This article appeared in the January 1980 issue of Christopher Street under the title "The New Narcissism and Homosexuality: The Psychiatric Connection."
Long before Dreyfus’s days, the homosexual was already one of psychiatry’s favorite scapegoats. American psychiatry’s true feeling about homosexuals showed in all its ugliness once more in the trial of Dan White. Let us hope that the White affair will arouse the sense of justice in the gay community and in the hearts of all those who sympathize with such victimization; and that the result will be the long-overdue expulsion of the psychiatric liars from the courtroom—whether they come to pervert justice by imprisoning the innocent or by exculpating the guilty.
—Thomas Szasz, Inquiry magazine (August 1979)
The New Narcissism
Many psychiatric terms have entered our everyday conversation. Projection, denial, sublimation, regression, depression, neurosis, masochism—these words are used so commonly to descrive such regular features of so many that their medicolegal ferocity and their ability to stigmatize have been substantially defused.
Or eliminated. Neurosis, for example, used to intimidate by suggesting a severe psychiatric condition. It is now, however, recognized as so universal a phenomenon that its characterization as such no longer appears in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As was the case when homosexuality was deleted, millions of people were suddenly “cured” of their “mental disorder.”
A newer term to the public, narcissism, may just be the latest pop psychology stigma to wend its way into the American household. Like neurosis, it may eventually be defused or replaced. (In fact, this process may have already begun. In the Woody Allen film Manhattan, the protagonist twice confesses, “My analyst thinks I’m a narcissist.”) In the meantime, “narcissism,” like “homosexuality,” is certain to become the newest source of psychiatric stereotyping, oppression, and abuse. Its principal victims, incidentally, will once again be homosexuals.
That which inspired Woody Allen’s sense of humor inspired in Christopher Lasch an apocalyptic vision. The theoretical foundation of his much-touted, best-selling doomsday book The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1978) is in fact our newest psychiatric classification of character pathology: “narcissistic personality disorder.” Lasch’s keynote address on this subject at the 1978 American Psychiatric Association convention in Atlanta received a standing ovation. (At a neighboring hotel, standing ovations were also accorded Anita Bryant and President Carter for their invocations at the Southern Baptist Convention. In the midst of these events, “The Dick Cavett Show” featured a two-evening debate on homosexuality. Cavett’s panelists included only one psychiatrist: Dr. Charles Socarides. A flauntingly orthodox psychoanalyst, Socarides had just published a “new” text, Homosexuality [Jason Aronson, 1978], a desperate face-lift of his earlier work The Overt Homosexual [Grune and Stratton, 1968]. Socarides had also just been appointed consulting psychiatrist for the Department of Defense.)
Following Lasch’s talk at the convention, narcissism was illustrated by a full-length presentation of Sunset Boulevard, popular among film buffs as a Hollywood genre classic but sometimes derogated for its camp appeal to “the homosexual.”
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The post-Freudian psychoanalytic conception of “pathological narcissism” was developed by Columbia University Medical Center’s Dr. Otto Kernberg, in some conflict with the similar observations of Dr. Heinz Kohut at the University of Chicago. The clinical syndromes of narcissism are described with the most arcane (for the lay reader) analytic liturgy in Kernberg’s book Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (Jason Aronson, 1975). This information concerns the layman, however, since she, whether feminist, atheist, communist, single, or—especially—homosexual is precisely the antisocial deviant who will be most victimized by this new classification’s vagueness and potential for political abuse.
The work of Kernberg and Kohut responded to the changing symptoms of patients in analytic therapy. According to one psychiatrist quoted by Lasch, “You used to see people coming in with handwashing compulsions, phobias, and familiar neuroses. Now you see mostly narcissists.” According to Kernberg, the narcissist is summarily characterized by an inability “to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving growing identification with other people’s happiness and achievements is tragically beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities.”
