/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22740626]

What's the /lit/ consensus on Lasch?

[Anonymous No.22740643]

One of the few authors both right and left wingers like

[Anonymous No.22740681]

Elite Theory for leftists and bad conscience 'conservatives'. The middest of mid.

[Anonymous No.22740696]

>>22740626
There is not one single insightful paragraph in any of Lasch's work.

[Anonymous No.22740733]

>>22740696
I will post my list of good paragraphs from his books before Revolt of the Elites.

[Anonymous No.22740736]

>>22740733

[Anonymous No.22740737]

>>22740733
he's wrong
t. phil major who's studies were historically-focused

[Anonymous No.22740742]

>>22740736

[Anonymous No.22740747]

>>22740626
I personally love the guy. The True and Only Heaven was a fantastic historical coverage of the development of 20th century liberal and progressive thought and gives very fair coverage even when it's very obvious Lasch profoundly disagrees with the author he is citing.

[Anonymous No.22740748]

>>22740742

>>22740737
I think its changed a bit from when he write it but it spoke to my experience in history personally.

[Anonymous No.22740753]

>>22740748

[Anonymous No.22740756]

none of those excerpts contained anything insightful and most built on questionable premises. you really like this trash? you think it's "good"?

[Anonymous No.22740757]

>>22740753

[Anonymous No.22740758]

>>22740742
damn this hits it right out of the park.

[Anonymous No.22740760]

>>22740756
post body

[Anonymous No.22740763]

>>22740758
>in former times men regarded law as the moral consensus of the community
evidence for this?

[Anonymous No.22740764]

>>22740756
i agree

[Anonymous No.22740765]

>>22740757

[Anonymous No.22740770]

>>22740756
You should read all the stuff in these books regurgitating orthodox Marxism or unironic Freudianism.

>>22740765

[Anonymous No.22740775]

>>22740770

[Anonymous No.22740778]

>>22740764
see >>22740760

[Anonymous No.22740780]

>>22740775

[Anonymous No.22740782]

>>22740778
a fanboy of someone who accuses everyone of narcissism is asking people to "post body"? is this some kind of weird troll? lasch sucks and you are fat. good day.

[Anonymous No.22740785]

>>22740778
le sigh

[Anonymous No.22740786]

>>22740780

[Anonymous No.22740792]

>>22740786

[Anonymous No.22740793]

>>22740785
you will never be a woman

[Anonymous No.22740795]

>>22740785
lmao

>>22740782
what's the big deal, bro? I just want to see your hot bod.

[Anonymous No.22740801]

>>22740792
And that’s it for me, Revolt of the Elites is far more readable because he isn’t sperging out about Freud so I didn’t take any screenshots.

[Anonymous No.22740821]

>>22740801
I don't know if the guy is right but he's surely a pageturner. Could you, please, post more? kek

[Anonymous No.22740850]

>>22740821
Here you go bro, some hot steaming psychoanalysis fresh from the pages.

[Anonymous No.22740870]

I'm reading the narcissism book and it's fucking shit. No, the cultural changes you're complaining about aren't inevitable thing that had to happen in capitalism, they were a consequence of CIA bankrolling them to subvert leftists which backfired. Literal human agency at work, Chris, I bet he would call that an unscientific explanation because retarded materialism caused brainrot. Now he's babbling garbage about Freud, a literal fucking hack and fraud, like he's some fucking prophet. I will finish it because I don't leave books unfinished but it's relegated to the toilet so I'm only reading this shit when I'm producing shit myself.

[Anonymous No.22740888]

>>22740870
That stuff was so bad, I couldn’t even believe it.

[Anonymous No.22740892]

>>22740850
>Men also have penis-envy
C'mon, she was coping SOO much.
lol

[Anonymous No.22740899]

>>22740870
>I will finish it because I don't leave books unfinished
You should change this concept, bro. So often we are trapped. I don't even blink.

[Anonymous No.22741041]

>>22740733
Calling out all the long covid and fibromyalgia roasties.

