In Our Prime

by Patricia Cohen

  Jaques’s work engendered a mini-industry of research and writing about the midlife crisis. Two of the most influential were the psychologists Daniel Levinson and Roger Gould, who published their theories in the 1970s. Levinson, a student of Erikson’s, undertook a ten-year study of forty men—hourly industrial workers, business executives, university biologists, and novelists—between the ages of 35 and 45. He concluded that throughout life men go through a series of regular and predictable periods of stability and transition (a term that, he later said, he preferred over “crisis”).

  Transition points are critical in determining a man’s behavior, emotions, and attitudes, Levinson argued in his 1978 book The Seasons of a Man’s Life. He defined middle age as occurring between 40 and 65, with a midlife transition between 40 and 45. Like Jaques, Levinson felt that the “experience of one’s mortality is at the core of the midlife crisis.” And like Hall, Levinson believed that at 40 a man has to “deal with the disparity between what he is and what he dreamed of becoming.” He noted, however, that the most dramatic of the crises was not in midlife but around age 30, during “early adulthood.”

  Gould, a psychiatrist at the University of California–Los Angeles, was one of the few to include women in his studies. He pinpointed the midlife crisis a bit earlier, between 35 and 45, arguing it struck adults as they compared their own achievements with the tick of the social clock.

  The midlife crisis gained a stable foothold in the popular culture of the seventies in a way that previous versions, like Hall’s “middle age crisis,” never did. One reason was that the midlife crisis had a powerful publicist. Gail Sheehy put middle age and its attendant crises at the center of the national conversation with her 1974 blockbuster book Passages. Sheehy adopted Erikson’s central insight about the adult life cycle that people move across time from one transition to another. She then built on this framework of life as a series of stages with predictable turning points, borrowing ideas from Levinson and Gould, and including women in her narrative. She labeled the years between 35 and 45 the “Deadline Decade,” when “most of us will have a full-out authenticity crisis.” Her own midlife crisis was accompanied by “thoughts of aging and imminent death.”

  Sheehy, too, saw light on the other side. After a difficult transition, people can emerge into middle age stabilized, empowered, and content, she said, if they allow themselves to be “shaken into self-examination”; in other words, to effect their own transformation. Self-improvement was once again identified as the route to midlife happiness, just as advertisers and beauty surgeons had been saying for decades, but this time it involved the psyche instead of the physical body. Indeed, the intense preoccupation with personal fulfillment prompted the writer Tom Wolfe to label the 1970s the Me Decade: “Changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!)” became an integral part of the midlife experience.

  Sheehy created a sensation, but in the popular retelling that followed, important details, like the fact that such periodic transitions were normal or that crises were triumphantly resolved, were lost or minimized. The miserable crisis, like a toddler throwing a tantrum, received all the attention.

  The vaunted discovery of a grim midlife segue seemed to go hand in hand with the increased political and social awakening of college students. Sheehy’s book appeared after the United States had ignominiously pulled its troops out of Saigon, Nixon had resigned in disgrace, and the country experienced the worst economic downturn since the Depression, triggered in part by an Arab oil embargo as well as corrosive inflation. For men already in their middle years, vague intimations of sliding cultural primacy that came in the wake of the sixties’ youth culture were supplemented by the sudden prospect of being pushed out of their jobs. Their unquestioned reign as head of the household was simultaneously threatened by women’s demands for equality and liberation. In 1973, an article by the popular psychologist Eda LeShan, author of The Wonderful Crisis of Middle Age, noted: “Men seem to have been hit harder than women by the burdens of middle age. . . . [He is] uneasy if not terrified about his job and its future, the destruction of the twin myths of male superiority and sexual longevity have had devastating effects.” Similar views were expressed in television documentaries titled Male Menopause and Middle Age Blues, which detailed men’s vague feelings of obsolescence.

  In the Long Run

  In terms of researching middle age, the 1970s turned out to be a boom time. The behavioral sciences were growing up. New studies and ideas about adult development came together, each nudging the other forward. “It was a very exciting time,” the psychiatrist George Vaillant recalled.

