Lasch's argument is undoubtedly attractive. Especially promising is his analysis of the ways in which therapy obscures questions of economic justice. However, Lasch supports his argument more with literary, intellectual, and emotional evidence than with material suggestive of social reality; his book seems more the handiwork of an individual mind than a vital analysis of the way people live. In the question of therapy and justice, for instance. Lasch is limited to a citation or two from business school texts on how psychology can be used to manipulate employees; he suggest and asserts rather than develops his case. On other questions, Lasch moves, in arguments of variable strength, towards a complete articulation at which he never arrives. One is left with the frustrating feeling that Lasch has not grasped the nature of the most important questions he faces or considered his ability to treat them in a book of this kind.

Lasch's discussion of contemporary emotional life, while apt, is under whelming. He notes that "the contemporary survival mentality...turns from public questions" This statement, while accurate, does not consider the American tradition of shrugging off public life as unimportant or as already hopeless. Implying that he is dealing with a new phenomenon, Lasch skirts the issue of historical depth. He is justly disturbed by the fact that the language and imagery of concentration camps has penetrated ordinary life. He thinks that to emphasize survivial alone and to reject self-sacrifice is despicable. But this judgement is qualified by his concession that "Contemporary politics to be sure, provides an substance of realistic reasons for regarding sacrifice in this light." He agrees with the goals of the antiwar and environmental movements, but feels that they "appeal to some of the worst impulses in contemporary culture." Here one is tempted to conclude that Lasch is putting the mere survival of his own argument ahead of all the particular qualities--clarity is one of them-which make it worthwhile.

Lasch's case against Promethean technology is surprising in its detail but unconvincing on the whole. He suggests that technology has provided us with so many choices as consumers that choices no longer have consequences or indeed meaning: "the freedom to choose amounts in practice to an abstention from choice." This seems doubtful. Are we, in fact, dying as a nation, as a culture, or as individuals from a surfeit of technological riches? Perhaps death from such causes is more common in Lasch's circle than in one's own. Perhaps, indeed, Lasch's acquaintances perish under the stress of the suggestion that industrial technology may jeopardize our political system. Lasch darkly intones that

it is precisely the democratizing effects of industrial technology that can no longer be taken for granted. If this technology reduces some of the drudgery of housekeeping, it also renders the housekeeper dependent on machinery--not merely the automatic washer and dryer but the elaborate energy system required to run these and in-numerable other appliances--the breakdown of which brings housekeeping to a halt.

The idea that one may find Prometheus chained to the dryer in a local laundromat, with the culture picking his brains as to which soda is better, is certainly droll; but it seems less an analysis of modern technology than a too plausible suggestion for Harvard's decadent undergraduate theater.

Lasch's remarks on literature seem in some respects closer to the mark. He complains that

Modernism, a movement that once thrived on shock, has become as predictable in its negativism as Victorianism, at its worst, was predictable in its moral optimism and uplift.

Trapped in a narcisstic solipsism, of which inner monologue is the essential expression. "The best writing today has the effect of removing history from the realm of moral judgments."

But certainly Lasch is wrong when he asserts that the realistic novel has been deprived of its usual targets: "hypocrisy, pomposity, misguided idealism, self-deception." The best novelists at work today, most notably the British, have satirized Freudian idealists and fools as ruthlessly as they attacked all the older stupidities. Lasch, however, might not find this literature entirely to his taste: a recurrent suggestion in these works is that the attempt to mix "modernist" with "traditionalist" values is at best messy and funny and at worst misguided and fatal. Iris Murdoch, to name only the most intelligent of these writers, has made a career of throwing Plato, Christ and Freud together like roosters in a ring.

The most interesting (and also the most convoluted) section of The Minimal Self is the conclusion, which deals with politics. Lasch examines and rejects positions he describes as analagous to liberalism and conservatism, instead suggesting a more sound third position through an insinuatingly critical summary of post-Freudian attempts to explain modern politics. The argument is weak end have by Lasch's refusal to state exactly what he means by liberalism or conservatism, and by his failure to articulate his own views. The best part of this section is the author's observation that the standard liberal dogmas of environmentalism, egalitarianism, and social engineering culminate in the politically unacceptable ideas and work of B.F. Skinner. Though Lasch does not develop the implications of this remark, this observation suggests a plausible way to apprehend the importance of Lasch's whole enterprise.

Lasch grasps that Skinner, having developed certain ideas as fully as he could, has reached some limit at which many Americans balk, but he overlooks the possible implications of this development. Most of Lasch's thought deals with correcting people who take Freud as their starting points; clinging to Freud as to the truth he neglects, except to dismiss, critics and rivals of psychoanalysis. Referring to Skinner's ideas as unacceptable "dogma," he dismisses them as politically unfeasible and ignores the question of their psychological validity.

This is typical treatment, but it has a sad result. It prevents Lasch from considering that Skinner's case perhaps exemplifies the universal tendency of the unsupervised intellect to create systems and products which are useless, in jurious, or unacceptable to mere human its. Though it is heresy in some circles to suggest it, the proper as well as the actual test of ideas may prove to be their political usefulness and social acceptability not their academic popularity.

With disarming intellectual and political innocence, Lasch writes on the teleogical assumption that the intellect is naturally suited for the ends to which modernist in tellectuals most often put it. He translates the misguided American trust in the innocence and perfectibility of nature into the goodness and universal applicability of rationality. His faith in this faculty is so strong that he overlooks the disadvantages of his genre. Lasch cannot explore the questions he raises nearly as well as novelists can. Nor can he, in contrast to the religious or ethical writer, and to politicians of all varieties, even pretend to settle an aspect of such issues. I his particular view of the intellect makes it an idol which must be smashed--even if, given the contradictions in Lasch's arguments, it is a very shabby god indeed.

Finally, we must recognize in Lasch that terrifying phenomenon, the after-dinner monomaniac--a specimen who could, by stricter regulation of dangerous technology, be kept from the typewriter entirely. He is the sort of talker, so family in the horror-pitted fields of family life, on whom one vomited at three years, old, listened to at seven, and ignored at ten. Does Lasch find it easy to lead a psychologically sound and theoretically consistent life? Or has he found, on the contrary, that humility, intellectual generosity, and a too-fitful wisdom keep breaking in?