The idea of a developmental crisis was first proposed by the distinguished psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Enlarging on Freud’s foundation, Erikson suggested that normal developmental stages do not stop with childhood but continue during the adult years.
Life in his view is a continuing series of steps, or stages, Itch presenting an opportunity for new growth. A developmental crisis occurs, says Erikson, when a person becomes ready to face a new life task, or a new set of choices. He has now arrived at a turning point.
A decisive moment.
The outcome will vary. Here “crisis” means, as it does in medicine, “a turning point for better or for worse.” So too in life. When a man arrives at this critical point he can either win a victory or suffer a defeat.
In theory Erikson’s ideas had a profound and far-reaching ellect on American behavioral scientists long ago. But it is only within the past ten or fifteen years that they have been applied in practice as well. Now researchers across the country have finally begun to fill in Erikson’s framework with a wide variety of empirical studies devoted to the problems and possibilities of the adult years.
Increasingly, too, they have begun to recognize that the mid-life period is an enormously important time of change, but also a time of upheaval and distress similar to that which teen-agers experience.
Less well known than adolescence, and certainly less well understood, this mid-life period marks the passage from early adulthood to middle age. It is a time of transition.
And a time of maturing: At forty the American male can finally come of age.
For our purposes the most illuminating study of the midlife crisis has been done by a team of researchers at Yale University, headed by psychologist Daniel J. Levinson. Begun in 1968, this Yale study of men between thirty-five and forty-five provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the issues we will be exploring, and we will refer to it in more detail throughout.
In general the Yale group offers these conclusions:
•The mid-life crisis is a predictable stage of development that all men go through. Most experience it at around forty, although it may affect some in their late thirties and others not until their fifties. Oddly enough, it occurs even if a man has been successful.
•For some the transition may go relatively smoothly, but it generally involves considerable agitation. Marked by confusion and introspection, it is a time when most men are plagued by fundamental doubts about their work, their family, and their goals. This restlessness and discontent are forerunners of normal personality development, painful but necessary.
•In addition to being predictable, the mid-life crisis is also desirable. True, this period has its threats, but it also offers opportunities for new personality growth and life changes never before possible: A man can now move toward greater self-fulfillment in his work, more intimacy in his marriage and other relationships, and a deeper connection with his children.
•Regardless of when it hits or how much distress it brings, however, this crisis is a strategic turning point in every man’s life—one that will profoundly affect his future.
During this period of change there is an unsettling feeling of death and rebirth. A man is coming to the end of something known, but also being initiated into something new. With his long struggle to prove himself in the world—to “make it” on society’s terms—almost completed, he now feels impelled to find out what he really wants for himself and what doors are still open.
A developmental crisis is precipitated, say the Yale group, when a man begins to feel that his old life structure no longer fits his newly evolving self—and this is exactly what happens at around forty.
Embarking on an internal struggle, a period of soul-searching and reappraisal, a man begins to question the choices he made in early adulthood. Forced to abandon some youthful dreams and illusions, he is likely to stir up old, unresolved conflicts—which may intensify his crisis. But there are more positive forces at work as well: New needs and wishes and values have also been evolving.
“Something new begins to perk in a man,” says Dr. Levinson, “and I think what perks are other aspects of himself that are not so much reflected in the structure he has built.”
The choices a man made earlier allowed him to live out certain parts of himself while others were excluded. Now those parts that were never fully used, that he ignored or repressed, begin to clamor for attention. The Yale group call these stirrings from an inner self “other voices in other rooms.” They prompt a man to alter and enlarge a life structure that has now become confining, or even to change it drastically.
The first faint rumblings of these “other voices” are frightening. The loss of illusions is dismaying. And the collapse of an old life structure hurts.
It is agonizing for a man to find himself suddenly unmoored in the middle of his life to battle powerful emotional currents, not sure who he is, what he wants, or where he’s going.
But the man who feels as if his life is in shambles can take comfort from the fact that his painful flounderings are probably signs of growth: His world is shaking because he’s gotten too big for it
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