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PARTISAN REVIEW
sensibility denies its importance by treating feelings as harmless and
allowing them unlimited expression. Under the conditions of inter–
personal intercourse that ideally prevail, the expression of emotion
provokes no stronger response than sympathetic understanding; but
the endless understanding with which the narcissist is surrounded by
lovers, parents, teachers, psychiatrists, and even law-enforcement
agencies , far from alleviating the fear of his own emotions, makes it
unbearable. He dreads the moment when patient understanding
exhausts itself and his destructive impulses finally provoke the retali–
ation they deserve. The indefinite postponement of this reckoning
heightens his anxiety instead of allaying it.
Psychological man has invented a new style of personal rela–
tions, cool, wary , and undemanding. His avoidance of emotional
entanglements and of "judgmental" attitudes towards others reflects,
at bottom, a narcissistic withdrawal of interest in the outside world.
Other people matter only as they impinge on the self; subjective
feelings take precedence over the objective world outside the ego.
Not only personal interaction but the prevailing modes of
thinking and perception bear the imprint of the narcissist's distinc–
tive style . The contemporary sensibility makes a sharp distinction
between fact and value; no other teaching of the social sciences–
which so accurately express the needs of the new man-has gained
more widespread acceptance than the importance ofseparating "value
judgments" from "objective" truths. This type of thought presup–
poses a withdrawal of interest from externals, a devaluation of the
outer world in two senses . The attempt to banish value judgments
from the description of external reality means that reality has lost its
value except as it affects the ego . No longer able to recognize in
society the collective creation of human labor and ingenuity , men
perceive it as wholly alien and external, obedient to objective laws
that work independently of human volition. As society becomes
increasingly resistant to any form of human intervention, this illu–
sion ofobjectivity corresponds to everyday experience. Men despair of
humanizing the social order and lapse not only into the well-known
political apathy of our time but into intellectual apathy as well. The
social order no longer excites a passionate curiosity to understand it .
Instead, the attempt to understand it has been deliberately drained of
passion and monopolized , moreover, by trained specialists, soft-