[Anonymous No.22741047]

>>22741041
Psychiatrists thinking they can eradicate war with the right education.

[Anonymous No.22741055]

>>22741047

[Anonymous No.22741070]

>>22740742
>>22740733
>>22740626
so the usual atheists who whine that the republic he created has just dogmas by the bureaucratic and business caste and no morality.
Atheists have really no introspection. They killed morality precisely to seize power.

[Anonymous No.22741135]

>>22740733
>Students of literature treat the text not as a representation of the real world but as a reflection of the artist's inner state of mind.
The Death of the Author came out in 1967, somebody should tell him.

[Anonymous No.22741361]

>>22740626
I like Lasch. He's particularly delightful when taken to the cinema on a warm summer evening in Paris.

[Anonymous No.22741827]

>>22740626
great author who improved as he got older. >>22740757
explains the last 30 years of pop culture

[Anonymous No.22742537]

Bump for Lasch. There is no better commentator on the problems America faces today. Skip his earlier works for their unfortunate tendency to get bogged down in Freudian babble. Revolt of the Elite and True and Only Heaven are amazing, clearly-written (Lasch also wrote a guide on writing) masterpieces.

His deconstruction of the notion of Progress, his attacks on double standards and acquiescence for blacks, his bemoaning of the loss of civic virtue and community, his advocacy for labor populism, his disgust for milquetoast academia and the rootless technical-professional-managerial class, and his critique of capitalism as it is practiced. Kino.

[Anonymous No.22742561]

>>22740626
Culture Of Narcissism was boring. Maybe Revolt and True might be better, I dunno

[Anonymous No.22742603]

>>22742561
for whatever reason, the entire book of culture of narcissism is best summarized in its preface (which is great.). lot of filler otherwise.
Revolt is his best book imo.

[Anonymous No.22742832]

>>22742537
people need to stop hating on Freud so much. they take offense at a few of his ideas (which were probably based off of real, if perhaps uncommon, neuroses he observed in his clients) and throw out the baby with the bathwater. Civilization and Its Discontents is a real gem. and if you dont have the basics of Freudian theory under your belt, then a lot of Lasch is going to sound like cobbled-together complaints with no unifying thread. what do you think culture of narcissism is based off of? whose definition? freud's.

[Anonymous No.22742845]

>>22742832
It isn't (at least for me) against Freud but simply that Lasch's earlier books had a lot of filler. Revolt and True and only Heaven were outstanding

[Anonymous No.22743013]

>>22742832
I agree that there's a lot to learn from Freud but I don't think Lasch touches on much of it. His analysis of the narcissism following the Sexual Revolution era is made weaker by his constant referencing to Freudian concepts. It's jarring to read Lasch make his argument by referring to penis envy, the Oedipus complex, or the consequences of outweighing the id or the superego or the role of the mother or the father. This is compounded by the fact that the nature and organization of the family has changed considerably since Freud (and even Lasch) wrote, and the anachronisms that change has created are often bizarre or outright damaging to Lasch's argument.

In Culture, it's also unnecessary. Anybody reading today will not need very much convincing that Lasch's thesis has been borne out. The sociological/historical analysis present in the book is plenty.

[Anonymous No.22743047]

>>22742832
Freud’s negative perception of religion (no doubt in part to his background) is one of my drawbacks with him, which I just use Jung to fill in the blind spots. I did enjoy CAID and to a lesser degree, BTPP.

[Anonymous No.22743205]

>>22743013
>I love the conclusions but hate the methods he uses to get there because incest is gross
do pseuds really?

[Anonymous No.22743286]

>>22743205
It's the problem with Freud in general. Moments of brilliance, where it seems like he's received divine revelation about the nature of man, interspersed with absolutely insane bullshit that couldn't possibly be true. Read Interpretation of Dreams. It's a little facetious to recommend such an early work but that's basically Freud in a nutshell.

[Anonymous No.22743331]

The idea that narcissism is culturally unavoidable and increasing is ridiculously depressing. Fuck you Lasch.

