Word: narcissus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...comes as no surprise that the Me generation is committing psychoanalysis to the grave. Would Narcissus have liked an analyst who threw stones in his pool...
Professor Lasch is not amused by what he calls a "cultural radicalism": the decadence of American individualism. Its chief symptom: "The pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self." The Narcissus of mythology, infatuated by his own reflection, pined away because he could not consummate self-love. Lasch's new narcissist has similar anxieties but feels no guilt. He has drunk the waters of progressive education and popular culture, and has little memory of traditional values and religious beliefs...
Attempting to fit something as huge and varied as American culture onto a narrow Freudian couch is bound to strain credulity. Appropriated for sociology, the term narcissism sometimes seems as frustratingly insubstantial as Echo, the nymph who taunted Narcissus by repeating his words. Yet undoubtedly Lasch is on to something quite real. The est-thetes, the self-accredited sex therapists, the purveyors of cosmic consciousness and Buddhamatics, the pathetic zombies of Jonestown are not figments. Narcissism may not be a constant or universal disorder, but it is hard to deny that the horizons of millions of Americans have become...
...dead." They envisioned weeds pushing up through the stones of Rockefeller Center, Roseland reverting to jungle. Watching the parade of garbage strikes and pedestrians high-stepping in a rage among the dogmerde, New Yorkers could imagine themselves being a little like the sailors on Joseph Conrad's Narcissus, helpless in a gale: "[They] had the aspect of invalids and the gestures of maniacs...
...transported, to a civilization where everything is to some extent a commodity, they become commodities too." The danger here lies in the potential reduction of these new faiths to products of a "profit-oriented culture" such as the psychological theories Cox discusses in the chapter entitled "The Pool of Narcissus: The Psychologizing of Meditation." Discussing the use of terms such as "investment" in people or psychic "dividends" he proceeds to suggest that...