The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times

Lasch has a great intellect: he's read deeply and though he's strong-minded, he's also compassionate. Here he examines faulty ideas, often finding the grain of truth that's given them wing. In THE MINIMAL SELF, still deeply relevant to our times, he explains two urges in light of man's destructiveness and our lack of faith in a future: a regressive, narcissistic wish to merge with the environment, in a timeless solipsism that negates the past and the present; or else, a strict adherence to rules and regulations that demand obedience by threat of punishment and retribution, and which harken back to false nostalgia for a simpler past.Lasch shows us that it's much more complicated than that: that our obsession with survival, our lack of faith in language to communicate commonalities (and its exploitation not just by the media but by activists trying to counter the media's insidious influence), and our confusion about how to structure, or de-structure (destroy) our lives leads us back to Freud, back to humility, and back to separation, away from narcissistic fantasies of either merger or omnipotence. In brilliant, thoughtful, complex prose, Lasch argues for an enlightened dependence, a reliance on the cultural sphere to give meaning to our inner drives and our recognition of the objective outside world, and thoughtfulness and sobriety in place of infantilism and fantasy. Lasch argues for mature play, and his is a convincing argument.

This book written back the middle of the 1980s is another one of a series of pessimistic,broad-reaching cultural studies written by Christopher Lasch. It is a follow-up to the more well known and influential work "The Culture of Narcissism".Mr. Lasch describes the emptiness and bleakness that he sees as a hallmark feature of the arts, of politics and society in thelate 20th century. Although one could disagree with his opinions, I think that this a well written indictment of modern times.