[Anonymous No.22743485]

>>22743331
don't shoot the messenger anon

[Anonymous No.22743539]

never heard of this guy. is he an elitist like mosca or mills?

[Anonymous No.22743585]

>>22740756
>most built on questionable premises.
Name one premise you found questionable. This critique is lazy and empty

[Anonymous No.22743589]

>>22743539
he's a populist in the vein of thomas jefferson

[Anonymous No.22743645]

>>22743286
Read jewish mysticism, it has all the good parts of Freud with none of the bad

[Anonymous No.22743684]

>>22743645
sounds schizo

[Anonymous No.22744491]

bump

[Anonymous No.22744709]

>>22743684
It is very much schizo. The Zohar conceives of reality as divided between spheres ascending from low to high cyclically.
And likens the people of Israel's relationship to God as akin to the relations between a man and a woman..,

[Anonymous No.22744823]

>>22744709
whats the qrd on how we get from there to freud

[Anonymous No.22744831]

>>22744823
sex addiction

[Anonymous No.22745686]

Any Lasch-type authors I should read? I've been recommended Primal Screams by Mary Eberstadt.

[Anonymous No.22745716]

>>22740626
Lasch and DH Lawrence are my only friends.

[Anonymous No.22745921]

>>22741070
>Atheists have really no introspection. They killed morality precisely to seize power.
tragically accurate

[Anonymous No.22746572]

>>22745921
They don't seem to have much power
>>22745686
He's pretty transparent with his sources, what part of him are you interested in?

[Anonymous No.22747313]

>>22743589
based

[Anonymous No.22747333]

>>22747313
test

[Anonymous No.22747343]

>>22740626
It’s bullshit

>Lasch's critique of "narcissism": middlebrow pseudoscience for godless conservatives

>Empirically wrong and confused about Freud.

>Contemporary political punditry is totally overrun with journalists and social media personalities psychoanalyzing each other — and almost all of it is complete bullshit. That’s why I wrote Most polipsych punditry is complete bullshit a few years ago. If you’d like to see that case laid out in general, with some rigor and patience, I recommend that you click on the link above. Here, I just want to take a moment to address one of the most persistent and idiotic cases of polipsych punditry in our discourse today: right-wing folks calling people “narcissists”, ostensibly in allusion to Christopher Lasch.

A little background in case you have blessedly never run into this. A few years ago a handful of journalists and podcasters loudly discovered Lasch for the first time:

>Lasch isn’t some obscure thinker — he was a bestseller, he was often discussed in mainstream media, and he was extremely influential among American conservatives — so it was surreal to see a whole orbit of people who get paid to get talk about politics all learn about him at the same time. It’s gonna be really funny when all these blue state humanities majors turned midlife crisis Republicans suddenly discover hidden gems like James Dobson and D. James Kennedy.

>Anyway what matters here is that Lasch wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism. CoN is probably best understood as an attempt to rehabilitate ordinary Protestant right ideas about the cultural consequences of godlessness for godless conservative elites. Critics who think this a simplification of Lasch have likely just simplified Protestant thought, which has a whole sophisticated theology on Luciferian pride and how the perversions of vanity and selfishness play out culturally and psychologically. Consciously or by osmosis, Lasch has plainly absorbed these ideas; his innovation is to try to rearticulate them through a quasi-Freudian, quasi-clinical lens of psychological narcissism.

>This angle is perfect for political pundits who want to play amateur psychologist — a good description of the author himself, who of course has no formal training or professional background in psychology. It’s also a good fit for influencers who want to pander to the Protestant right, but who find religious claims about sin and godlessness a little too passé. It is, finally, a good fit for the extremely lazy, because in its popular form Lasch’s theory has become a hammer that turns everything into a nail: everything my haters do is narcissism, the reigning psychopathology of our age.

