Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-301) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Introduction : Consumption, narcissism, and mass culture. Materialism and mass culture ; Mass production and mass consumption ; The fantastic world of commodities ; Consumption and mass culture ; Industrial technology, mass culture, and democracy ; The decline of authority ; Politics as consumption ; The new "personhood" ; "Selfishness" or survivalism? -- The survival mentality. The normalization of crisis ; Everyday life reinterpreted in the light of extreme situations ; Large organizations as total institutions ; The Cold-War critique of survivalism ; Shedding it all: the spiritual discipline of survival ; Who are the doomsayers? ; Apocalyptic survivalism and ordinary apathy ; Everyday survival strategies -- Discourse on mass death: "lessons" of the Holocaust. One "Holocaust" or many? ; "Totalitarianism": from radical evil to comparative political typology ; Auschwitz as an image of the modern malaise ; "Mere" survival criticized and defended ; Survivor guilt, pro and con ; Survivalism at its ugliest: seven beauties ; Comparative "survivor research": extreme situations and everyday stress -- The minimalist aesthetic: art and literature in an age of extremity. The Roth-Cunningham effect ; From self-assertion to self-effacement ; The imperial ego effaced by images ; The aesthetics of exclusion ; The fusion of self and not-self ; The strategic retreat into paranoia ; Modernism's dead end -- The inner history of selfhood. Oneness and separation ; Early fantasies of reunion ; Gender differences and the "tragedy of lost illusions" ; Origins of the superego ; The ego ideal ; Narcissism as opposed to ordinary egoism ; Childhood in a narcissistic culture ; Man-made objects and illusions -- The politics of the psyche. Contemporary cultural debate: an ideal typology ; The party of the superego ; The liberal ego: nineteenth-century origins of the therapeutic ethic ; Psychoanalysis and the liberal tradition of moral optimism ; The quarrel between behaviorism and humanistic psychiatry ; Hartmann's ego psychology: psychoanalysis as behavioral engineering -- The ideological assault on the ego. The exhaustion of political ideologies after World War II ; The neo-Freudian left ; Marcuse on "surplus repression" ; Brown's thanatology: the pathology of purposefulness ; Freudian feminism ; The case for narcissism: "Masculine" enterprise against "feminine" mutuality ; Purposefulness, nature, and selfhood: the case for a guilty conscience.