Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications. 1955. [An interesting and provocative book. I want to thank Joe Loehr, of the Penn College Communications Faculty, for bringing it to my attention.]

Hughes, Robert. Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. [H,R a perceptive critique of both the Left and the Right in U.S. politics, education, and art.]

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. NY: W.W. Norton, 1978. [Thanks to Richard Sahn, of our Sociology Dept., for bringing this book to my attention. This is an important book for anyone wishing to understand current culture.]

"A distrust of experts may help to diminish the dependence on experts that has crippled the capacity for self-help." (xv)

"The superego, society's agent in the mind, always consists of internalized representations of parents and other symbols of authority, but it is important to distinguish between those representations which derive from archaic, pre-Oedipal impressions and those resting on later impressions and therefore reflecting a more realistic assessment of parental powers. Strictly speaking, these latter contribute to the formation of the "ego ideal" -- the internalization of others' expectations and of the traits we love and admire in them; whereas the superego, in distinction to the ego ideal, derives from early fantasies that contain a large admixture of aggression and rage, originating in the parents' inevitable failure to satisfy all the child's instinctual demands. But the aggressive, punishing, and even self-destructive part of the superego is usually modified by later experience, which softens early fantasies of parents as devouring monsters. If that experience is lacking -- as it so often is in a society that has radically devalued all forms of authority -- the sadistic superego can be expected to develop at the expense of the ego ideal, the destructive superego at the expense of the severe but solicitous inner voice we call conscience. (Note from page 12.)