“Eriksonian became almost a household term on many campuses,” Erikson’s biographer Richard Friedman notes, and eventually turned him into a “culture hero.” Erikson’s writings about identity and nonconformity struck a chord. His daughter, Sue, remembers eating at a restaurant when a nervous waitress came over to ask for her father’s autograph; she had read Childhood and Society in her college psychology course and recognized his shock of wavy white hair and Wedgwood blue eyes.
Of all the movements, fads, and enthusiasms that blew across campuses in the 1960s, perhaps the most surprising was the so-called discovery of middle age. Adult development, a topic largely confined to a small group of scholars at a handful of universities in the fifties, spread during a decade that was punch-drunk on the power and promise of youth. As student activists stood atop police cars to demand free speech at Berkeley or brandished guns outside the student union at Cornell, inside college libraries and labs, established and aspiring social scientists began, for the first time, to examine the second half of life, initiating research and constructing theories. New doctoral candidates, ever in search of virgin territory to study, found human development to be a vast untrodden field. In universities, middle age and other periods of adulthood shared a feature with new academic areas like Black Studies and Women’s Studies. Just as race and gender concentrations were created to make up for the neglect of those groups in existing departments like English, History, and Political Science, adult development arose to correct the child-centered focus in psychology. Reading through the avalanche of articles, studies, and papers published in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, one can detect the incredulity of graduate students and researchers as they announce with astonishment that “no one before has examined” divorce, marriage, contentment, and a slew of other events and emotions that occupy middle age.
Ideas about adults’ capacity for change also matched the spirit of the age. Deeply rooted beliefs and institutions were being yanked from their moorings and heaved into once inconceivable formations. Race relations, sexual mores, women’s roles, gay rights—all testified to the possibility that human beings were capable of deep, even disorienting transformations.
In 1956, Thomas Desmond hoped that “a new discipline of ‘mediatrics’ [might] blossom forth to care for middle-aged folks . . . just as pediatrics had emerged to center attention on the care of children.” His title never gained traction, but a decade later, the idea had.
The Second Wave
Bernice Neugarten was one of the first of the psychologists interested in adult development to focus specifically on middle age and, like a scholarly Pied Piper, she inspired legions of followers with her pathbreaking work. Born in 1916 in the small town of Norfolk, Nebraska, Neugarten stuck out like a sunflower among weeds. She took her first college course before turning 13 and finished a master’s degree at 21. Unable to find a job as a high school teacher because she looked so young, Neugarten was glad to accept a graduate assistantship at the University of Chicago’s new Committee on Childhood Development. She went on to earn her PhD in 1943. She then did something Erikson and many subsequent, mostly male, theorists had never considered: she took a break from her career for eight years to raise a family, undertake some part-time research, and volunteer in her community.
Only by happenstance did Neugarten later turn her gaze to adult development. After returning to the university in 1951, she was asked to teach a class on aging (and discovered the lack of any texts aside from Erikson’s). The Committee on Childhood Development, renamed the Committee on Human Development, was expanding its focus under the leadership of Robert J. Havighurst, an education specialist who had worked with Erikson before World War II. Havighurst, too, was studying the aging process, and Neugarten ended up working with him on a new project, the Kansas City Study of Adult Life, the first community-based research to focus on middle and old age. For ten years, between 1954 and 1964, they and their colleagues followed more than two thousand men and women over 40.
The study provided Neugarten with something that her esteemed and honored predecessors lacked: data. Hall, Jung, and Erikson expounded on human nature, the meaning of existence, and the confrontation with death with enormous insight and creativity, but little actual evidence.
Neugarten used Erikson’s theoretical framework, but her research provided a richer and more nuanced understanding of how people experienced their middle years. The presumption that individuals evolved over time was borne out. “Many people talk about how they grew up in new ways even after they were forty or sixty,” Neugarten discovered. “No one says, ‘I am the same person I was ten years ago.’”
