‘Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history, Bourguse families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the families status, where as today the family album of photographs verifies the individuals existence; it’s documentary record of his record development from infancy onwards provides him with the only evidence of his life that he recognizes as altogether valid. Among the ‘many narcissistic uses’ that Sontag attributes to the camera ‘self servalence’ ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self scrutiny, but because it renders the sense of self hood dependant upon the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world’
Pg 48
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch
W W Norton & Co Ltd; New edition edition (15 Jan 1979)
‘In fact the cult of intimacy originates not in the assertion of personality but in it’s collapse. Poets and Novelists today, far from glorifying the self, chronicle it’s disintegration.’ 
”These considerations help us to see how psychological defences against seperation anxiety – against early feelings of helplessness and dependence – can be elaborated in human culture. One way to deny our dependence on nature (on mother’s) is to invent technologies designed to make ourselves masters of nature. Technology, when it is conceived in this way, embodies an attitude toward nature diametrically opposed to the explanatory attitude, as Klein calls it. It expresses a collective revolt against the limitations of the human condition. It appeals to the residual belief that we can bend the world to our desires, harness nature to our own purposes, and achieve a state of complete self-sufficiency. This Faustian view of technology has been a powerful force in western history, reaching it’s climax in the industrial revolution with it’s remarkable gains in productivity, and in the even more remarkable advances promised by the post-industrial information explosion.” 
‘When art, religion and finally even sex lose their power to provide an imaginative release from everyday reality, the banality of pseudo-self awareness becomes so overwhelming that men finally lose the capacity to envision any release at all except in total nothingness, blankness.’ 
‘our culture’s indifference to the past – which easily shades over into active hostility and rejection – furnishes the most telling proof of that culture’s bankruptcy. The prevailing attitude, so cheerful and forward looking on the surface, derives from a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche and also from an inability to ground our needs in the experience of satisfaction and contentment. Instead of drawing on our own experience we allow experts to define our needs for us and then wonder why those needs never seem to be satisfied. ‘as people become apt in learning how to need’
‘The proliferation of visual and auditory images in a ’society of spectacle’ as it has been described, encouraged a similar preoccupation with the self. People responded to others as if their actions where being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present, in varying degrees, in everyone – a certain protective shallowness, a fear of binding commitments, a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose, a desire to keep one’s options open , a dislike of depending on anyone , an incapacity for loyalty or gratitude. 
‘The propoganda of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure’
‘Instead of the neurotic character with well structured conflicts centering around around forbidden sex, authority, or dependence and independence within a family setting, we see characters filled with uncertainty about what is real.’ This uncertainty now invades every form of art and crystallises in an imagery of the absurd that re-enters daily life and encourages a theatrical approach to existence , a kind of absurdist theatres of the self. ‘