[Anonymous No.22747348]

>>22747343
>The basic problem here is that Lasch’s claim is just empirically incorrect. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the actual condition in question with all of its pathological psychodynamics and behavioral problems, is comically rare in the United States. Studies through 1994 repeatedly rounded its prevalence in the population to 0%; in 1995, an outlier study put it at 4.4%, and since then more rigorous studies have dropped it down to somewhere between 1% and .1%. Informal estimates usually go up to around 5%, but we are not talking about anything resembling an epidemic here, much less some kind of bizarre universal condition.

>Set aside the fact that basically none of our cultural commentators have an ounce of the clinical training you’d need to make this diagnosis, and that even if they did there is simply no way they could reliably do so as they usual do: remotely, by eyeballing strangers online and running with their intuition. Set all of that aside, because what these numbers tell us is that if we actually institutionalized your average American and attempted a formal, rigorous diagnosis, the odds of finding an actual narcissist are in the low single digits.

>I dwell on this point because Lasch’s entire claim to credibility here relies entirely on his supposed clinical rigor. He dismisses other writers who’ve explored similar ideas because “they use the term narcissism so loosely that it retains little of its psychological content,” they “dress up moralistic platitutes in psychiatric garb,” and in their writing, “theoretical rigor gives way”. He insists that “theoretical precision about narcissism is important” and scolds “the refusal of recent critics of narcissism to discuss the etiology of narcissism or to pay much attention to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject.” This bluster is so interminable that we shouldn’t be surprised when the Bari Weisses of the world come away thinking that they’ve just read a scientific paper.

>But by his own measure, Lasch is directly contradicted by the science. In a crucial early passage, he specifically grounds his argument in a supposed “increase in the number of narcissistic patients” and “psychiatric testimony about the prevalence of narcissism.” He gives a whole series of anecdotal quotes — for example, “Burness E. Moore notes that narcissistic disorders have become more and more common” — that he presumably wouldn’t give if his argument didn’t rely on them. What are we to make of the fact that his specific, central claim about the clinical prevalence of narcissism is contradicted by every actual study on the topic?

[Anonymous No.22747350]

>>22747348
>The standard move, in my experience, has been to try to rescue Lasch’s claim by trivializing it. Instead of arguing that society is being hit with a tidal wave of NPD, you talk about narcissism as a kind of vague Freudian psychodynamic that we can’t expect science to recognize. This is directly at odds with Lasch’s specific argument, but we should also note how radically it misunderstands Freud.

>Freud, like Lasch, sees narcissism everywhere. But not, he writes, as some historically recent pathology:

>"On the contrary it is probable that this narcissism is the universal and original state of things, from which object-love is only later developed, without the narcissism necessarily disappearing on that account…we must reckon [narcissism] as belonging to normal life, such as the psychical behavior of a person in love, during an organic illness or when asleep."1

>Narcissism is not in Freudian theory a sinister or pathological concept; he is careful to distinguish between what he calls “excessive narcissism” and “normal narcissism,” and readily points out benign examples of the latter. (For example, “In a sleeper the primal state of distribution of the libido is restored — total narcissism…”).

>So we arrive at the hilarious triple bind that the Laschian critics of narcissism have caught themselves in. First, it is supposed to be some kind of massive world-historic epidemic that’s so powerful that it can explain not just contemporary culture writ large, but also the internal psychology of everyone in it. But then, they have to insist that this epidemic is also so subtle that it can’t be detected clinically, and can only be understood as an implication of Freudian theory. But then they have to insist that it really isn’t what we see in Freudian theory either, since Freudian narcissism can be entirely benign.

>1. The Libido Theory and Narcissism, Lecture XXVI, Introductory Lectures.

[Anonymous No.22747354]

>>22747350
>In an extraordinary aside in CoN, Lasch himself admits that he isn’t really doing Freudian theory, either:

>"Freud’s extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, history, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of society, but his clinical investigations constitute storehouse of indispensable ideas…"

>This is cargo cult logic! Freud indeed makes all kinds of bizarre claims about infancy, for example, but you can’t just splice them off from his theory of the Oedipus complex; they were directly related, and insofar as one was wrong the other had to be modified. Freud, contra Lasch, argues that narcissistic conflicts between the ego and superego are a defining feature of civilization in general, and not just of post-nineteenth century civilization in particular. But this isn’t just some whimsical claim that Freud tacked onto the rest of his theory: it’s a direct logical implication of it which he spells out at length in Civilization and Its Discontents. If Lasch has decided that this is a historically new phenomenon then he owes us an entirely new psychodynamic theory.

