Vol. 43 No. 3 1976 - page 349

RICHARD SENNETT
349
does; she "deserves" whatever men have. The author argues that women
should try to get "total gratification," tha.t they deserve whatever they
desire. As the book unfolds, the idea recedes that a system of bad social
relations created female oppression in the first place . A woman who gets
what she "deserves" in the system simply changes positions in the game of
musical chairs. Thus, in the course of making an argument for the equaliry
of the sexes, Greer winds up forgetting about society. Total gratification of
the self becomes the alternative to systematic discrimination against females.
The world, at first seen as socially unjust, becomes a mirror or resource for
the self. This is the unfolding of narcissism at work in an ideology of libera–
tion, and it defeats goals of that ideology by gradually blotting out the
reality which caused the problem. The conversion of the desire for social
liberation into the desire for personal liberation maintains the system as a
whole; the social network of inequalities is not challenged, although the
sex of a few of the players may be changed.
But what is truly perverse about narcissistic projections is that they are
seldom self-evident; nor are they simple demands for pleasure. For example,
one attempts to explain to himself why he has failed to be upwardly mobile,
and arrives at the conclusion-despite all his abstract knowledge that social
organization controls his chances-that some personal failing is the cause.
In this he is mirroring the self onto the world. This is as much a narcissistic
formulation as is the credo that in the end liberation from a subdominant
role involves free gratification of the self through use of the "resources"
ofsociety.
Elsewhere I have argued that there is a correlation between the in–
creasing bureaucratization of modern capitalism and the mobilization of
narcissism in society. Large-scale bureaucratic structures function according
to a system of promised rewards based on the supposed talent, personal
affability, and moral character of the employee at work. Reward thus be–
comes tied to the exercise of personal ability, and the failure to receive
reward-in fact a systematic necessity since large bureaucracies are sharp
pyramids-is increasingly interpreted by those in the lower middle positions
as a failure on their own parts to be rewardable, by virtue of their personal–
ities. Thus, it is also for functional reasons, and not only as a consequence
of the intensified belief in personality manifest in all social relations, that
narcissism has come increasingly to be mobilized.
When bureaucracy and the collective consciousness of personality join
forces, it becomes possible to believe, as the Victorian bourgeoisie could not,
in a protean self. The American psychiatrist Robert
J.
Lifton defines a pro–
tean self as a conception of identity involving the belief that one's personality
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