In his seminal 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, the American historian Christopher Lasch warned of the increasing normalization of pathological narcissism. Though he was hailed as a “biblical prophet” by Time magazine, his was far from a purely moralistic diatribe. Rather, he aimed to demonstrate that this anxious focus on the self was primarily a psychological condition more so than a mere moral failure, arising from certain sociological factors tied to the expansion of neoliberal economic policies. Lasch — formed by the material approach of the “Old Left” — pointed to the impact that over-bureaucratization and the decline of institutions that banked on mutual responsibility, respect, and the forging of thick social bonds had on our collective psyche. His Freudian background drew his attention to the effect that familial dysfunction — especially the distortion of dynamics between men and women — had on social realities, which other theorists of his ilk were less inclined to pick up on. While dedicating much writing to the effects of the decline of the role of the father and the bureaucratic paternalism that took its place, Lasch also considers the effects of the doting mother who, seeing “the child as an extension of herself, lavishes attentions on her child that are ‘awkwardly out of touch’ with his need,” thereby encouraging “an exaggerated sense of his own importance.” The resultant lapse in the child’s superego — his capacity to discern and adhere to limits — makes it difficult for him to maintain “boundaries between the self and the world of objects,” gives rise to “delusions of omnipotence” and magical thinking, and disposes him to oscillate between yearning to win the approval of others and to gratify his own base instincts. This collapse of the child’s sense of objectivity and his skewed sense of the real traps him in a bewilderingly solipsistic state.