Lasch—To Establish or Submerge?

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

p. 6—my note says:
contrasts the "consciousness movement" with past "millenarian outbreaks"; specifically, in living "only for the moment" and not for some future utopia

[8] Her preoccupation with the state of her psychic health, together with her dependence on others for a sense of selfhood, distinguish Susan Stern [in her memoir of the Weathermen] from the kind of religious seeker who turns to politics to find a secularized salvation. She needed to establish an identity, not to submerge her identity in a larger cause.

A linchpin of the broader narcissism thesis. Certainly it is observable in many areas of life whether or not narcissism per se is involved. The choice of a sixties activist as an illustration is, nonetheless, probably not an innocent/unmotivated choice and probably doesn't do justice to the earnest beliefs of a great many involved in those movements. Another case, I think, of visibility and representativeness being conflated. A more mundane, representative example could be made of the vast majority of eighteen year-olds who show up to college declaring a major in the performing arts, only to eventually graduate or (statistically much more likely) quit having established much but submerged little.

[10] For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.

...

[15] [Jerry] Rubin claims that the "inner revolution of the seventies" grew out of an awareness that the radicalism of the sixties had failed to address itself to the quality of personal life or to cultural questions, in the mistaken belief that questions of "personal growth," in his words, could wait "until after the revolution." This accusation contains a certain amount of truth. ...

Yep. Anytime you're told something indispensible can wait, expect the wait to be interminable.

[16] Yet...in those years, there was a growing recognition [by the New Left and others]...that personal crisis on the scale it has now assumed represents a political issue in its own right, and that a thoroughgoing analysis of modern society and politics has to explain among other things why personal growth and development have become so hard to accomplish...

Yep.

Also from a note:
pp. 25-27—against understanding "contemporary narcissism" as classbound

[26] The collapse of personal life originates not in the spiritual torments of affluence but in the war of all against all...

...

[27] the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place

now being advocated as solutions.