Book Notices

THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM. By Christopher Lasch. New York: Norton, 1978, 268 pp., $11.95.

It has become commonplace to label the culture of the seventies "narcissistic." Narcissism replaced "alienation" as the fashionable label for the people, trends, and events of the decade. No other word captured its bewildering diversity; the breakdown of the family, schools that fail to teach, stagflation in the economy, and the proliferation of self-indulgent "life styles." People seemed absorbed in themselves and uninterested in the causes that gripped the feverish sixties. The present infatuation with the word, however, might seem somewhat surprising. At a time when major news magazines publish a new refutation of Freud every week, the same publications adopt, usually without crediting him, a concept he adumbrated well over sixty years ago. Certainly Freud would be no happier with the heavy-handed moralizing associated with much of the current writing about narcissism than he was with the earlier propaganda for sexual liberation which so many read into his work. Nor would he have liked the way narcissism is used loosely to mean selfishness as once alienation was equated with disaffection. It is to his credit that Christopher Lasch, author of the surprisingly popular The Culture of Narcissism, recognizes the danger inherent in appropriating technical terms for polemical purposes: "Unless we are content to moralize under the cover of psychiatric jargon…we need to use [narcissism] more rigorously than it is used in popular social criticism and with an awareness of its clinical implications." While applauding the sentiment, we wonder how well Lasch has followed his own advice.

Lasch, an eminent historian at the University of Rochester, has combined intellectual history and social criticism before. In Haven in a Heartless World, psychoanalytic concepts are central to his critical analysis. He faults social scientists for presenting a falsely optimistic picture of the