Minimal Selfhood, 1984–present
topics include Christopher Lasch, psychoanalysis, 100 gecs, Steve Bannon, bad social media documentaries, and the Hat Man
A brief note
This is a revised version of an essay I published in September 2022 under the title “A Brief History of Cursed Vibes.” However, for purposes of citation, it should be considered a distinct article.
Reality, wrote Christopher Lasch in 1984,
is no longer real in the sense of arising from a people’s shared understanding, from a shared past, and from shared values. More and more, our impressions of the world derive not from the observations we make both as individuals and as members of a wider community but from elaborate systems of communication, which spew out information, much of it unbelievable, about events of which we seldom have any direct knowledge.1
Without the benefit of context, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is an excerpt from the script of a slickly-produced documentary about misinformation or social media, something intended to be read over a score by the winner of the Trent Reznor Soundalike Contest, or perhaps juxtaposed with sound bites from cable news and Trump rallies. One often gets that eerie sense of timelessness from reading Lasch at his best. Indeed, as the literary critic Christian Lorentzen put it, “Lasch’s polemical works of social criticism have a dramatic quality of plunging us into (and back into) crises we didn’t know we were experiencing but immediately recognize.”2
Consequently, as Lorentzen suggests, it’s perhaps unsurprising that even though Lasch died in 1994, his work remains relatively popular. Lorentzen’s essay came out in December 2022. Kristin Dombek engaged with his Culture of Narcissism (1979) in her book-length essay The Selfishness of Others (2016), which I read last August and very strongly recommend.3 The hosts of Know Your Enemy did a really good episode on his later work last summer with the writer and editor Chris Lehmann, who studied with Lasch at the University of Rochester. Even people who don’t care for Lasch still want to write about him: to give one example, the psychoanalytic scholar Alex Colston used a critique of his ideas about parental authority as a jumping-off point for an essay on fathers in Parapraxis, a new journal of psychoanalysis and left politics.
To be sure, not everybody who talks about Christopher Lasch has something interesting to contribute. A number of prominent reflexively contrarian writers and podcasters like his books, especially The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995). Decontextualized passages from the latter text about elites’ fear of death and infirmity often circulated during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the implication that only an effete professional-class milksop would ever want to take precautions to avoid dying of respiratory failure.4
Additionally, some readers may recall Steve Bannon’s effusive praise of The Revolt of the Elites in a 2017 interview. They may also recall that shortly thereafter, our nation’s self-appointed Bannon understanders immediately took it upon themselves to skim Revolt and declare that it perfectly explained Bannon’s worldview. Chris Lehmann wrote a very good critique of their interpretation, though it must be said that these are the same folks who declared, with much fear and trembling, that Bannon was a once-in-a-generation tactical genius because he claimed to have read (are you ready for this?) Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.
While The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites probably get the most attention today, for better or for worse, my first encounter with Lasch’s work was through The Minimal Self (1984). I’d heard that it further developed his ideas about narcissism in a less splenetic tone while replying to conservatives who saw him as a back-to-basics traditionalist. He was, in fact, a deeply idiosyncratic Marxist who felt alienated from contemporary political movements and organizations and doubted that the categories “right” and “left” were still meaningfully distinct. Nonetheless, in The Minimal Self, he made clear that he believed the solutions to the world’s most pressing problems lay in collective political action.5
But Lasch was primarily a diagnostician, not a prescriber. His primary interest in The Minimal Self was the effects of the predominance of the narcissistic self. He did not, however, use that precise term. Though “narcissistic” and “narcissism" often connote excessive self-regard, Lasch used them in the traditional psychoanalytic sense, in which a "narcissistic self" is one for whom the boundary between the self and the world is blurry or non-existent. For psychoanalysts, in other words, a narcissistic self is “uncertain of its own outlines.”6 Thus, for the general reader, it would be more accurate to call it a minimal self.