And despite the culture’s ever-deepening love affair with youth, the adults she studied did not feel overshadowed or sidelined by younger people. Americans might embrace hippies’ studied scruffiness, salute the young’s righteous activism, or recoil at their outrageousness, but they recognized that the middle-aged remained the “norm-bearers and decision-makers; and they live in a society which, while it may be oriented towards youth, it is controlled by the middle age.”
Neugarten thought Time magazine was right—even if its conclusion was “less laboriously derived and more colorfully stated”—to feature middle agers on the cover of its July 29, 1966, issue and call them “The Command Generation.” Listing White House occupants, Cabinet members, Nobel Prize winners, hundreds of corporate CEOs, as well as leaders in education, religion, science, industry, and communications, Time placed those in the 40- to 60-year age group at the center of influence. They are “the ruling class,” the magazine declared, “that one-fifth of the nation between the ages of 40 and 60 (42,800,000) who occupy the seats of power, foot the bills, and make the decisions that profoundly affect how the other four-fifths live. . . . Even the revolt of the teen-aged is subsidized by middle-agers.”
In 1967, Neugarten wrote up her findings from Kansas City and other studies and later included them in Middle Age and Aging (1968), a classic collection she edited that served as the discipline’s first textbook for the growing number of universities and colleges that were instituting courses in this subject. (Martin Martel’s comparison of the way middle age was depicted in magazine fiction in 1890 and 1955 was one of the selections.)
Because of her on-the-ground research, Neugarten recognized early on the degree to which women were transfiguring views of middle age. In 1966, the same year that Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, more than half of women between 45 and 54 were in the labor force. (After age 20, women’s participation dropped steadily as they stopped work to marry and raise children. It reached a low among 30-year-old women when forty percent had jobs, before rising again.) For women new to the working world, earning a paycheck meant they saw themselves as “economic adults” for the first time in their middle years (much as Gertrude Atherton had predicted). This development, Neugarten maintained, contributed to “the broad redefinitions of age groups” in America. “Most of the women interviewed feel that the most conspicuous characteristic of middle age is the sense of increased freedom,” Neugarten reported in 1967. “Not only is there increased time and energy now available for the self, but also a satisfying change in self-concept.” As one typical woman responded: “I discovered these last few years that I was old enough to admit to myself the things I could do well and to start doing them. I didn’t think like this before. . . . It’s a great new feeling.”
Neugarten examined how society’s expectations about the age at which someone should marry, have a child, find a job, or retire exerted significant pressure on individuals regardless of class or ethnicity. Deviating from this “social clock” could be discomforting, but it could also pry open opportunities. Neugarten’s hopscotching around the expected progression of school, marriage, children, and career in the 1940s was extremely rare. By the seventies, though, notions of a smooth, predictable series of life stages were thrown topsy-turvy by feminism, a changing economy, growing divorce rates, and older mothe
rs. The number of middle-aged women who landed their first jobs or returned to work after taking time off to raise children grew, as did their status both outside and inside the family. By the end of the decade, for the first time, a clear majority of women approved of wives working (even if their husbands did not). Many women went back to school and then into the workforce. In a 1982 study, thirty-seven percent of women who got a graduate degree were older than 40.
The aftershocks of such changes upended a boatload of assumptions about age-appropriate behavior. Middle age did not necessarily mean one was finished with child-rearing, settled in an occupation, or set in one’s ways. Erikson’s notion that generativity marked a new stage of nurturing did not sufficiently account for the fact that women had already spent most of their lives caring for the next generation at home and in school, and had channeled those energies into volunteer work after their children grew up.
The feminist movement, despite its primary attention to younger women, helped to widen the possibilities for women in midlife just as Progressive Era–feminism had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the “Renaissance of the Middle Aged.” In The Coming of Age (first published in English in 1972), Simone de Beauvoir dissected the way societies infuse different ages with meaning. Aging is both a biological and a psychological phenomenon, but the significance of any particular stage of life “is imposed upon him by the society to which he belongs,” she wrote. “Every society creates its own values: and it is in the social context that the word decline takes on an exact meaning.”
