The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

" In addition he finalized his intentions for the essays to be included in Women and the Common Life: Love Marriage and Feminism which was publiChristopher Laschd with his daughter's introduction in 1997. It would not make a paycheck the only symbol of accomplishment. Most of his books even the more strictly historical ones include such sharp criticism of the priorities of alleged "radicals" who represented merely extreme formations of a rapacious capitalist ethos.

' His books including The New Radicalism in America (1965) Haven in a Heartless World (1977) The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The True and Only Heaven (1991) were widely discussed and reviewed. In the 1960s he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions public and private were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities.