The Culture of Narcissism
American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
Christopher Lasch
Quotations reprinted without permission from the Norton Edition
"The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to
inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life.
Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of
his own existence. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, he finds little use
for dogmas of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the
security of group loyalties and regards eveyone as a rival for the favors
conferred by a paternalistic state. His sexual attitudes are permissive
rather than puritanical, even though his emancipation from ancient taboos
brings him no sexual peace. Fiercely competitive in his demand for approval
and acclaim, he distrusts competition because he associates it
unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. Hence he repudiates the
competitive ideologies that flourished at an earlier stage of capitalist
development and distrusts even their limited expression in sports and
games. He extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial
impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief
that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his
cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions
against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of
nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification
and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire."
"She imagined herself an avenging Fury, an Amazon, a Walküre. On the
wall of her house, she painted `an eight-foot-tall nude woman with flowing
green-blond hair, and a burning American flag coming out of her cunt!' In
her `acid frenzy,' she says, she `had painted what I wanted to be somewhere
deep in my mind; tall and blond, nude and armed, consuming -- or
discharging -- a burning America."