In an interview for Psychology Today (June 1978), Dr. Kernberg observed that narcissists are often highly intelligent, creative, and productive individuals. “And, of course, narcissistic personalities can be found as leaders in political life, or in industry or academia, or as outstanding performers in the theater or the arts.” In the next breath, however, he cautions that “careful observation of their productivity over a long period of time will give evidence of superficiality and flightiness in their work, of a lack of depth which reveals emptiness behind the glitter. Quite frequently, narcissists are the ‘promising’ geniuses who then surprise other people by never fulfilling the promise of their talents, whose development ultimately proves to be banal.”
In fairness, the psychoanalysts are the first to admit that their work on narcissism is embryonic. Kernberg’s text actually concludes with an apologia: “As our clinical and theoretical understanding of narcissism progresses, some of the confusing terminological issues and discrepancies between metapsychological formulations and clinical observations may be resolved into a more sharpened, circumscribed, and clinically relevant usage of the term narcissism.” As if it weren’t difficult enough to circumscribe and sharpen a concept like “narcissism” in the lab, Lasch has exploited this concept to characterize an entire culture.
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As beheld by the professor of Narcissism, today’s culture is without beauty. It is a venereal eyesore, a concubinage of vanity and cowardice in the outskirts of hell. Lasch exposes the culture of narcissism, beneath its consumes of self-improvement, for what he sees it to be—coy, castrating, and thoroughly corrupt: “In the Seventies, a harsher time, it appears that the prostitute, not the salesman, best exemplifies the qualities indispensable in American society…She craves admiration but scorns those who provide it and thus derives little gratification from her social successes…She remains a loner depending on others only as a hawk depends on chickens.” In a word, the culture of narcissism is feminine, and patriarchal order is threatened by it.
The children of narcissism are also belligerent. In scornful transgression of authority, they wanted in aimless search of the paternal discipline they never knew. Narcissistic expectations have the ring of “boundless optimism,” but pierce with dissonant undertones of suppressed rage. In Lasch’s ears, the hopes of today’s generations become the selfish cries of unruly brats. Narcissists unconsciously seek the loving punishments that would set them straight. In the Law of the Father, in the guiding strength of his right hand, lies the narcissist’s only true hope for salvation: “The moral discipline formerly associated with the work ethic still retains a value independent of the role it once played in the defense of property rights. That discipline—indispensable to the task of building a new order—endures most of all in those who knew the old order only as a broken promise, yet who took the promise more seriously than those who merely took it for granted.” These trumpets of rectitude have already been dismissed by many critics as the familiar racket of reactionary backlash. But many critics have ignored—or perhaps not heard—its invocation of psychoanalytic psychiatry, of America’s most subtly reverberant organ of patriarchal authority.
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The Culture of Narcissism is difficult to read. Its prose is theoretical, condescending, and as completely devoid of humor as it is of hope. The sensibility of moral outrage is sustained; a clear sense of direction, however, is not. In an early chapter, Lasch explains that “for the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design.” The ensuing chapters of Narcissism wander aimlessly in reflections of psychoanalysis. Accusations of narcissistic decadence are zigzaggingly leveled at life-styles, ideologies, technologies, and bureaucracies; beyond that there is no unifying design, no sense of destination, no real shape.
Lasch is fixated in the present, rarely projecting, except in his despair, to the future. When his gaze finally does lift from its downward cast, it does so reluctantly, as if it were too late to anticipate anything but doom. That “the struggle against bureaucracy…requires a struggle against capitalism itself” comes too late in the last chapter to be anything but conspicuous. Two sentences later, Lasch’s gaze has shifted abruptly from left to right: “Only then will the productive capacities of modern capitalism, together with the scientific knowledge that now serves it, come to serve the interests of humanity instead.” Lasch’s ambivalence here better characterizes the narcissist than the “rugged individualist” of his allusions.
