AMERICANIZATION of NARCISSISM

The AMERICANIZATION of NARCISSISM The AMERICANIZATION of NARCISSISM Elizabeth Lunbeck Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Lunbeck All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Lunbeck, Elizabeth. The Americanization of narcissism / Elizabeth Lunbeck. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 72486- 0 1. Narcissism— United States. 2. United States— Social conditions. 3. United States— Social life and customs. 4. Social values— United States. I. Title. BF575.N35L86 2014 158.2—dc23 2013034742 To the memory of John W. Cell 1935–2001 First and best teacher CONTENTS Introduction 1 I. Narcissism in the Me De cade 9 1. The Culture of Narcissism 11 2. Heinz Kohut’s American Freud 37 3. Otto Kernberg’s Narcissistic Dystopia 59 II. Dimensions of Narcissism from Freud to the Me Decade and Beyond 81 4. Self- Love 83 5. In de pen dence 113 6. Vanity 138 7. Gratifi cation 165 8. Inaccessibility 202 9. Identity 224 Conclusion: Narcissism Today 252 Abbreviations 273 Notes 276 Ac know ledg ments 352 Index 355 The AMERICANIZATION of NARCISSISM INTRODUCTION It is a commonplace of social criticism that Amer- ica has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists. Greedy, selfi sh, and self- absorbed, we narcissists are thriving, the critics tell us, in the culture of abundance that is modern, late- capitalist America. The disciplined, patriarchal Victorianism under which our stalwart forebears were raised has purportedly given way to a culture that asks nothing of us while at the same time promising to satisfy our every desire. Plentitude reigns where privation was once the norm, and self- indulgence has displaced self- control. Reck- less Wall Street bankers, philandering politicians, charismatic CEOs, talentless celebrity wannabes, shopaholic women and abs- obsessed men, the vacuous young and the Botox- dependent old: in this regu- larly invoked gallery of narcissists in our midst— spanning the spec- trum from ruthless to pathetic— we can see the seeds of too much self- esteem and too little self- discipline come to warped fruition. Narcissism has proven the pundits’ favorite diagnosis, a morally freighted term with appealing classical resonances, a highfalutin name for the old- fashioned complaint that modernity means a loos- ening of restraint and that modern satisfaction is to be found in, as Philip Rieff put it nearly fi fty years ago, nothing so much as a “plentitude of option.” Narcissism has fi gured importantly in psychoanalytic thinking from the appearance of Freud’s landmark essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in 1914, but it did not enter the pop- u lar lexicon until the 1970s. Then, as a shorthand for Me De cade 2 Introduction excess, it was quickly grafted onto a narrative of decline that saw Americans as a people shifting from sturdy production to meaning- less consumption, from small- town gemeinschaft to anonymous ge- sellschaft, from David Riesman’s introspective bourgeois to his su- perfi cial glad-hander, and from the self- denying hysteric of Freud’s day to the pampered and indulged narcissist of our own. This powerful narrative has informed a major tradition of Ameri- can social criticism, from Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte Jr.’s The Orga ni za tion Man in the 1950s, through Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism in the 1970s, to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, published in 2000. Collectively, the critics have painted a portrait of a culture in characterological freefall that valorizes mindless consumption and promotes the indulging, rather than the harnessing, of all sorts of impulses. Once they adopted the concept of narcissism, this portrayal coalesced around the fi gure of the narcissist, whose impoverished moral sensibility serves to vividly illus- trate the depths to which we have fallen. It was the Age of Narcissism, the New York Times proclaimed in the early 1970s, and the term was suddenly everywhere, offering a beguiling new language in which to voice these venerable complaints. Cassandras of cultural decline, from both left and right, contended that a “new narcissism” was ascendant. Too many Americans, they charged, were bristling at tradition, seeking fulfi llment at the feet of New Age gurus while spurning engagement with the common good. Among the Cassandras, no one was more infl uential than Christopher Lasch, a gifted polemicist who, throughout the de cade, issued dire assessments of the nation’s fall in tandem with narcissism’s rise, cul- minating in the publication of his wildly pop u lar 1978 jeremiad, The Culture of Narcissism. In the hands of Lasch and other critics, narcissism was both cause and effect of the rampant individualism, the spiritual questing, the preoccupation with self, and the fl ight from commitment that they argued were newly prevalent in American life. Lasch and other public intellectuals took stock of the social and po liti cal