BIRN BAUM
I
LASCH
365
to say that the new or third generation has few psychic resources with which
to confront our history . We have few cultural resources either. In the
process something of ineluctable value has been lost which cannot be
replaced.
Lasch:
It could be argued, of course, that if it takes three generations for any
far-reaching characterological changes to work themselves out , this partic–
ular process is only beginning, and that it is therefore too soon to come to
any conclusions about it. This argument seems to me somewhat evasive. If
it is true that conscience is being superceded by other forms of personality
organization and social cohesion, I would agree that what is being lost, for
all its own pathological side effects, is irreplaceable. This reorganization, or
perhaps simply disintegration, of personality is the psychic foundation of
the growing demand for immediate impulse gratification and also of the
tendency to equate fulfillment of these demands with political and cultural
emanCIpatIOn .
Birnbaum:
You ' re purring yourself (and myself) clearly in the camp of the
cultural traditionalists . I don't mind being there-after all , for Marx, a
major justification of socialism was that it was the only way to realize
bourgeois cultural values. But if in fact we face a world in which new
historical structures and new modes of gratification combine to propagate
values we despise-and we can no longer imagine any social institutions
that can generate cultural values we espouse- that is a very serious matter.
Lasch :
It
is a matter , however, insofar as it concerns the family , about which
your colleagues in sociology provide very little guidance. Academic
sociologists , until the seventies at least, have resisted the very proposition
that the family is in some kind of trouble . The position they defend is that
the family has gained in emotional services what it has lost in the way of
economic , educational , and protective functions.
Birnbaum :
What do you think that "emotional services" means to them?
That the family does more for people , or that more is attempted?
Lasch :
It does more for people, because it's lost its economic and protective
functions and therefore can concentrate on serving as a kind of asylum for
feelings that have to be suppressed elsewhere. The world of work is cold and
impersonal, and the family provides consolation for deprivations suffered
at work , goes the typical argument. Parsons, whose theory of the family still
commands a good deal of respect, constantly compares what goes on in the
family to psychotherapy .
Birnbaum :
A therapeutic community in miniature?
Lasch:
A therapeutic community; a haven in a heartless world .
Birnbaum :
Others would argue that precisely this overloading of the family
emotively is what is destroying it . The seventies rewrite of the suburban
