Restabilization: The Beginning of Middle Adulthood, Forty-three to Forty-seven: Somewhere around forty-five a man is ready to move into the next life stage, hopefully having formed a new life structure as the basis for living in middle adulthood. Some men will have made destmetive changes, while others will have refocused their energies around new commitments. But even if a man has remained in the same groove, his life will now have a different meaning for him, say the Yale group, because he will have changed internally to some degree.
To dramatize the fact that the mid-life transition is a time of great threat to the self, as well as a time of great possibility, the Yale group point out that men like Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis destroyed themselves because they were unable to handle the crisis. By contrast, men like Freud, Jung, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Gandhi all went through a profound crisis around forty—and made tremendous creative gains as a result.
It is becoming urgently apparent that we Americans need to revise our priorities within a life-cycle perspective. Our present view of life as a ladder to be scaled, as a one-way street to success, is causing widespread human obsolescence not only among the elderly, but among the middle-aged as well. Today too many men are entering middle adulthood resigned to emptiness and despair. They seem burned out already, burdened by a crushing sense of loss but lacking any sense of what has been gained.
In order to develop some cultural wisdom about the years after forty as a season with its own rewards, we need to alter our thinking about the development of the human personality and the meaning of life’s stages. We need to abandon our stubbornly held, but grossly mistaken, conviction that aging means not simply wrinkled skin and waning physical energies but also a monumental loss of all human potential.
Today the evidence needed for such a revision of our attitudes is already in. Many social scientists, including those at Yale, have clearly proven that adults are more flexible than we ever suspected; that the self is too complex to be contained by a static identity; and that growth can occur throughout the entire life span.
*33\93\2*