Abstract

What is most interesting about Lasch's Culture of Narcissism is not so much the originality of his thesis, but the fact that it is at this time that such a thesis has begun to penetrate American consciousness. As Lasch himself points out, his account is not altogether new: it has illustrious precedents in Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt School. Earlier versions of his thesis can already be found in those brilliant pages of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where Marx describes as the most debilitating features of alienation man's separation from species being and from other human beings 2 — typical traits of the narcissistic personality.