SOURCE: Lasch, Christopher. “Planned Obsolescence.” New York Review of Books 23, no. 17 (28 October 1976): 7, 10.

In the following review, Lasch offers a mixed assessment of Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, commenting that the work “rests on medical definitions of reality that remain highly suspect.”

Psychiatric self-help, the twentieth century's equivalent of “self-culture,” commends itself as the shortest road to health and happiness, at least for those who can't afford regular visits to a psychiatrist. The market for books of psychiatric advice and consolation appears inexhaustible. The style of these manuals, however, has recently undergone a certain refinement. Exhortation has yielded to analysis, positive thinking to study of the laws of psychological development. The popularization of psychiatric jargon and concepts has created a half-knowledgeable readership that can no longer be satisfied with slogans and proverbs, formulas for winning friends and influencing people, injunctions to keep smiling.

The agreeable fiction that life...