Churchill's Black Dog

by Anthony Storr

  In this connection, it is pertinent to recall one observation of a zoologist working with baboons, which indicates that there is some interest in studying the behavior of animals which have passed their reproductive period. John Crook reports a personal communication from Robin Dunbar, who had been looking at the social organization of gelada baboons. When a younger male takes over the harem of an old male, the latter is not banished or killed, as happens in some other species. Instead, “the old male remains loosely attached to the harem and spends a great deal of time caring for his infants. No longer active sexually, he now invests his time and energy in caring for his last offspring.”6

  Erikson’s postulated third and final stage of adult development takes us beyond the biological in the sense that its utility in Darwinian terms cannot easily be defined. Erikson formulates it as “ego integrity versus despair.” He writes:

  Only in him who in some way has taken care of things and people and has adapted himself to the triumphs and disappointment adherent to being, the originator of others or the generator of products and ideas—only in him may gradually ripen the fruit of these seven stages. I know no better word for it than ego integrity.7

  Erikson’s concept of ego integrity includes the notion that the individual has come to terms with the inevitability of death by an acceptance of his own life cycle as something that had to be, that could not really have been different. He contrasts this attitude of constructive resignation with despair, which he conceives as arising from the feeling that it is now too late to reach ego integrity by any other path. Despair, in this sense, is linked with the fear of death. Although many criticisms can be made both of Erikson’s stages of life and of the clumsy, turgid prose in which he struggles to express himself, clinical observation confirms that those who are most afraid of death are those who have been most afraid of some aspects of life, and who therefore continue to feel that, if they had shown more courage, life would have been more fulfilling.

  In recent years, various other workers have been attracted to the idea that the developmental stages of adulthood are worthy of study. At Yale, Daniel Levinson and his associates have studied the life cycle in males.8 Like Erik Erikson, they conclude that there are “developmental tasks” characterizing different stages of life which every individual is compelled to tackle. Levinson’s original procedure was to study in depth the life cycles of a small number of American males: ten factory workers, ten biologists, ten business executives, and ten novelists. He claims to have detected a pattern of change in each individual which, both in nature and timing, is closely similar. By taking individuals from such different backgrounds and with such different interests, Levinson has at least avoided the common error of assuming that the life cycles of other people necessarily coincide with one’s own.

  According to Levinson, the life cycle alternates between stable periods of consolidation and less stable periods of transition. The first of the periods of transition occurs between adolescence and full entry into the adult world. In our culture, this stage usually occupies the years between eighteen and twenty-two. After settling into an occupation and perhaps embarking upon marriage, there is usually another transition period between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two. This is a time when the young man is apt to question his original choices of occupation and of marital partner, and may well change both. Between thirty-two and about forty-one is another period of consolidation. This is succeeded by the mid-life transition, between thirty-nine and forty-two.

  Like other writers, Levinson emphasizes the storminess of the mid-life transition, often referred to as the mid-life crisis. It is sometimes a period of agonizing reappraisal, when many men have to come to terms with the fact that they cannot hope to fulfill all their youthful dreams. It is also a period at which neglected parts of the self clamor for expression. Levinson, like Jung, believes that the achievement of conventional goals in Western society involves making choices which necessarily exclude or minimize certain aspects of the person as a whole. This one-sidedness is apt to cause trouble in the mid-life period. Clinically, when faced with cases of mid-life depression, I have found it useful to encourage the patient to recall the daydreams and interests of his adolescence. This brings to light aspects of the self which have been neglected and which, if pursued, have a compensatory therapeutic effect.

  Levinson’s explorations of later adulthood are incomplete and will not be pursued further here. The sequences of crises and resolutions which he describes seem too closely tied to narrow time spans and are also rather tediously similar. The period of transition at adolescence, or the mid-life transition, may occur at very different times in different individuals. Human beings mature at different rates, both mentally and physically.

  However, there may be a valid underlying principle in Levinson’s scheme, although he himself does not spell it out. In our Western culture, though not in all cultures, man seems so constituted that he can never rest upon his laurels. The moment he has achieved something, be it a position in the world, marriage and a family, a successful piece of research, a new book, painting, or musical composition, he is driven to question its value and look for something more. If problems are not there, he will invent them. Man seems to be a problem-seeking as well as a problem-solving animal. We are programmed to change, develop, and meet new challenges until we die. We are compelled to be perpetual travelers. If we travel hopefully, that is as much as we ought to expect. If we do not, we become depressed. The idea that we can ever arrive at a stable state in which life’s problems are settled is an illusion. The only “final solution” is death.

