The Americanization of Narcissism

by Elizabeth Lunbeck

American social critics in the 1970s, convinced that their nation was in decline, turned to psychoanalysis for answers and seized on narcissism as the sickness of the age. Books indicting Americans as greedy, shallow, and self-indulgent appeared, none more influential than Christopher Lasch's famous 1978 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism . This line of critique reached a crescendo the following year in Jimmy Carter's "malaise speech" and has endured to this day.

But as Elizabeth Lunbeck reveals, the American critics missed altogether the breakthrough in psychoanalytic thinking that was championing narcissism's positive aspects. Psychoanalysts had clashed over narcissism from the moment Freud introduced it in 1914, and they had long been split on its defining How much self-love, self-esteem, and self-indulgence was normal and desirable? While Freud's orthodox followers sided with asceticism, analytic dissenters argued for gratification. Fifty years later, the Viennese émigré Heinz Kohut led a psychoanalytic revolution centered on a "normal narcissism" that he claimed was the wellspring of human ambition, creativity, and empathy. But critics saw only pathology in narcissism. The result was the loss of a vital way to understand ourselves, our needs, and our desires.

Narcissism's rich and complex history is also the history of the shifting fortunes and powerful influence of psychoanalysis in American thought and culture. Telling this story, The Americanization of Narcissism ultimately opens a new view on the central questions faced by the self struggling amid the tumultuous crosscurrents of modernity.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy

384 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2014

Reviews

[Nooshin Navidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally the book many of us have been waiting for. Lunbeck hits the nail squarely on the head without being didactic. I'm not sure American culture & its rampant self-involvement is going to improve much in terms of narcissistic outlets, distractions & perceived payoffs. If anything, we seem to be leading other countries down the same primrose path through increasingly vapid & exploitive advertising, entertainment, social media, reality TV, etc. But books like this may at least foster more awareness of the insidious "selfie" drug and its side effects.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Personally, I would have flipped the early chapters on Kohut and Kernberg for later in the book and lead with her six chapters (trimmed from the 7 Deadly Sins, it felt like) on Self-Love, Independence, Vanity, Gratification, Inaccessibility, and Identity. The chapters seemed to have more of what I found relevant.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book and generally found it very interesting. I don't know very much about traditional psychotherapy, so I appreciated Lunbeck's willingness to go back and explain some of the historical development and personal interactions in the narrative. The flip side of this was a rather wandering train of thought that often belied the title. The book could more appropriately have been called The Americanization (or Modernization) of Psychotherapy. While the concept of narcissism does provide the central thread, the various redefinitions of this idea by various popular and specialist commentators over the years created a term with hardly any residual meaning.

Lunbeck's writing leans toward the academic with a tendency toward frozen phrases describing the central concepts and players of the text. Still, as noted above, she takes the time to fully develop concepts and people who might prove unfamiliar to a lay reader, making the book readable without being particularly elegant.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have given it 4 stars after I first finished it, but the aftertaste has moved me down to three stars. I see this book as mostly a critique of a small group of people who believe narcissism was a certain way, mainly weak and dependent. She uses Kohut and Kernberg to argue that Narcissism is more grandiosity and individualism than previously understood. The author is writing about the popular cultural understanding of narcissism and how that affects society, but it is hard to not want to make her view of narcissism just a tad more complex.

[Hani Omar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful enough primer circling around an ultimately half-finished argument, Lunbeck gets caught in the weeds among the various epistolary contretemps of the Freud circle, while giving her own conclusion short shrift in the end (to wit: narcissism was redefined for American society to mean sometimes healthy self-esteem, and other times malignant self-regard, also Facebook); not a bad read, well-researched, but falls well short of its intended target.

[Mills College Library]

158.2 L961 2014