CONSIDER THE parallel problems of faith which bedevil both Christians and Freudians. The two groups subscribe to systems of thought which account for the origin, present behavior, and likely end of all humanity. Both rely for guidance on assertive, highly-trained, and often pessimistic experts. The substantive teachings of both systems are found in a series of books allegedly linked by a single author and a single author and a single point of view. Those outside are discouraged from converting by evident discrepancies between theory and practice.

The Minimal Self, Christopher Lasch's book of all-over-the-page analysis and erudite grumbling, represents one such discrepancy. A sociologist by profession. Lasch made his reputation several years ago with The Culture of Narcissism. In that book as in this, he tries to explain modern life by generalizing from Freud's theories of personality to the condition of society as a whole. He argues that contemporary culture fosters narcissistic personalities. The discrepancy comes when Lasch, as a faithful son of Sigmund, attacks writers who do just what he is doing Criticizing Herbert Marcuse, a noted re-interpreter of psychoanalytic thought, Lasch claims that

... psychoanalysis offers "the most concrete least concerns itself with developing a general theory of culture and sticks instead to clinical concepts.

Lasch lays down this rule only after breaking it for over 230 pages of thoroughly repellent prose.

Lasch's book is an attempt to describe today's Everyman as "a minimal or narcisstic self". This psychological construct is "above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union."

However, the author means not merely to describe personality but to identify and to help solve its problems. The subtitle of his book is "psychic Survival in Troubled Times." Lasch wants to help people recover a mature and realistic sense of personality. For this task, Freud is not enough. The author drags in the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition as well when he asserts that genuine self-affirmation

remains a possibility precisely to the degree that an older conception of personality, rooted in Judaeo-Christian traditions, has persisted alongside a behavioral or therapeutc conception.

Evidently Lasch feels himself capable not only of a wild expansion of Freudian thought but also of taking on and combining the problems of faith and interpretation involved in both systems.

Lasch's work must be seen less as an individual effort than as a late and rather dull development in a very long tradition of American thought. Lasch belongs to that school of intellectuals which insists on understanding life from a theoretical point of view. This school is in the habit of frequently changing its textbooks; but the form of its message (as opposed to the matter) remains constant. Whether one is religious, Marxist, or Freudian (to take these texts in historical, perhaps hysterical order), one is in possession of the truth: the welfare of the rest of the country, whether it likes it or not, depends on its being enlightened, converted, and, afterwards, being helped to lead its new life. Any adulteration of or addition to the message is tolerable so long as it gets through and so long as the citizens acquire or confirm the habit of theoretical thinking. Thus Lasch, embarking on a psychoanalytic critique of American politics, economics, literature and art, stops long enough to tell us that our "salvation" must come from those nifty Judaeo-Christian habits which Freud's work has done so much to undermine.

The evident silliness of such messages aside, the danger of this school is that the too-systematic quest for an abstract goal can lead one from mere intellectual confusion to damnable, personal corruption. It is through such hunting, so often mistaken for the pursuit of happiness, that cultured or half religious people are transformed into mere snobs, feminists to shrews, athletes to books, and scientists to subversives. Lasch has metamorphosed from a would-be thinker into a rather loose writer.

Lasch claims that two basic personality types. Narcissus and Prometheus, are prototypical in Modern society. Both are variants of the lower-case narcissistic self, which is unable to accept its postnatal existence separate from nature. Narcissisus continually seeks to rejoin nature, while Prometheus tries to impose his infantile fantasies of omnipotence on it. So far so good.

But this observation immediately plunges Lasch into the difficult work of splitting infantile hairs. While the author agrees with scientists and industrialists that control over nature is a good thing, and with environmentalists that nature must be preserved (these two groups being loosely identified with Prometheus and Narcissus), he wants their actions to be motivated more by reality than by infantile fantasy. Lasch evidently fears right actions performed for the wrong reasons more than he fears wrong actions or their consequences. Psychologically, one supposes, this is typical and perhaps sound. However, from a practical, political, on ethical point of view, it seems impertinent.

If there is any grounds for picturing our present culture as one of narcissism, Lasch writes, "it is because that culture tends to favor regressive solutions instead of "evolutionary" solutions..." New ways of raising children and organizing families deprive people of old models of authority which, while inadequate, provided a resting place on the road to maturity. Therapy is being used, Lasch argues, not to help but to confuse and to take advantage of people; in the workplace, especially, psychological legerdemain is used to cloak management's lack of substantive responses to the needs of working people.

With the ego stalled in narcissistic confusion and therapy too garbled to help, reality fades quickly. An economy based on management and consumption rather than on production and entrepeneurism intensifies the problem. As workers, citizens know that a good image is more important than real work. As consumers, they are programmed to define themselves in terms of ever-changing products and commodities; they lose their sense of a permanent identity and of their lives as a narrative in the public world Lasch observes that:

What has weakened is not so much the structure of moral obligations and commandments as the belief in a world that survives its inhabitants.