Author(s): Christopher Lasch
Year: 1985
Language: English
Pages: 324
Cover......Page 1
Copyright......Page 6
Contents......Page 9
Preface......Page 13
Materialism and Mass Culture......Page 20
Mass Production and Mass Consumption......Page 24
The Fantastic World of Commodities......Page 26
Consumption and Mass Culture......Page 31
Industrial Technology, Mass Culture, and Democracy......Page 36
The Decline of Authority......Page 41
Politics as Consumption......Page 45
The New "Personhood"......Page 48
"Selfishness " or Survivalism ?......Page 54
The Normalization of Crisis......Page 57
Everyday Life Reinterpreted in the Light of Extreme Situations......Page 62
Large Organizations as To tal Institutions......Page 66
The Cold War Critique of Survivalism......Page 70
Shedding It All: The Spiritual Discipline of Survival......Page 78
Who Are the Doomsayers?......Page 83
Apocalyptic Survivalism and Ordinary Apathy......Page 87
Everyday Survival Strategies......Page 91
One "Holocaust" or Many?......Page 97
"Totalitarianism ": From Radical Evil to Comparative Political Typology......Page 101
Auschwitz as an Image of the Modern Malaise......Page 108
"Mere " Survival Criticized and Defended......Page 111
Survivor Guilt, Pro and Con......Page 116
Survivalism at Its Ugliest: Seven Beauties......Page 119
Comparative "Survivor Research ": Extreme Situations and Everyday Stress......Page 121
The Roth-Cunningham Effect......Page 127
From Self-Assertion to Self-Effacement......Page 129
The Imperial Ego Effaced by Images......Page 134
The Aesthetics of Exclusion......Page 138
The Fusion of Self and Not-Self......Page 144
The Strategic Retreat into Paranoia......Page 150
Modernism 's Dead End......Page 154
Oneness and Separation......Page 160
Early Fantasies of Reunion......Page 163
Gender Differences and the "Tragedy of Lost Illusions"......Page 167
Origins of the Superego......Page 170
The Ego Ideal......Page 175
Narcissism as Opposed to Ordinary Egoism......Page 179
Childhood in a Narcissistic Culture......Page 182
Man-Made Objects and Illusions......Page 187
Contemporary Cultural Debate: An Ideal Typology......Page 194
The Party of the Superego......Page 197
The Liberal Ego: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Therapeutic Ethic......Page 202
Psychoanalysis and the Liberal Tradition of Moral Optimism......Page 205
The Quarrel between Behaviorism and Humanistic Psychiatry......Page 208
Hartmann 's Ego Psychology: Psychoanalysis as Behavioral Engineering......Page 215
The Exhaustion of Political Ideologies after World War......Page 221
The Neo-Freudian Left......Page 224
Marcuse on "Surplus Repression
......Page 226
Brown 's Thanatology: The Pa thology of Purposefulness......Page 231
Freudian Feminism......Page 237
The Case for Narcissism: "Masculine" Enterprise against "Feminine" Mutuality......Page 241
Purposefulness, Nature, and Selfhood: The Case for a Guilty Conscience......Page 250
Acknowledgments and Bibliographical Notes......Page 257
Index......Page 298
Back Cover......Page 313