Lasch’s indictments are sometimes obscured by intimidating psychoanalytic imagery. More often, his use of the language of psychoanalysis sounds pretentious and archaic: “Chronically bored, restlessly in search of instantaneous intimacy—of emotional titillation without involvement and dependence—the narcissist is promiscuous and often pansexual as well, since the fusion of pregenital and Oedipal impulses in the service of aggression encourages polymorphous perversity.”
An allegedly typical defense mechanism of clinical narcissism is “pseudo self-insight,” a capacity for superficial self-reflection and criticism. An instance of this mechanism occurs in Narcissism when Lasch tries to mitigate the contradiction that may become apparent to the reader: “Theoretical precision about narcissism is important not only because the idea is so readily susceptible to moralistic inflation but because the practice of equating narcissism with everything selfish and disagreeable mitigates against historical specificity. Men have always been selfish, groups have always been ethnocentric; nothing is gained by giving these qualities a psychiatric label.”
That said, Lasch resumes his otherwise nonstop fire-and-brimstone denunciation of every conceivable social vicissitude, from “The Apotheosis of Individualism” to “The Eclipse of Achievement,” from “The Sexual ‘Revolution’” to “The Socialization and Reproduction and the Collapse of Authority,” from “Narcissism, Schizophrenia and the Family” to “Feminism and the Intensification of Sexual Warfare”—all are seen as the “narcissistic lesions” of Oedipal disease.
When they are mentioned at all, any positive aspirations or achievements of today’s culture are dismissed as characteristically superficial. Lasch seems utterly unable “to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity.”
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Lasch repeatedly asserts hopelessly unsubstantiated psychoanalytic biases as if they were the proven formulas of major empirical scientists. But Lasch sees no inconsistency in reducing the scrupulously documented findings of preeminent sex researchers Masters and Johnson to one completely false and astonishingly arrogant quip: “The famous Masters-Johnson report on female sexuality added to anxieties by depicting women as sexually insatiable, inexhaustible in their capacity to experience orgasm after orgasm.”
There is no mention here of The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (Fawcett), as Erich Fromm described it in 1970, or The Death of Psychiatry (Penguin), which E. Fuller Torrey predicted in 1975. Lasch also neglects to counter Martin Gross’s devastating critique of psychoanalytic theory and practice within the American psychiatric industry, The Psychological Society (Random House, 1978), and he barely mentions Thomas Szasz, perhaps the most articulate critic of psychoanalysis. Lasch skirts the fact that his indictments are based on the Freudian and post-Freudian assumptions, which have been superseded at most levels of theory and practice within the profession itself.
For Lasch, reduction and extrapolation are the dominating principles of criticism. Since psychoanalytic theory also accounts for psychosis, Lasch is quite comfortable in suggesting that mass murderers are the predictable result of Oedipal malnurture: “The criminal who murders or kidnaps a celebrity takes on the glamor of his victim. The Manson gang with their murder of Sharon Tate and her friends, the Symbionese Liberation Army with its abduction of Patty Hearst, share with the presidential and would-be assassins of recent years a similar psychology.” Thus, Charles Manson is a narcissist. Are all narcissists potential Charles Mansons? “The contemporary psychoanalytic position,” Lasch posits, is that “schizophrenia is above all a narcissistic disorder. It is not surprising, therefore, that studies of the family background of schizophrenic patients point to a number of features also associated with narcissistic families.” The implicit relationship between narcissism and psychosis here gains special credibility by the discreet omission of what is apparently for Lasch a minor detail: that the evidence for physiological anomaly as the basis of most true schizophrenia has never been stronger. But even before these discoveries, the psychoanalytic theories of origin were already being discredited for lack of empirical data. As Gross concludes in The Psychological Society, “Events move quickly in the psychiatric world, but one fact is indisputable. As scientific advance continues in finding the cause of schizophrenia and the affective psychoses, and new treatments are developed to cure these scourges, the primitive cultist view of the Freudian revolution will recede as effectively as did the centuries-old theory of ‘humors’ causing sickness within the human body.”
