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The interesting acceptance of an argument that will not work in Christopher Lasch's (1978) The Culture of Narcissism deserves some comment. Such an eager desire to label our social experience, and finally ourselves, in terms of a particularly unattractive psychiatric diagnosis and with a term carrying such a heavy baggage of cultural disapproval, is a peculiar phenomenon. It may be a typically American phenomenon, actually, this emphasis on self-doubt and self-flagellation, one of our genuine American traditions. It may also be a peculiar media fad or event, another increasingly common phenomenon. After all, Tom Wolfe, without benefit of psychoanalysis, created the Me Generation fashion, and the New Year decade summation of the New York Times was liberally sprinkled with reference to narcissistic preoccupation. It is tempting to ask why we're so enthusiastically beating ourselves, but to do so would repeat one of the fundamental flaws in the culture of narcissism argument which I hope to demonstrate, simply replacing “narcissism” with “masochism.” The temptation, however, is very strong.
Rather than succumbing, let me spell out what's wrong with Lasch's conceptual moves. Descriptively, Lasch wants to use the psychiatric pathological narcissism model as something of an analogue to a cultural trend of the late 60s and early 70s. He sees what he describes as a growing psychiatric concern with narcissism as indicative of the growing cultural phenomenon of a somehow similar