One way of understanding these social changes is that the culture of repression which dominated Freud’s era has today given way to a culture of desire. Against the historical backdrop of the 1960s sexual revolution and the 1990s communication revolution, the new individualism of our age is one in which retail therapy rules, catering as it does to our endless cultural thirst for new sensations, appetites, desires, cravings, and products.

From this angle, Freud’s cultural diagnosis needs to be reversed. Gone is the era of bourgeois security, order, and repression. This has been replaced by the era of instant gratification – the age of the selfie, online shopping, Twitter, and Facebook. In today’s world, the most common types of psychic troubles, anxieties, and discontents are not those of repression, but of addiction.

The Life of I, by Anne Manne, engages with these seismic cultural shifts, drawing culture, identity, and history together in a powerful configuration. Manne reinterprets the relationship between self and society through a psychoanalytic lens, examining the cultural politics of self-identity and psychopathology.

Cottesloe, Western Australia 1998 (photograph courtesy of Hardie Grant from the title Rennie Ellis' Decadent:1980-2000)

Contemporary culture, according to Manne, has implanted new maladies at the heart of the soul. ‘During the course of the last century,’ writes Manne, ‘the old hysterias, the classic neuroses analysed by Freud, were giving way to new disorders of the self.’ For Manne, the fundamental disorder of the self in these early years of the twenty-first century – at least as far as life in the expensive, polished cities of the West goes – is narcissism. According to her, narcissism ‘is our modern “hysteria”’.

Narcissism, Manne contends, should not be conflated with lay understandings of vanity or selfishness. Rather, it is a distinct character disorder, in which actions, events, and relationships in the narcissist’s life are pressed into the production and performance of a grandiose self. Narcissism stands in opposition to open communication and the autonomy of the self. A psychological defence against infantile rage, narcissism papers over feelings of despair and humiliation in the damaged self through elaborate, omnipotent fantasies of self-control.

Manne is out to stress that narcissism does not exist in a cultural vacuum. She relates the spread of narcissistic psychopathology to cultural forces such as the drastic shrinking of the public sphere, an evaporation of history, glossy consumerism, and the diffusion of one-dimensional media images. ‘Changes in our culture,’ reflects Manne, ‘have created an economic, social and relational world that not only supports but actually celebrates narcissism, cultivating and embedding it as a character trait.’

The modern sense of self, then, may be solitary and solipsistic, but in sociological terms it is a function of its wider circumstances. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Lasch’s magisterial The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), Manne offers interesting insights into the hard, horrific core of narcissistic pathology, one which she sees penetrating all aspects of daily life. Life in the fast lane of narcissistic culture, according to Manne, is shallow, vacuous, brittle, inauthentic, and painfully empty.

The Life of I distils the power and prevalence of narcissism in social life today through mixing psychoanalysis and sociology, history, and biography. From mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik to the vengeful crimes of Elliot Rodger to the doping scandal of racing cyclist Lance Armstrong, Manne tracks and traces the wide-ranging hold of a narcissistic survivor ethic in the contemporary epoch. As she observes: ‘The narcissism epidemic is not an aberration. Without the narcissistic character, the new capitalism might collapse.’

What the book does, in short, is ransack the deadly excesses of contemporary culture, reframe them in terms of narcissistic personality diagnosis, and redeploy them in the name of a moral critique which sees everywhere social decay and cultural breakdown. It is, at times, an astonishingly narrow application of psychoanalytic theory to the cultural sphere. It is also one littered with problems.

‘Life in the fast lane of narcissistic culture, according to Manne, is shallow, vacuous, brittle, inauthentic, and painfully empty’

For one thing, Manne’s argument violently unifies the complex, contradictory cultural patterns of identity-formation. Reading the narcissistic character-type off from the rise of the hypercompetitive consumer society, it appears that the culture of narcissism is now wall-to-wall. But how might we ever know this? If narcissism has really gone global, how might the cultural critic stand apart from the culture of narcissism and reflect otherwise?

For another, globalisation has facilitated the development of a public, cosmopolitan life in ways that profoundly question the thesis of the culture of narcissism. Consider, for example, today’s cultural preoccupation with the body. The rise of self-improvement projects focused on the body arguably represent attempts to reconcile the contradictory forces of desire and disappointment, beauty and terror. But why should such body-projects move centre-stage today?

Confused Narcissus (photograph by Giovanni DallOrto, 2010)

Oddly, Manne has little to say about the relation between self and the body, one of the central dimensions of narcissism as it is traditionally understood. While the myth of Narcissus concerned the worship of self-appearance, the cultivation of the body – from compulsive consumerism to drastic diets – has become a common aspect of contemporary Western lifestyles.

Should this be taken as a sign of the spread of narcissistic culture? Perhaps. But not necessarily. For an ongoing concern with bodily presentation has become an intrinsic aspect of contemporary societies, and there is much social-science evidence suggesting this does not represent a defensive, narcissistic withdrawal of the self from the surrounding social world. On the contrary, body-projects and body-planning often represent an active engagement with society.

This is not to deny the power of narcissism in contemporary society – as any cursory glance at extreme makeover television programs reveals. But it is to make the point that not everyone is held in thrall by celebrity culture, cosmetic surgery, and the consumer industries. Contemporary women and men may express greater interest in the possibilities for transforming their lives than at any previous historical time, but this does not render the world narcissistic through and through.

In the end, it is better I think to read Manne – as with Lasch before her – as offering a portrait of the narcissistic warping of the self which contemporary society in some part promotes. From this angle, narcissism is merely one – albeit disturbing – malady of the self, at once condition and consequence of our brave new world of globalisation.