The Connection to Homosexuality
Neither Kernberg nor Lasch talks much about an important historical correlate of narcissism: homosexuality. Since narcissism (“retarded adolescence,” “arrested psychosexual development”) is for most analysts the very definition of homosexuality, the relative absence of homosexuality from both books is both conspicuous and suspicious. While Kernberg briefly discusses what many analysts still call “sexual inversion,” his few remarks leave no doubt that he holds the thoroughly discredited (even officially, within his own profession) orthodox psychoanalytic view that all homosexuality is pathologic and always narcissistically so. “We may classify male homosexuality along a continuum that differentiates the degree of severity of pathology of internalized object relations.”
It is unclear what and whom Lasch is referring to when he discusses narcissists who are not necessarily more numerous than in the past, just more “conspicuous.” According to Lasch, “radical lesbians…carry the logic of separation to its ultimate futility.” Yet male homosexuality is not mentioned directly—not once, even though “the” male homosexual is clearly Lasch’s archetype of narcissistic decay.
Is Lasch subliminally courting homophobia? Is The Culture of Narcissism, despite its costume of social criticism, actually a gigantic subliminal attack on homosexuality?
Before determining the tactical advantages of playing down connections between narcissism and homosexuality, the substance of these connections must be examined. Are homosexuals narcissistic? Are they sociopathic? Are they paranoid? Are they (sado) masochistic? Is there indeed some truth to what Kernberg, Socarides, Bieber, Hatterer, Bergler say, to what an entire psychiatric and psychoanalytic tradition has been saying about homosexuality for more than fifty years?
Yes—the same kind of truth that labels blacks as sociopathic and of inferior intelligence because of their higher crime, unemployment, and illiteracy rates. Many homosexuals are obligatory narcissists. Deprived of role models, of social structuring, of identity, constantly ridiculed, threatened, punished, and endangered for natural sexual instincts, homosexuals have been completely excluded (not unlike women) from honest participation in the patriarchal societies they have lived in for almost two milleniums. The “narcissistic” self-absorption that so many homosexual exhibit may actually be among the most extraordinary examples of human adaptability in the face of adversity, in the absence of alternatives, that nature has ever demonstrated.
Beyond all this lies the psychoanalytic piece de resistance: “distorted object relations.” Homosexuals are allegedly incapable of establishing fully committed, “mature” relationships. Their sexual communications are said to be based entirely in fantasy. Worse, these fantasies are described as universally infantile and sadomasochistic. This line of reasoning can be similarly dissected. Homosexual coupling in patriarchal cultures has always been so fraught with guilt, with taboo, with serious, sometimes mortal danger that some homosexuals (like some heterosexuals with comparably repressive backgrounds) have been conditioned to include those elements in their lovemaking. For most homosexuals, as for most human beings, the instinct to love must be gratified even where risk or pain is conditionally involved. If that risk has been sufficiently augmented by sociocultural mores (the orthodox, patriarchal religions and their related structures), these individuals may have “sadomasochistic” difficulties in expressing their warmest emotions. (“There’s no question about it. Absolutely, unequivocally, religious orthodoxy, whether Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant, is responsible for a significant degree of sexual dysfunction [Masters and Johnson].) If th resultant conditioning is sufficiently aversive, some of those same individuals may indeed have repeated difficulty in establishing close attachments, even in situations where risk has been lessened. If these people are thus narcissistic and sadomasochistic, they have been made so. Even today, prevailing social circumstances discourage most homosexuals and many heterosexuals from achieving sexual health and happiness.
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What would be the advantage to Lasch and to Kernberg of so conspicuously understating and avoiding the psychoanalytic connection between narcissism and homosexuality? Simply this. The orthodox psychoanalysts and their intellectual converts are not unaware of the scientific fragility of their hypotheses. If the new narcissism were to be immediately assaulted on the basis of disreputable theories of homosexuality, its credibility would be seriously—perhaps morally—undermined. By subliminally rather than overtly suggesting the connection, they minimize the risk of adverse publicity from gay protest.
