Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism

Excerpt

The Americanization of Narcissism is a book that is full of surprises. Based on its title and its author (an historian of psychoanalysis), one might expect an “externalist” account of how the analytic concept of narcissism, and its treatment, underwent significant changes as psychoanalysis took root in America, and this country became the center of the analytic universe following the Second World War. As has often been argued, Freud’s deep pessimism about therapy in general, and the treatment of narcissistic disorders in particular, and his disenchanted aspiration to transform “hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness” (SE2: 305) by encouraging us to stop trying, as one patient said, “‘to be something better than what, with our origin, we are capable of being’” (SE9: 182), was a poor fit for a hopelessly optimistic American culture committed to self-reinvention, self-realization, and, of course, the boundless pursuit of happiness. As a result, Freudian therapy and theory had to be revised, reformed, and ultimately rejected in order to make it acceptable and marketable to Americans longing for a more joyful, exuberant, and fulfilled life. But this oft-told story is not Lunbeck’s. Instead, her book combines: (1) an “internalist” account of how long-simmering debates within the psychoanalytic community over the nature, pathogenesis, and treatment of increasingly common “narcissistic” disorders culminated in a “revolution” in the 1960s and 70s, led by Viennese émigrés Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, which finally overthrew Freudian orthodoxy in both theory and practice; and, (2) an “externalist” account of how the analytic term “narcissism” then crossed over into the cultural discourse of the period and became the dominant conceptual tool for diagnosing and denouncing the failings of the emerging American character. …