ferment of the Vietnam- era—assassinations, urban riots, Black power, student protests, nascent second- wave feminist agita- Introduction 3 tion, and claims for gay liberation—to collectively warn of the un- raveling of Western society and the undermining of its most cher- ished ideals. The countercultural young came under especially sharp scrutiny, cast by their elders as hedonists questing for self-realization and reveling in an Elysium of instantly gratifi ed desires. What might be seen as their more ascetic impulses— their rejection of the house in the suburbs, the cars in the garage, and (for men) the secure niche in the corporate hierarchy— were altogether missing from this portrait of the American character gone amok. Also missing was that the capitalist system, aligned in the minds of the critics with the values of hard work, individual initiative, and entrepreneurial bra- vado, depended for its vitality on the ever- expanding consumer de- mand that these same critics deplored. The critics’ turn to narcissism was not simply a reaction to changes they perceived in American society, nor did it merely refl ect the ever- increasing prevalence, noted by clinicians, of character dis- ordered individuals. Critics might never have latched on to the term and its meanings if not for the appearance of pathbreaking works on narcissism, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the Viennese émigré analysts Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, which generated both excitement and fi erce controversy among psychoanalysts. Cel- ebrating what others condemned, Kohut boldly reframed narcissism as a desirable, even healthy, dimension of mature selfhood. He con- sistently underscored narcissism’s positive aspects, arguing that it fueled individuals’ ambitions, creativity, and fellow- feeling. He re- jected the pejorative attitude toward narcissism he saw both in his disciplinary colleagues and in the culture more generally, going so far as to suggest that the emptiness and fragmentation critics saw as characteristic of modernity resulted not from too much narcissism but from too little. Kernberg’s stance could not have been more differ- ent. He focused on narcissism’s darker side, in precise and vivid prose describing narcissists’ destructiveness, rage, and aggression as well as the masterful ways in which they exploited and enslaved their hapless victims. Kernberg’s narcissists were charming and seductive, expert at eliciting admiration and tribute from those they would invariably 4 Introduction devalue and discard. The most creative and intelligent of them en- joyed a level of worldly success that fueled the critics’ complaint that the culture not only tolerated but rewarded narcissistic traits, enabling those skilled at manipulating interpersonal relations and deft in sustaining the illusion of their own limitless possibilities to prevail within the drab conformism that was the bureaucratic world of business, politics, and government. Narcissism was thus both normalized and pathologized at the mo- ment of its Americanization. Analysts had wrestled long and hard with the concept’s doubleness. Glancing back to Freud in the 1970s and beyond, they could argue that from the start he had conceived of narcissism as both normal (present in everyone and necessary to sus- tain life) and pathological (a state of self-love to be overcome in the course of development). In the half-century-long unfolding of narcissism’s post-Freudian history, however, it was narcissism’s pathologies that for the most part drew analysts’ attention, even as some of them made stabs at conceptualizing it more neutrally as a repository of self- feeling and others proposed that an infl ated sense of self was inescapably part of the human condition. Kohut and Kernberg to- gether broadened narcissism’s remit— in their wake it could refer to both destructiveness and self- preservation, and could be seen as ex- pressive of both selfi sh entitlement and patently selfl ess altruism— and brought some clarity to a concept that analysts complained was ambiguous, baffl ing, and elusive. Delineating healthy narcissism, Kohut brought clearly into view a thread of analytic thinking that cast narcissism as a form of self- esteem. And, although analysts had long used narcissism and narcissistic in reference to feelings, traits, and behaviors someone might experience or display, the narcissist as a specifi c character type eluded their conceptual grasp. Pressing the newly coined diagnostic term “narcissistic personality disorder” into ser vice, Kohut and Kernberg were able to provide a description of the narcissist as a type of person that was at once bracingly new and instantly recognizable. This move marked narcissism’s psychoanalytic coming of age and, beyond the discipline, endowed it with a concrete- ness and specifi city appealing to critics. The narcissist was now an identifi able character open to attack.

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