Paranoid? Lasch has recently attended advisory sessions and a special White House dinner with President and Mrs. Carter. The reason? The Culture of Narcissism has been generously cited in presidential press interviews and on prime-time television as one of the most important influences on the president’s political thinking.
Paranoid? A major goal of psychoanalytic pathologists of homosexuality has long been to find some way of publicly exposing the “true nature” of homosexuality. In the italicized words with which Dr. Edmund Bergler concluded his most inquisitionally homophobic book, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (Hill and Wang, 1956):
The only effective way of fighting and counteracting homosexuality would be the wide dissemination of the knowledge that there is nothing glamorous about suffering from the disease known as homosexuality, that the disease can be cured, and that this apparently sexual disorder is invariably coupled with sever unconscious self-damage that will inevitably show up outside the sexual sphere as well, because it embraces the entire personality. ... This triad of countermeasures could be effective—in the long run.
With The Culture of Narcissism, that “way” has been found.
(Incidentally, Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Luna could have been written by Bergler. It is the most recent example of the intellectual Left’s discovery of the new narcissism. Here, Irving Bieber’s Close-Binding-Intimate [CBI] mother unconsciously encourages the “polymorphous perversity” of her heroin-addicted son in an incestuous minestrone of indigestible Freudian leftovers, serve on stock Marxist platitudes. In Luna, homosexuality is oh-so-daringly unmasked as Mom-induced narcissism. If we were to eliminate capitalism and restore Dad to his rightful place in the nuclear family, psychoanalyst Bertolucci deduces, narcissistic pathologies like CBI-Mom and homosexuals would disappear [along with property, class, disharmony, and evil]. The picture could not be more clear: the new Left has discovered neo-Freud.)
The Bergler quotation highlights another important similarity between the new narcissism and homosexuality: the disastrous results of treating either conditions with what is allegedly the only hope for “cure”—psychoanalysis. The unbreakable strength of the narcissist’s (and of the homosexual’s) defenses is said to render “the narcissistic lesion” refractory to successful therapeutic intervention. Recidivism in therapy is consequently great.
So the patient most frequently encountered by today’s psychoanalyst is “the narcissist.” Narcissists are male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. But not all males, females, and heterosexuals are narcissists. All homosexuals, however, are. All suffer from pathology (smothering, sadistic mothers and absent, weak fathers). All narcissists (all homosexuals) could be treated, cured, with psychoanalysis. But because of their narcissistic belligerence, they in fact do poorly. Specifically, if they don’t drop out early, they exhibit an extraordinary, often unassailable resistance to insight and change, depending on the character and extent of their pathology.
So the death of psychanalytic credibility is not due to the empirical dismantling of psychoanalytic theories, not due to the $60,000 cost of a five-year, five-days-a-week analysis, not due to the analysts’ disgraceful 33 percent “success rate” for treating these “disorders” (or anything else, for that matter), not due to the fact that a patient has a better prognosis for symptomatic improvement by not undergoing therapy, and not due to the fact that analytic institutes are now attracting few candidates. No: we are to believe that the failures of psychoanalysis are due to a recalcitrant, sociopathic therapeutic population for which there appears to be scant prognostic hope, for they are the culture of narcissism.
This is where nearly a century of (orthodox) psychoanalytic theorizing has brought us—back, full circle, to the nuclear family; back to “morality,” to “discipline”; back to religious orthodoxy, to sexual repression, to homophobia; back, in other words, to patriarchy. We have returned to the civilization that engendered our need for psychoanalysis in the first place, returned to the “civilization” of our most wintery and profound discontents, born, yet again, of prejudice, of fear, of superstition, and of ignorance. ❡
