2 An Outline of the Cultural Phenomenon of Narcissism
Referring to Christopher Lasch (1991, 34), we can define a cultural narcissism as a collective phenomenon of personality disorders, which is occurring to representatives of highly developed societies from the circle of Western civilization. Essential for this phenomenon are skills, interests, attitudes, needs, motivations, values formed in the process of biological, mental, and social development (socialization) during which individuals identify themselves. They express their identity and distinguish from the representatives of other contemporary civilizations: Latin American, Orthodox, African, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, and Japanese (see Huntington 2007). Narcissism in terms of Lasch can be considered as individuals’ reaction to the growing scale of risks generated by the abstract systems (cf. Lasch 1991, 50; Giddens 2002, 234–237; Aldridge 2006, 95–99). The awareness (more or less conscious) of the possibility of apocalyptic events leads to the withdrawal of individuals from the public life, to them focusing on the privatized “survival strategies” and closing in the personal worlds dominated by the obsession of physical and psychological selfimprovement. People start to realize that they are surrounded by a multiplicity of risk forms that earlier generations have not met. Moreover, people lose their sense of historical continuity, cease to be interested in the past and future, and focus on the present events, in which they are seeking psychological security and a sense of self-fulfillment. So here, they are balancing between addressing the primary and higher-order needs. The personal pursuit of narcissistic attracting attention includes even such practices as monopolization of the conversation, consumerism, buying attention, excessive concentration on work, and creating an excess of obligations and therefore unavailability for others (Derber 2002).
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