Modern society, it would seem, is a conspiracy against authentic existence. Freud thought this true of all civilization, but a generation of literary critics, historians, and social scientists are laying at the door of modern civilization responsibility for the pathologies of everyday life. The time scales vary greatly, some scholars insisting that the modern revolution in the conception of the self has taken centuries, while others see this process as having taken place within the last century, but the savants all seem to arrive at roughly the same conclusion, namely, that what characterizes modern American life in this century is an unconsummated search for authenticity. The social pathology of this search, those most critical of modernity conclude, is narcissism. Clearly, whatever form the argument takes and regardless of the willingness of the analyst to moralize on the basis of his or her analysis, authenticity is a “hot” subject.