If middle-aged women were devalued, it was because society constricted their options. Embarking on a new path as an entrepreneur or oceanographer, an artist or a drummer, a passionate lover or global traveler was not a part of most middle-aged women’s mental universe. Primarily typecast as mothers and housewives, in society’s view they became functionally unnecessary after menopause and after their children had grown up.
The women’s movement helped to transform middle age into a period of undiscovered possibility. As one woman wrote in a 1973 column in the New York Times: “It is pure gold to realize your life is opening up. You have freedom from and freedom to—just when you thought it was all but over.”
The Midlife Crisis
While the women’s movement gave middle-aged women a novel feeling of expanding opportunity and liberation, men’s middle years seemed increasingly enveloped in gloom thanks to the appearance of a catchy meme that appeared in 1965: the midlife crisis. Of the many theories about adult development that arose in Erikson’s wake, few have been more influential. This allegedly omnipresent affliction has remained a touchstone, a powerful presence in our imaginations if not our lives.
The phrase was coined by Elliott Jaques, a Canadian psychoanalyst and management consultant who studied with the child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in London and later consulted for the Church of England and the U.S. Army. Unlike Erikson, who proposed a comprehensive model of lifelong development, Jaques concentrated on what he believed was a seminal turning point. He assembled a supposedly random sample of 310 renowned painters, composers, poets, writers, and sculptors—including Shakespeare, Goya, Bach, Gauguin, Purcell, and Dante—and then analyzed their art to assess at what age they created their greatest work. Jaques was investigating the same question that the neurologist George Miller Beard had puzzled over a century earlier and he employed virtually the same flawed method. Jaques’s project, nevertheless, differed from Beard’s “Relation of Age to Original Work” graph in crucial ways. While Beard measured value in terms of productivity, a reflection of the era’s industrial orientation, Jaques explored the psyche. The purely material evaluation of middle age was replaced by more intangible measures. To Jaques, the midlife crisis was wholly a psychological phenomenon. The cause was a new awareness of “one’s own death, one’s own real and actual mortality.”
Jaques’s conclusion that the midlife passage led to an artist’s most impressive achievements squarely contradicted Beard’s insistence that artists produced their greatest work before age 40. “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” the enormously influential article he published in 1965 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, argued that a significant transformation occurs in their late 30s. There was a decisive change “in the quality of their work,” the result of a midlife crisis, ranging from the mild and less troubled to the severe and dramatic. Despite the word “crisis,” Jaques was in reality offering a counternarrative to the common story of slump that accompanied middle age. His theory was consistent with the classical view that connected aging to wisdom. He argued that men, recognizing the limits of time, could either be thrown into despair and artistic impotence or break through to deeper self-awareness and expressiveness. During the midlife crisis, he wrote, “tragic and philosophical content” emerged, “which then moves on to serenity in the creativity of mature adulthood, in contrast to a more characteristically lyrical and descriptive content [in] the work of early adulthood.” The difference, say, between Beethoven’s first symphony, written at age 29, and the ninth, composed in his late 40s and early 50s. Profound genius was midlife’s territory.
Jaques’s paper contained other familiar elements. G. Stanley Hall, too, had presented his “middle age crisis” in psychological terms. “The passage from late youth to middle age has many of the same traits as growing old,” he wrote in Senescence. “We suddenly realize, perhaps in a flash, that life is no longer all before us. When youth begins to die it fights and struggles. The panic is not so much that we cannot do handsprings, but we have to compromise with our youthful hopes . . . . We lose the sense of superfluous time and must hurry.”
To Hall, the midlife crisis could be triggered by an event. Nietzsche’s, he said, began in August 1876, when he was 32, after a performance of Wagner’s The Ring of the Niebelung. His disappointment in the score led him to think Wagner was not his long-awaited superman, an event that Hall believed prompted his descent into madness. In extreme cases, the midlife crisis could even lead to death.