  Another study worth looking at is by George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist.9 His subjects were Harvard students. Vaillant’s emphasis is quite different from Levinson’s. He is not so concerned with stages of the life cycle but more with “patterns of defense” in the Freudian sense; that is, with how the individual comes to terms with instinctual drives. As examples of pathological defenses, he cites the following: the paranoid one of always blaming others for one’s own shortcomings; retreating into a world of fantasy; or “acting out” with overtly disturbed behavior. Healthy mechanisms of defense include suppression as opposed to repression, altruism, and sublimation. Vaillant’s study, in contrast with what might be expected from early Freudian theory, indicates that childhood trauma is a poor guide to predicting adult neurosis or health. However, children who have not developed “basic trust,” or who have not been encouraged to be autonomous, are likely to show delay in maturation. As in Terman’s famous studies of gifted children,10 physical health and mental health generally march hand in hand, although there are some exceptions.

  But what emerges most strikingly from these biographical studies is the fact that more development toward maturity takes place during adult years than most psychiatrists had imagined. Even highly disturbed adults who have habitually employed one of the pathological defenses already mentioned, and who may have been labeled “psychopathic,” can lose their symptoms, abandon their disturbed patterns of behavior, and adopt maturer mechanisms of defense. Vaillant discovered that a surprisingly large number of adults only feel free to “do their own thing” by the time they are fifty or older. This finding is relevant to the changes which occur in some notably creative people, which are discussed below. It looks as if the length of the period during which the human child is educable may carry with it the disadvantage of embedding his early training so firmly within him that emancipation from its influence is difficult when this is needed.

  I referred before to the reluctance of the early psychoanalysts to treat middle-aged patients. However, C. G.Jung, after he parted company with Freud in 1913, developed a psychotherapeutic practice which consisted largely of older patients. Jung’s ideas about the development of personality are explored in Chapter 9 of this book. In this context, it should be emphasized that he was a pioneer in the study of adult development. In Chapter 9, Jung’s own experience of going through a mid-life crisis is related
to the growth of his interest in the problems of the middle-aged. In 1931, Jung wrote:

  The clinical material at my disposal is of a peculiar composition: new cases are decidedly in the minority. Most of them already have some form of psychotherapeutic treatment behind them, with partial or negative results. About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives. I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age. Fully two thirds of my patients are in the second half of life.11

  Jung’s own subjective upheaval was partly responsible for directing his attention to such patients, but there were other reasons as well. Jung did not share Freud’s assumption that the events of early childhood were the prime cause of neurosis, and did not therefore believe that getting the patient to recall his first five years was always essential.

  Jung also accumulated older patients who had had previous treatment because he became famous enough to be regarded as a last resort who might succeed where other analysts had failed. Some of those who were suffering from the “senselessness and aimlessness of their lives” were undoubtedly Americans like the Mellons and Fowler McCormick who possessed enormous wealth and did not know what to do with themselves. At Mary Mellon’s first appointment with Jung, her opening words were “Dr. Jung, we have too much money. What can we do with it?”12

  I earlier referred to my own practice of asking patients to recall their adolescent fantasies and interests. This psychotherapeutic technique is taken from Jung, who wrote:

  The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.13

  Jung then comments upon statistics which show an increased incidence of depression around the age of forty in men, rather earlier in women. He believes that these disturbances are often evidence of an important change taking place in the psyche which has its origin in the unconscious. Occasionally, these changes can be almost catastrophic. Jung quotes the case of an excessively pious and intolerant churchwarden who became more and more morose and moody. Finally, at the age of fifty-five, he sat up in bed one night and said to his wife, “Now at last I’ve got it! I’m just a plain rascal.” Jung reports that he spent his declining years in riotous living!14 This is a crude and comical example of Jung’s notion of self-regulatory compensation, described in Chapter 9.

  Why should this process of compensation be particularly noticeable at the mid-life period or later? Jung considered that the first half of life was primarily concerned with the young person establishing himself or herself as a separate entity, with breaking the emotional ties with parents and home, with achieving a position in the world, and with beginning a new family. When all this had been accomplished, it might well happen that the person concerned became depressed; feeling perhaps that there was nothing to aim for, no definite direction to go in. Jung’s way of treating such problems is outlined in Chapter 9.

  Whereas Jung interpreted the mid-life crisis in terms of the reemergence of aspects of the self which had been neglected and were seeking recognition, other observers took a different view. One of these is Elliott Jaques, whose paper “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis”15 has become a classic. Elliott Jaques qualified in medicine at Johns Hopkins, obtained a Ph.D. in social relations at Harvard, and also trained as a Kleinian analyst. He was, for some years, head of the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University in West London. Jaques is one of the very small number of psychoanalysts who have taken an interest in industrial relations. His work on management in industry has become deservedly famous.

