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Christopher Lasch, "The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times"

The redefinition of selfhood, through growing from despair in an uncertain world, offers the promise of a new culture based not on the technological conquest of nature but on its loving cultivation.

Summary: The Minimal Self

Rating: 5

The book is disturbing and insightful. Though written in the 80s, this social/psychological/political/aesthetic critique describes today's disconnect between self and society: the lack of humanisitic glue; the sad (and secret) nihilism of religions that can no longer keep the genie of destruction corked up; the merging of mass culture with mass destruction. Just as it must've been two decades ago, the book is an amazing wake up call. My copy, however, was in poor shape. The binding is upside down and the pages are falling out.

Summary: A Genuinely Great Mind

Rating: 5

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.

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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123