Why did the minimal self predominate circa 1984? Not out of any mass moral failing. Rather, the rise of the minimal self could be linked to “a defensive response to danger”—of nuclear war, of ecological catastrophe, of economic collapse—and “the replacement of a reliable world of durable objects by a world of flickering images that make it harder and harder to distinguish reality from fantasy.”7 Indeed, this “world of images” was of particular concern to Lasch, at least in The Minimal Self. In the world of modern consumer capitalism, one is “surrounded not so much by things as by fantasies” and “lives in a world that has no objective or independent existence and seems to exist only to gratify or thwart [one’s] desires.”8
From these causes—fears of catastrophe and collapse; impressions of the world derived from the media’s “flickering images”—the minimal self emerges. In other words, it becomes impossible to tell where the world ends and I begin, and vice versa. The uncertainty makes me feel constantly under siege as the world threatens to overwhelm me at every turn. The ordinary demands of living come to seem so insurmountable that I reframe the motions of daily life as a series of survival strategies: “We conduct ourselves as if we lived in ‘impossible circumstances’ […] [W]e arm ourselves emotionally against the onslaught of everyday life.” Lasch calls this the “survival mentality.”9
The broad outlines I have just described are, I believe, very persuasive and accurate; once I started noticing the survival mentality, it was difficult to stop seeing it everywhere, including in myself. More debatable, however, are some of his supporting details and less-major conclusions. I am not sure if I can join him in reflexive opposition to all things "therapeutic," though I share his dislike of the corporate world's adoption of a therapeutic vocabulary. His critique of the idea of infinite choice leads him to say some profoundly ill-considered things about abortion. And his views on comprehensive sex education read like a Moms for Liberty press release with more SAT words.10
On the other hand, I don't believe that accepting the major tenets of Lasch’s argument compels me to uncritically accept his most debatable conclusions. (According to Lehmann, Lasch sometimes spoke of “how fun it was to scandalize people”; make of that what you will.11) It is those major tenets, rather than the periodic grouchy asides, that make The Minimal Self still relevant. The claims about flickering media images and unreal realities, for example, give the lie to every op-ed writer or documentarian who has claimed that everybody believed in the same facts until the rise of social media.12 No matter how much we might wring our hands over “post-truth,” no matter how much we might mourn the perceived death of consensus reality, the problem is decades old.
What is more, the survival mentality is still alive and well, as I noted above. Selective apathy, disengaging from others, taking things one day at at time, and refusing long-term moral and emotional commitments (four tendencies Lasch mentions) are still common.13 It's difficult to read The Minimal Self and not feel just a little bit weird about how often “self-care” is equated with putting on your own oxygen mask on an airplane before helping someone else. But this is a relatively minor quibble in comparison with the degree to which the survival mentality has captured the contemporary American right wing, as Matthew Sitman described last year:
The right benefits from people becoming more isolated, hunkered down, wary of others, and doubtful that a better future can be built. It is to such people that the reactionary message appeals: the best you can hope for is to hoard what you have, and attack the shadowy forces and alien others that you’re told imperil you and your livelihood. Solidarity and generosity are turned into risky wagers not worth taking.14
Not only has the survival mentality persisted, but a new and powerful variant has emerged alongside it, particularly among people born after about 1995. For Lasch, the paradigmatic figure was a yuppie striver who majored in business and bought books with titles like Survival in the Executive Jungle.15 This type of guy hasn’t disappeared, not by a long shot; you can find him by the dozen in the replies to any Twitter thread about books to read during one’s twenties. The post-1995 survivalists, however, have never upheld clawing one’s way up the corporate ladder as a viable plan for one’s future. No: ever since they became conscious of such a thing as “the future,” it has only held downward mobility, an out-of-control housing market, crushing debt, and omnipresent ecological and biological catastrophe.
These post-1995 survivalists want either for the self to fade away into nothingness or for the self to become entirely separate from the world. Both desires are fundamentally desires for numbness and oblivion. Though Lasch alludes, at one point, to the minimal self's desire for "emotional anesthesia,"16 he did not anticipate the now-widespread longing for total oblivion. Such a desire is not, to be clear, a result of a mass moral failing or character flaw. It is instead the inevitable result of learning, over and over, through an onslaught of flickering images of pervasive, inescapable misery (if you're lucky) or through an onslaught of actual misery (if you aren't), that you are living in a world that seems destined to collapse at any minute.
The production style of much contemporary hip-hop, with its thick, hazy atmosphere, speaks to the increasingly widespread hunger for numb oblivion. (It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that opiates and benzodiazepines have become the most commonly referenced drugs in hip-hop.) Consider Future’s “Mask Off,” in which old and new survival strategies are merged:
Percocets, molly, Percocets Chase a check, never chase a bitch
The first line, numbness and oblivion; the second line, emotional disengagement and a rejection of long-term commitments.