Jung had also asserted that the transition in middle age was frequently triggered by a traumatically stormy period. The “severest shock” jolted one into wholly realizing one’s self, but the end result was insight. In Jung’s view, the full, authentic self could emerge only when traits that had been neglected or suppressed were integrated into the whole. A man might need to express the feminine elements of his personality, for example, or a shy woman might need to work on her more extroverted qualities. In midlife, people had to transcend their youthful preoccupations with beauty or lust and develop mature purpose and insight.
Resistance to aging was normal, but acceptance led to a breakthrough. As Jung wrote in “The Soul and Death” (1934): “Ordinarily we cling to our past and remain stuck in the illusion of youthfulness. Being old is highly unpopular. Nobody seems to consider that not being able to grow old is precisely as absurd as not being able to outgrow child-sized shoes. A still infantile man of 30 is surely to be deplored, but a youthful septuagenarian—isn’t that delightful? And yet both are perverse, lacking in style, psychological monstrosities.” Jung’s description of this perverse arrested development are sounded in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World (1932) when “all the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished,” so that “characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime” and “at 60 our powers and tastes are what they were at 17,” with “no time off from pleasure,” and no leisure to think.
People who successfully balanced their opposing traits sailed smoothly through middle age, Jung promised. Similarly, Erikson posited that the midlife clash between caring and self-absorption could be successfully resolved. Indeed, the very experience of a crisis, in the long run, was preferable to going through the period of identity formation without a ruffle. Jaques, too, assumed a traumatic transition. Poorly adjusted individuals, he maintained, overreacted to the midlife crisis with manic attempts to appear young, hypochondria, promiscuity, or a sudde
n religious conversion, the same kinds of responses Hall had warned about forty years earlier.
Jaques’s term has been used as shorthand for disappointment and defeat, but that is a mistake. Like Jung, his conception of the midlife crisis did not assume a period of unending deterioration; rather, the crisis was the gateway to “wisdom, fortitude and courage, deeper capacity for love and affection and human insight, and hopefulness and enjoyment.” A successful resolution resulted in artistic invention and a kind of spiritual transcendence. “There is no longer a need for obsessional attempts at perfection, because inevitable imperfection is no longer felt as bitter persecuting failure,” Jaques wrote. “Out of this mature resignation comes the serenity in the work of genius, true serenity, serenity which transcends imperfection by accepting it.” In Jaques’s schema, the midlife crisis had a happy ending.
The positive spin on middle age was significant. Still, Jaques’s theory was based on a series of dubious assumptions, such as midlife began at 35 and anyone not settled with nearly grown children by that age was suffering from a serious adjustment problem. He also insisted that the fear of death was the switch that set the whole machinery of the midlife crisis in motion, an assumption that has been proved false.
Women were shut out of the cathedral of the midlife crisis, just as they had been given the back hand by psychoanalysis. Freud had a particularly negative view of women over 40 and believed menopause triggered in them an Oedipal complex that focused on their sons-in-law. After menopause, women’s characters altered, he wrote, and they become “quarrelsome, vexatious, overbearing, petty, stingy, typically sadistic and developed anal-erotic traits that they did not previously possess.” Psychoanalytic interpretations assumed fertility was the essence of female identity and portrayed menopause as a “partial death,” in the words of Freud’s Austrian-American colleague Helene Deutsch, because it marked the end of a woman’s “key life function as childbearer.” Erikson adopted the Freudian assumption that women suffered from penis envy, and he often portrayed middle-aged mothers as neurotic. Jaques insisted female transitions were obscured by menopause. During the 1960s, female junctures were still primarily defined by biology: alterations in the face and body, the onset of menopause, or a shift in a woman’s reproductive and maternal roles. Women escaped the midlife crisis for most of the twentieth century not so much because they were considered particularly well adjusted but because they were not deemed worthy of it.
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