Wie Sigmund Freud unsere Welt veränderte
"Christopher Lasch [..] said frankly that we now [after Freud] have what he called a culture of narcissism, economic man (Marxist man) having given way to psychological man. He too said we have entered a period of "therapeutic sensibility": therapy, he argued, had established itself "as the successor to rugged individualism and to religion."
This new narcissism means that people are more interested in personal change than in political change, that encounter groups and other forms of awareness trainings have helped to abolish a meaningful inner private life - the private has become public in "an ideology of intimacy." This makes people less individualistic, less genuinely creative, and far more fad- and fashion conscious. It follows, says Lasch, that lasting friendships, love affairs, and successful marriages are much harder to achieve, in turn thrusting people back on themselves, when the whole cycle commences.
Modern man, Lasch concluded, was actually imprisoned in his self-awareness.
 - Peter Watson)
