The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch
© 1979

Published in New York by W. W. Norton & Company.
ISBN 0-393-30738-7

The following excerpts appear in the Afterword of the 1991 paperback edition, as reprinted from The World and I of February 1990.

A Faustian View of Technology

These considerations [of narcissism] help us to see how psychological defenses against separation anxiety – against early feelings of helplessness and dependence – can be elaborated in human culture.  One way to deny our dependence on nature (on mothers) is to invent technologies designed to make ourselves masters of nature.  Technology, when it is conceived in this way, embodies an attitude toward nature diametrically opposed to the exploratory attitude, as Klein calls it.  It expresses a collective revolt against the limitations of the human condition.  It appeals to the residual belief that we can bend the world to our desires, harness nature to our own purposes, and achieve a state of complete self-sufficiency.  This Faustian view of technology has been a powerful force in Western history, reaching its climax in the Industrial Revolution, with its remarkable gains in productivity, and in the even more remarkable advances promised by the postindustrial information explosion.

Modern technology has achieved so many dazzling breakthroughs that we now find it difficult to envision any limits to collective human ingenuity.  The secret of life itself is within our grasp, according to those who predict a revolution in genetics – in which case it may be possible for us to keep ourselves alive indefinitely or at least to extend the human life span to unheard-of lengths.  This impending triumph over old age and death, we are told, is the ultimate tribute to humanity's power to master its surroundings.  The prolongevity movement embodies the utopian possibilities of modern technology in its purest form.  In the mid-seventies, Albert Rosenfeld, the movement's leading propagandist, predicted that "most of the major mysteries of the aging process" would be "solved" by the third decade of the twenty-first century.  August Kinzel, former president of the Salk Institute, announced in 1967 that "we will lick the problem of aging completely, so that accidents will be essentially the only cause of death."

In psychological terms, the dream of subjugating nature is our culture's regressive solution to the problem of narcissism – repressive because it seeks to restore the primal illusion of omnipotence and refuses to accept limits on our collective self-sufficiency.  In religious terms, the revolt against nature is also a revolt against God – that is, against the reality of our dependence on forces external to ourselves.  The science of ecology – an example of the "exploratory" attitude toward nature, as opposed to the Faustian attitude – leaves no doubt about the inescapability of this dependence.  Ecology indicates that human life is part of a larger organism and that human intervention into natural processes has far-reaching consequences that will always remain to some extent incalculable.  Nature retains the upper hand:  The very technologies designed to overcome natural limitations on human comfort and freedom many destroy the ozone layer, create a greenhouse effect, and make the earth unfit for human habitation.

Careful study of the consequences of our attempts to master nature leads only to a renewed appreciation of our dependence on nature.  In the face of this evidence, the persistence of fantasies that envision technological self-sufficiency for the human race indicates that our culture is a culture of narcissism in a much deeper sense than is conveyed by journalistic slogans like "me-ism."  No doubt there is too much selfish individualism in American life; but such diagnoses barely scratch the surface.

Twentieth-Century Gnosticism and the New Age Movement

Even our deeply rooted, misplaced faith in technology does not fully describe modern culture.  What remains to be explained is how an exaggerated respect for technology can coexist with a revival of ancient superstitions, a belief in reincarnation, a growing fascination with the occult, and the bizarre forms of spirituality associated with the New Age movement.  A widespread revolt against reason is as much a feature of our world as our faith in science and technology.  Archaic myths and superstitions have reappeared in the very heart of the most modern, scientifically enlightened, and progressive nations in the world.  The coexistence of advanced technology and primitive spirituality suggests that both are rooted in social conditions that make it increasingly difficult for people to accept the reality of sorrow, loss, aging, and death – to live with limits, in short.  The anxieties peculiar to the modern world seem to have intensified old mechanisms of denial.

New Age spirituality, no less than technological utopianism, is rooted in primary narcissism.  If the technological fantasy seeks to restore the infantile illusion of self-sufficiency, the New Age movement seeks to restore the illusion of symbiosis, a feeling of absolute oneness with the world.  Instead of dreaming of the imposition of human will on the intractable world of matter, the New Age movement, which revives themes found in ancient Gnosticism, simply denies the reality of the material world.  By treating matter essentially as an illusion, it removes every obstacle to the re-creation of a primary sense of wholeness and equilibrium – the return to Nirvana.

