SOURCE: A review of The Minimal Self, in Southwestern Humanities Review, Spring, 1986, pp. 181-83.

In the following review, Voelker compares the themes of The Minimal Self to those of The Culture of Narcissism, concluding that, while The Minimal Self "seems guilty of the same cultural shallowness it sees around it," the book has "occasional sharp observations."

There is something meretricious in the title to Christopher Lasch's sequel to his often precise and powerful The Culture of Narcissism. A reader unacquainted with Lasch's work who comes across a book sub-titled "Psychic Survival in Troubled Times" is likely to mistake it for a success manual—one of those hot-selling cynical paeans to the very "minimalism" Lasch decries. "Meretricious" is perhaps too strong a term for what is wrong with the rest of The Minimal Self. Lasch works in an impressionistic field, extrapolating cultural observation from psychoanalytic terminology, and in The...