  Jaques became interested in the mid-life period when he became aware of

  a marked tendency towards crisis in the creative work of great men in their middle and late thirties.… This crisis may express itself in three different ways: the creative career may simply come to an end, either in a drying-up of creative work, or in actual death; the creative capacity may begin to show and express itself for the first time; or a decisive change in the quality and content of creativeness may take place.

  Jaques studied a random sample of 310 creative men of genius and found a sudden jump in the death rate between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine. This group included Mozart, Raphael, Chopin, Rimbaud, Purcell, Baudelaire, and Watteau.

  As an example of “drying-up,” Jaques cites Racine, who had thirteen years of success, culminating with Phèdre at the age of thirty-eight. For the next twelve years he produced nothing. Another example is that of Ben Jonson, who had produced all his best plays by the time he was forty-three, although he continued to write masques and some other plays which are generally considered of less interest.

  Gauguin, who gave up his job in a bank at the age of thirty-three, is an obvious example of an artist who did not really get going until the mid-life period. George Eliot did not turn to fiction until she was nearly forty. Studies in Hysteria, the first psychoanalytic book, was not published until Freud was thirty-nine.

  Donatello and Goethe are quoted as examples of men of genius whose styles, in their late thirties, showed considerable change. Jaques might also have referred to Ibsen. It was not until Ibsen was thirty-eight that he achieved considerable success with the publication of Brand. At the same time, his manner, appearance, and even his handwriting underwent considerable changes.

  Jaques’s explanation of the significance of the mid-life period is that this is the period when individuals become truly aware that they must die; a possibility which, in youth, seems infinitely remote.

  Jaques alleges that, in earlier years, creative production tends to be intense, spontaneous, lyrical, and rapid. After the mid-life crisis, works become more “sculpted,” that is, more carefully considered, worked over, and externalized. He associates the first kind of creativity with the idealism and optimism of youth, quoting Shelley as an example of someone who, according to his wife’s account, thought that all the evil in the world would disappear if only men would will it to be so.

  In Kleinian terms, such an idealistic attitude is based on unconscious denial of reality and the employment of manic defenses. The change which takes place at the mid-life period is consequent upon an acceptance of the existence of hate and destructive impulses within the self, as well as upon recognizing and accepting the reality of death. Jaques uses the phrase “constructive resignation,” which aptly expresses this change of attitude. Mature insight leads to serenity, and this manifests itself in an artist’s work.

  Jaques illustrates his thesis, rather convincingly, by quoting the opening of The Divine Comedy, which was begun by Dante after his banishment from Florence at the age of thirty-seven.

  Midway upon the journey of our life

  I found that I was in a dusky wood;

  For the right path, whence I had strayed, was lost.

  Ah me! How hard a thing it is to tell

  The wildness of that rough and savage place,

  The very thought of which brings back my fear!

  So bitter was it, death is little more so.16

  Jaques argues that the poem is an account of the poet’s first conscious, full encounter with death. He has to be led by Virgil through both hell and purgatory before he eventually finds his own way into Paradise.

  One might argue that the mid-life crises of creative people are hardly typical of the general run of mankind. However, I am inclined to agree with Jaques that what can be more easily discerned in men and women of genius because it is recorded in their wor
ks also occurs in some form or other in more ordinary mortals. Indeed, the changes taking place in adult life can perhaps best be studied by considering the records left by creative artists. Longitudinal studies of change in ordinary people from adulthood to death are still hard to come by, although I earlier referred to some attempts in this direction. But there is certainly a consensus among observers writing from very different theoretical standpoints that, somewhere around the late thirties or early forties, changes in attitude take place in many human beings which are often accompanied by emotional upheavals. How far such changes are a product of our particular culture is an open question.

  Jung and Jaques are content to delineate two main periods of adult life, separated by the mid-life crisis. In the case of creative people, however, critics have often defined three periods rather than two. The so-called “third period” is of particular interest. As I have written about it at some length elsewhere,17 I shall refer to it only briefly. The first period in an artist’s life is one in which he is learning his craft and in which, in varying degree, he still exhibits indebtedness to his teachers. The second period is the time at which the artist has achieved mastery of his art, and has also found his own, individual way of expressing himself. Some artists reach this second period without difficulty. Others, like Giacometti, may go through agonies before they feel that they have succeeded in reaching the essence of an individual vision. Many of the greatest geniuses have not passed beyond this second stage because they have died prematurely, like Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Purcell, and the others referred to earlier.