One of the most shocking psychological events of early infancy, as we have seen, is the discovery that the beloved caretakers on whom the infant depends for its life are at the same time the source of much of the infant's frustration.  Parents – mothers in particular – provide gratification, but since their capacity to do this is not unlimited, they also, unavoidably, inflict the infant's first experiences of pain and sorrow.  Parents also inflict pain on the child in their capacity as judges and disciplinarians.  The reason the child finds it so difficult to acknowledge the union of gratification and suffering in a common source is that he thereby acknowledges his own dependence and limitations.

The perception of the parents' double nature entails the discovery that they are not mere projections of the child's own desires.  A standard defense against this discovery – one of the standard mechanisms of denial – is the splitting of parental images into good and bad images.  The infant's fantasies dissociate the frustrating and the pleasure-giving aspects of the adults who take care of him.  Thus he invents idealized images of breasts side by side with images of omnipotent, threatening, and destructive maternal or paternal authority – a devouring vagina, a castrating penis or breast.

Religious dualism institutionalizes these primitive and regressive defenses by rigorously separating images of nurture and mercy from images of creation, judgment, and punishment.  The particular version of dualism known as Gnosticism, which flourished in the Hellenistic world in the second, third, and fourth centuries A.D., carried this denial to its most radical conclusion.  It condemned the entire material world as the creation of dark, evil powers.  Gnosticism gave mythological form – often very touching and expressive form – to fantasies that serve to maintain the archaic illusion of oneness with a world absolutely responsive to one's own wishes and desires.  By denying that a benign creator could have made a world in which both suffering and gratification have a place, Gnosticism kept alive the hope of a return to a spiritual condition in which those experiences are unknown.  The secret knowledge that Gnostics prized so highly, into which only a few privileged souls were ever initiated, was precisely the original illusion of omnipotence; the memory of our divine origins, antecedent to our imprisonment in the flesh.

By interpreting the resurrection of Christ as a symbolic event, Gnostics avoided the Christian paradox of a suffering God.  Unable to conceive of a union of spirit with matter, they denied that Jesus was a human being at all, depicting him instead as a spirit who presented himself to human perception in the illusory form of a human being.  Their "grandiose mythology," as Hans Jonas calls it in his historical study The Gnostic Religion, purported to offer a definitive account of creation, according to which "human existence ... is only the stigma of a divine defeat."  The material creation, including the life of human beings in the flesh, represented the triumph of inferior, diabolical deities; salvation lay in the spirit's escape from the body, in the remembrance of its celestial origin – not (as Christians believed) in reconciliation to the justice and beauty of a world that nevertheless includes evil.

The New Age movement has revived Gnostic theology in a form considerably adulterated by other influences and mixed up with imagery derived from science fiction – flying saucers, extraterrestrial intervention in human history, escape from the earth to a new home in space.  What was often figurative and metaphorical in Gnosticism becomes literal in New Age writers like Ken Wilber, Robert Anton Wilson, and Doris Lessing.  Where second-century Gnostics imagined the Savior as spirit mysteriously inhabiting a series of human bodies, their twentieth-century descendants conceive of him as a visitor from another solar system.  Where the early Gnostics sought to recover the memory of man's original homeland without, however, assigning it an exact locale, New Age enthusiasts take the idea of heaven quite literally:  Sirius seems to be the current favorite.  (See, among many other books, Lessing's novel The Sirian Experiments.)  They believe, moreover, that visitors from space built Stonehenge, the pyramids, and the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis.

The New Age movement is to Gnosticism what fundamentalism is to Christianity – a literal restatement of ideas whose original value lay in their imaginative understanding of human life and the psychology of religious experience.  When Shirley MacLaine finds Walt Whitman demanding that the universe be "judged from the standpoint of eternity," she takes this to refer to the immortality of the soul, not to the desirability of holding humans accountable to some kind of superhuman standard of conduct.  In the same way, she attributes to Heinrich Heine a belief in reincarnation because he once asked, "Who can tell what tailor now inherits the soul of Plato?"

New Age spirituality may take strange shapes, but it is a prominent feature of our cultural landscape, like fundamentalism itself, which has grown steadily in recent years.  The flowering of such movements has confounded earlier assumptions about the increasing secularization of modern life.  Science has not displaced religion, as so many people once expected.  Both seem to flourish side by side, often in grotesquely exaggerated form.

More than anything else, it is this coexistence of hyper-rationality and widespread revolt against rationality that justifies the characterization of our twentieth-century way of life as a culture of narcissism.  These contradictory sensibilities have a common source.  Both take root in the feelings of homelessness and displacement that afflict so many men and women today, in their heightened vulnerability to pain and deprivation, and in the contradiction between the promise that they can "have it all" and the reality of their limitations.

The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.  It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness.  Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms.  But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them.  Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment.  Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships.  We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization.  We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us.  Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images.  Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.