But contemporary hip-hop isn’t the only music that speaks to the desire for numbness and oblivion. So, in its own way, does the music of 100 gecs: in its bricolage of every popular genre of the last twenty or thirty years, it simulates the experience of skipping through a lengthy playlist in an increasingly fruitless effort to distract oneself from the sorry state of the world.
So do the online communities of people who like to take excessive doses of a common over-the-counter medication to get high.17 They freely admit that it isn’t the slightest bit enjoyable; they make memes about the clusters of spiders and the shadowy, menacing figures (the “Hat Man” is a frequent visitor) that appear in the vivid hallucinations that large doses cause. On the plus side, it decisively cuts the user off from reality. That is all that matters. Drowning out the terror of the present, no matter how frightening the alternatives may be, has become the categorical imperative.
I suppose I should end on an obligatory note of hope, to borrow Jenny Offill’s phrase. In fact, I will end on two notes of hope. The first is from The Minimal Self:
By dramatizing the dangers ahead, opposition movements inadvertently strengthen the siege mentality, but they also provide the only effective antidote against it: a determination to mount a collaborative assault on the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm us. Political action remains the only effective defense against disaster—political action, that is, that incorporates our new understanding of the dangers of unlimited economic growth, unlimited technological development, and the unlimited exploitation of nature. […] [M]ilitarism and runaway technology have social, economic, and political roots as well as psychological roots [and] political opposition to these evils, even if it often rests on shaky psychological and philosophical premises, represents an indispensable beginning in the struggle to make our world fit for human habitation.18
The second is from an essay by David Graeber: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”19
Whether Lasch and Graeber can be synthesized is not for me to say; my understanding of Graeber’s work, in particular, is woefully thin. Maybe they can; maybe they can’t. Nonetheless, my own sense of hope, feeble though it may be, comes not from historicizing the worst features of the present age—i.e., from recognizing that the world is something that has been made—but from the implications of that act of historicizing: we could just as easily make it differently.
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Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 133. (Cited hereafter as “Minimal.”)
Christian Lorentzen, “The Hopeful Dystopian,” Jacobin, December 5, 2022, https://auth.jacobinmag.com/2022/12/the-hopeful-dystopian.
Seriously, you should read The Selfishness of Others.
I am grateful to Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell for pointing this out in a May 2020 bonus episode of Know Your Enemy titled “Pandemic as Culture War.”
Lasch, 18. I don’t know if he changed his mind on this front; I’m not familiar enough with his later work.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 95.
On abortion, see Lasch, 38: “But if choice no longer implies commitments and consequences—as making love formerly carried important ‘consequences,’ for instance, especially for women [emphasis added]—the freedom to choose amounts in practice to an abstention from choice.”
On comprehensive sex education, see Lasch, 187: “[M]odern education and mass culture probably go much further in plunging children into the sexual dimension of adult experience before they are ready to understand it or deal with it. Nor does this sexual indoctrination [emphasis added] succeed in its object—the object avowed by educators, anyway—of easing the child’s transition into the adult world.” Compare this recent tweet by Moms for Liberty, or anything that allies of Ron DeSantis have said about the Parental Rights in Education Act (a/k/a the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill).
Chris Lehmann, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Bookforum, June/July/August 2010, https://www.bookforum.com/print/1702/christopher-lasch-came-to-embrace-hope-against-hope-5776.
For what it’s worth, Lasch’s misgivings about abortion seem sincere; he later criticized the abortion-rights movement in The True and Only Heaven (1991).
Rick Perlstein’s books are like this, too. He’ll list every single bad thing that happened in a single month in the 1960s or 1970s, then say something like, “America, it seemed, was falling apart.” These passages become oddly soothing during moments of national crisis.
Lasch, 94. See also Clare Coffey, “Failure to Cope ‘Under Capitalism’,” Gawker, August 12, 2022, https://www.gawker.com/culture/failure-to-cope-under-capitalism. Coffey sees the survival mentality (though she doesn’t use the phrase) as mostly a personal problem, while Lasch believes it originates from broader, society-level phenomena. However, the specific examples she gives of how people online like to talk about “persistent low-grade dysfunction” could be considered instances of the survival mentality.
Matthew Sitman, “Anti-Social Conservatives,” Gawker, July 25, 2022, https://www.gawker.com/politics/anti-social-conservatives.
Lasch, 69.
Ibid., 94.
I won’t name the drug or link to the communities; you’ll have to take my word for it that they exist.
Lasch, 18; all emphases are mine.
David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity,” in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2015), 89.