantile hairs. While the author agrees with scientists and industrialists that control over nature is a good thing, and with environmentalists that nature must be preserved (these two groups being loosely identified with Prometheus and Narcissus), he wants their actions to be motivated more by reality than by infantile fantasy. Lasch evidently fears right actions performed for the wrong reasons more than he fears wrong actions or their consequences. Psychologically, one supposes, this is typical and perhaps sound. However, from a practical, political, on ethical point of view, it seems impertinent.

If there is any grounds for picturing our present culture as one of narcissism, Lasch writes, "it is because that culture tends to favor regressive solutions instead of "evolutionary" solutions..." New ways of raising children and organizing families deprive people of old models of authority which, while inadequate, provided a resting place on the road to maturity. Therapy is being used, Lasch argues, not to help but to confuse and to take advantage of people; in the workplace, especially, psychological legerdemain is used to cloak management's lack of substantive responses to the needs of working people.

With the ego stalled in narcissistic confusion and therapy too garbled to help, reality fades quickly. An economy based on management and consumption rather than on production and entrepeneurism intensifies the problem. As workers, citizens know that a good image is more important than real work. As consumers, they are programmed to define themselves in terms of ever-changing products and commodities; they lose their sense of a permanent identity and of their lives as a narrative in the public world Lasch observes that:

What has weakened is not so much the structure of moral obligations and commandments as the belief in a world that survives its inhabitants.

Lasch's argument is undoubtedly attractive. Especially promising is his analysis of the ways in which therapy obscures questions of economic justice. However, Lasch supports his argument more with literary, intellectual, and emotional evidence than with material suggestive of social reality; his book seems more the handiwork of an individual mind than a vital analysis of the way people live. In the question of therapy and justice, for instance. Lasch is limited to a citation or two from business school texts on how psychology can be used to manipulate employees; he suggest and asserts rather than develops his case. On other questions, Lasch moves, in arguments of variable strength, towards a complete articulation at which he never arrives. One is left with the frustrating feeling that Lasch has not grasped the nature of the most important questions he faces or considered his ability to treat them in a book of this kind.

Lasch's discussion of contemporary emotional life, while apt, is under whelming. He notes that "the contemporary survival mentality...turns from public questions" This statement, while accurate, does not consider the American tradition of shrugging off public life as unimportant or as already hopeless. Implying that he is dealing with a new phenomenon, Lasch skirts the issue of historical depth. He is justly disturbed by the fact that the language and imagery of concentration camps has penetrated ordinary life. He thinks that to emphasize survivial alone and to reject self-sacrifice is despicable. But this judgement is qualified by his concession that "Contemporary politics to be sure, provides an substance of realistic reasons for regarding sacrifice in this light." He agrees with the goals of the antiwar and environmental movements, but feels that they "appeal to some of the worst impulses in contemporary culture." Here one is tempted to conclude that Lasch is putting the mere survival of his own argument ahead of all the particular qualities--clarity is one of them-which make it worthwhile.

Lasch's case against Promethean technology is surprising in its detail but unconvincing on the whole. He suggests that technology has provided us with so many choices as consumers that choices no longer have consequences or indeed meaning: "the freedom to choose amounts in practice to an abstention from choice." This seems doubtful. Are we, in fact, dying as a nation, as a culture, or as individuals from a surfeit of technological riches? Perhaps death from such causes is more common in Lasch's circle than in one's own. Perhaps, indeed, Lasch's acquaintances perish under the stress of the suggestion that industrial technology may jeopardize our political system. Lasch darkly intones that

it is precisely the democratizing effects of industrial technology that can no longer be taken for granted. If this technology reduces some of the drudgery of housekeeping, it also renders the housekeeper dependent on machinery--not merely the automatic washer and dryer but the elaborate energy system required to run these and in-numerable other appliances--the breakdown of which brings housekeeping to a halt.

The idea that one may find Prometheus chained to the dryer in a local laundromat, with the culture picking his brains as to which soda is better, is certainly droll; but it seems less an analysis of modern technology than a too plausible suggestion for Harvard's decadent undergraduate theater.

Lasch's remarks on literature seem in some respects closer to the mark. He complains that

Modernism, a movement that once thrived on shock, has become as predictable in its negativism as Victorianism, at its worst, was predictable in its moral optimism and uplift.

Trapped in a narcisstic solipsism, of which inner monologue is the essential expression. "The best writing today has the effect of removing history from the realm of moral judgments."

But certainly Lasch is wrong when he asserts that the realistic novel has been deprived of its usual targets: "hypocrisy, pomposity, misguided idealism, self-deception." The best novelists at work today, most notably the British, have satirized Freudian idealists and fools as ruthlessly as they attacked all the older stupidities. Lasch, however, might not find this literature entirely to his taste: a recurrent suggestion in these works is that the attempt to mix "modernist" with "traditionalist" values is at best messy and funny and at worst misguided and fatal. Iris Murdoch, to name only the most intelligent of these writers, has made a career of throwing Plato, Christ and Freud together like roosters in a ring.

The most interesting (and also the most convoluted) section of The Minimal Self is the conclusion, which deals with politics. Lasch examines and rejects positions he describes as analagous to liberalism and conservatism, instead suggesting a more sound third position through an insinuatingly critical summary of post-Freudian attempts to explain modern politics. The argument is weak end have by Lasch's refusal to state exactly what he means by liberalism or conservatism, and by his failure to articulate his own views. The best part of this section is the author's observation that the standard liberal dogmas of environmentalism, egalitarianism, and social engineering culminate in the politically unacceptable ideas and work of B.F. Skinner. Though Lasch does not develop the implications of this remark, this observation suggests a plausible way to apprehend the importance of Lasch's whole enterprise.

Lasch grasps that Skinner, having developed certain ideas as fully as he could, has reached some limit at which many Americans balk, but he overlooks the possible implications of this development. Most of Lasch's thought deals with correcting people who take Freud as their starting points; clinging to Freud as to the truth he neglects, except to dismiss, critics and rivals of psychoanalysis. Referring to Skinner's ideas as unacceptable "dogma," he dismisses them as politically unfeasible and ignores the question of their psychological validity.

This is typical treatment, but it has a sad result. It prevents Lasch from considering that Skinner's case perhaps exemplifies the universal tendency of the unsupervised intellect to create systems and products which are useless, in jurious, or unacceptable to mere human its. Though it is heresy in some circles to suggest it, the proper as well as the actual test of ideas may prove to be their political usefulness and social acceptability not their academic popularity.

With disarming intellectual and political innocence, Lasch writes on the teleogical assumption that the intellect is naturally suited for the ends to which modernist in tellectuals most often put it. He translates the misguided American trust in the innocence and perfectibility of nature into the goodness and universal applicability of rationality. His faith in this faculty is so strong that he overlooks the disadvantages of his genre. Lasch cannot explore the questions he raises nearly as well as novelists can. Nor can he, in contrast to the religious or ethical writer, and to politicians of all varieties, even pretend to settle an aspect of such issues. I his particular view of the intellect makes it an idol which must be smashed--even if, given the contradictions in Lasch's arguments, it is a very shabby god indeed.

Finally, we must recognize in Lasch that terrifying phenomenon, the after-dinner monomaniac--a specimen who could, by stricter regulation of dangerous technology, be kept from the typewriter entirely. He is the sort of talker, so family in the horror-pitted fields of family life, on whom one vomited at three years, old, listened to at seven, and ignored at ten. Does Lasch find it easy to lead a psychologically sound and theoretically consistent life? Or has he found, on the contrary, that humility, intellectual generosity, and a too-fitful wisdom keep breaking in?