>Don’t expect one from the Laschians. This talk about “narcissism” has nothing to do with narcissistic personality disorder, with Freudian / post-Freudian theory, or with our culture or with how anyone thinks about anything. Godless middlebrow conservative pundits should really just drop it and return to the old Protestant critiques of pride and vanity. Say what you will about them, but at least they make sense.


https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/laschs-critique-of-narcissism-middlebrow

[Anonymous No.22747390]

>>22747343
That's a lot of text spent attacking him without addressing a single position he holds. Also a "critique" of a book he wrote almost twenty years earlier than the one in the OP; the psychoanalysis stuff does not make an appearance in Revolt.

[Anonymous No.22747424]

>>22747354
Can't think of a more pitifully midwitted attack on Lasch than this guy.

[Anonymous No.22747430]

>>22740733
Ortega said all of this decades prior in a book ironically called Revolt of the Masses

[Anonymous No.22747474]

>>22747348
>>22747350
>>22747354
>In ignoring the psychological dimension, these authors also miss the social. They fail to explore any of the character traits associated with pathological narcissism, WHICH IN LESS EXTREME FORM APPEAR IN SUCH PROFUSION IN THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF OUR AGE: [...]
Did that retard you're quoting even read the book?

[Anonymous No.22747520]

>>22747474
um, sorry sweaty, but if it isn't serious enough to have a label, then it doesnt exist :) debunked by real science :))

[Anonymous No.22747841]

Reminds me of this classic

[Anonymous No.22747883]

>>22747343
>the author himself, who of course has no formal training or professional background in psychology
aaaand stopped reading there

[Anonymous No.22748115]

>>22747354
>>22747350
>>22747348
>>22747343
These people have leveled some serious accusations at your posts. Care to defend them?4

[Anonymous No.22748124]

>>22748115
it's some paypig of this "carl" substack
>we looked at the data ok? and the "studies" says people are only 5% Narcissistic ok??

[Anonymous No.22748160]

>>22744823
I have made posts about this before on /lit/. I do not know if Freud read the Zohar, but it seems entirely possible to me his Jewish background may have had some influence over his beliefs/ideas. There are key differences of course.
Freud is fundamentally modern and so sees the individual as the primary metaphysical unit--such that higher values have no real existence separate from the individual will.
That said, the area i see some resemblance in is how the Zohar divides the soul into 3 parts: a super-soul, spirit, and vital soul.
These are conceived hierarchically from low to high, yet basically interconnected.
The vital soul is askin to the fuel that allows a flame to burn; it is our physical bodily reality and necessities.
The spirit is the flame itself our shape, and the super-soul is the barely visible blue flame at the very top
The super-soul is the higher order conceptualization of your character.
I am rendering this mystical language in more modern, psychological rhetoric, but basically the super-soul might be described as our capacity for meta-cognition and meta consciousness: our awareness of our self as self.
In these terms i can see some resemblance to Freud's Id, ego, and super-ego
In addition Freud's cosmology may be described as Gnostic: the individual's desires are in fundamental conflict with reality leading to necessary repression.
Similarly the Zohar has Gnostic elements, God is separated from reality by layers and layers. The individual soul descends from its divine source becoming separate from it though ultimately returning

[Anonymous No.22748274]

>>22748124
People will pay you to write that fucking trash?

[Anonymous No.22748285]

>>22747883
Academic gatekeepers are cancerous. You another tumor anon?

[Anonymous No.22748303]

>>22748285
he's quoting the original carl substack article, which says you can't write on psychology unless you have a phd in psychology... kek

[Anonymous No.22749175]

>>22740626
>Buy One True Heaven
>takes 2 months to ship
>After 2 months i get a message that the book cant be delivered