ABSTRACT
Christopher Lasch contended that studies from cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and psychoanalysts, regarding the impact of culture on personality show that 'every culture works out distinctive patterns of child rearing and socialization, with the effect of producing a distinctive personality type suited to the requirements of that culture'. In psychoanalytic terms, the dominant character structure in such societies was therefore centred on repression, socialization within the family, and the internalization of strong moral values, discipline, responsibility, the capacity for delaying gratification, and so on, also useful values in the workplace. Lasch suggested that local autonomous traditions, often involving resilience against the vagaries of the market, were thus undercut from 'both sides', by the ubiquitous commodification that accompanied consumer capitalism, and from the intrusions of the helping professions and a therapeutic, or rather a 'pseudo-therapeutic', culture, from which the radical pessimism of Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition had been surgically removed.
