The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times by Christopher Lasch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Problem With Survival

Christopher Lasch was an intellectual hero of my youth. He was, in my still to be formed mind, a synthesizer of all the social thought that mattered. From psychology to politics, from technology to sociology, he seemed to have assimilated everything that was known about modern society and he re-formulated that knowledge with astounding skill, grace and judgment. Even so, reading him now after half a century, I find that I probably underestimated his thinking as much as I overestimated my ability to understand its implications.

The Minimal Self was written in the early 1980’s, a pivotal point in the cultural and political life of America. Greed was good. Communism was bad. Reagonomics reigned. And Americans were paranoid - certainly not for the first time but in a manner that was signally more desperate after their defeat in Vietnam, in the midst of profound economic woes and racial tension, and with a general feeling of being unable to control their lives. In a word, used by Lasch, the country was beleaguered.

Like the Boers in South Africa, Americans hunkered down. The national ethos became one of resistance - to ‘non-traditional values’, to economic and military challenges from elsewhere, but mostly resistance to itself. Its fear of what it might become in a future over which its influence was questionable had a dramatic change on its politics that few but Lasch noticed: an obsession with survival. Survival of a ‘way of life’, survival of the environment, survival of institutions like the family, survival of ‘democratic freedoms’. America had adopted a sort of “siege mentality,” the consequences of which wouldn’t be visible for decades as it persisted, festered and matured.

Politically, America had reached a pivotal ideological and cultural point: “The hope that political action will gradually humanize industrial society has given way to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” Lasch diagnosed this condition as a sort of national narcissism. Narcissism is not the equivalent of selfishness or egotism but a “confusion of the self and the not-self.”

“The minimal or narcissistic self is”, Lasch says, “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.” The narcissist inhabits a world of struggling fantasy, discovering and fighting battles against the world in general. Illusion is the narcissist’s life-blood. He (and I suppose she) strives continually to “attempt to restore narcissistic illusions of omnipotence.” Crucially the narcissist has no ideal as an end point of such striving, no vision, no strategy; merely the objective of being in control.

It is inevitable that one encounters Trump in this description of the emerging personality of America. Lasch also spots the Promethean pretense inherent in Trump’s Make America Great Again. This is a pretense because it masks profound feelings of inadequacy: “...narcissism...[is] a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires—not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs.”

Narcissism is not functional, either for an individual or a nation. It is ultimately destructive: “It seeks both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation.” The survivalist living in the Montana mountains, the racists provoking conflict wherever they can, the resentful rural folk who feel by-passed by what they perceive as urban-centrism, the nihilist electorate which doesn’t quite know what they want politically but it isn’t ‘this’, along with Trump himself are quite prepared to destroy American society in order to dominate it. This is the profound meaning of the ‘We don’t care’ response of his supporters to his increasingly clear mendacity, criminal associations, and incompetence.

The Trumpians are indeed driven by a passion. But this passion is not directed to anything in particular, not even the improvement of their own economic or political status much less that of the nation. According to Lasch: “Narcissism signifies a loss of selfhood, not self-assertion. It refers to a self threatened with disintegration and by a sense of inner emptiness. To avoid confusion, what I have called the culture of narcissism might better be characterized, at least for the moment, as a culture of survivalism.” Trump’s narcissism has led him just the point he wants to be - on the edge of survival. And he’s doing his best to put the rest of the world there as well.

Many parts of Lasch read like they were written yesterday not decades ago. He is sage in a manner that seems to have been largely lost among more recent social critics. I find him inspirational as well as astute. One could do worse, therefore, than to revisit Lasch and his frightenly prescient work today. I intend to, and recommend him highly to others.

Postscript 17Sept18: here is an analysis that also traces the problem back to the Reagan years in a rather interesting way: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/americ...

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