The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. By Christopher Lasch. New York:  W.W. Norton and Co., 1978,  268 pp.

In his most recent book, the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch has written a most interesting analysis of modern American society. The title of the book carries a double meaning, referring to our narcissistic culture as well as to the social medium in which it was cultivated. The author addresses himself to a wide ranging descriptive analysis of contemporary culture and to a general consideration the “etiology of narcissism.” In the process, he poses an interesting historical question: why has narcissim emerged so insistently now, in our time? He urges “historical specificity” and writes that:

change in personality structure… derives from quite specific changes in our society and culture—from bureaucracy, the proliferating of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of inner life, the cult of consumption, and in the last analysis from changes in family life and from changing patterns of socialization.

In the course of his exposition, he covers these complex contemporary issues competently and knowingly. But the underlying issue of whether it is simply that the culture is making man narcissistic or whether man's narcissism is becoming manifest in the corporate body—the culture—is not addressed. (It is assumed that the former is