  Fledgling attempts to study groups of children and teenagers that had been initiated years earlier were entering their fourth or fifth decade. Gawky 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds who had lived in Berkeley in the 1920s; toughened Irish and Italian boys who spent the 1940s in Boston’s inner city; and polished, highly ranked students from Harvard’s class of 1941 had all grown into middle-aged adults. Such long-term, or longitudinal, studies provide a unique type of information; they allow you to see how someone evolves over time—whether a shy child is also a shy adult or whether intelligence scores shift. The very existence of these novel data sets attracted fresh recruits to study middle age, and prompted researchers to launch a new wave of longitudinal studies. Just as “the Child is Father to the Man,” so was child development the father of adult development.

  One of the early surveys was started in 1921 by Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, who recruited roughly 1,500 gifted children from California (later called “Termites”) for an investigation of intelligence. The Berkeley Guidance Study followed 248 infants born in 1928 and 1929, most of them white and middle class, while in 1931 the Oakland Growth Study monitored 167 fifth and sixth graders. On the East Coast, the Grant Foundation began tracking 268 top sophomores at Harvard in 1939. The alumni have remained mostly anonymous except for a couple of outed participants, like John F. Kennedy and the former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. George Vaillant later took over the alumni study as well as another project dating back to 1939 that included 456 inner-city Boston schoolboys.

  Throughout the decades, these researchers and their successors followed the original participants, checking in with them at regular intervals through interviews, health assessments, and personality inventories. They monitored the men’s physical and emotional well-being, their accomplishments and regrets, their personality traits and habits, and eventually their deaths. The longest-running studies included three generations: the subjects, their parents, and later their own children.

  Vaillant declared that the Boston and Harvard men produced the first clinical data that confirmed Erikson’s theories about lifelong personality development. He pointed out that annoying adolescent tropes, from acting out to sulky passive aggressiveness, had evolved into mature coping mechanisms like altruism or sublimation. “Such transformation becomes visible only through the vantage point of the prospective study of lifetimes,” Vaillant said. “Once such studies are available, the evidence that defenses could continue to mature into late midlife seemed clear.”

  The ability to adapt, Vaillant declared, “is not the product of social class; it is not a product of I.Q.; and it is not a product of years of education. It has nothing to do with the color of our skin or our mother’s schooling. Rather, the ingenuity of defenses is as democratic as our sex lives and our ability to play pool. And it has everything to do with increasing age.” Over the course of someone’s life, there are pendulum swings in outlook and behavior. Temperament may be more fixed, but character and personality are more flexible. As an adolescent, you might be reluctant to contradict your friends, while as an adult you are comfortable speaking your mind. “Our self-assurance, our tendency to criticize our children, our satisfaction with our lot, are highly inconsistent between ages 30 and 70.”

  Vaillant
also concluded that the Harvard data undermined the fabled midlife crisis. Divorce, unemployment, and depression happen throughout adulthood with roughly equal frequency, he noted. “If such events occur during the dangerous, exciting ripening of the forties, we can pause and say ‘Ah-ha! The midlife crisis, the dirty forties, menopausal depression!’ but that is to miss the point. Progression in the life cycle necessitates growth and change; but crisis is the exception, not the rule.” Looking back, Vaillant’s Harvard men “regarded the period from 35 to 49 as the happiest in their lives and the seemingly calmer period from 21 to 35 as the unhappiest.” The young men who had resorted to what he labeled immature emotional reactions to anxiety (like losing oneself in fantasy) had, by midlife, replaced those with mature defenses like creativity, humor, and altruism. In Vaillant’s view, 20- and 30-somethings who anticipate middle age with dread and anxiety are like a 9-year-old boy who finds kissing gross, only to later discover the wonder and excitement of sex as he turns into an adolescent.

  On the other side of the country, Glen Elder, a newly minted sociologist, considered the long-term studies that had been under the care of the University of California–Berkeley: the 1931 Oakland study, which revolved around the sample of fifth graders born in 1920–21, and the Berkeley study, which originated with a couple of hundred infants born in 1928–29.

  When Elder looked at the older children, he was surprised by how many were able to flourish despite having grown up during the Depression’s economic catastrophe. How, he wondered, were these Oakland children able to turn their lives around? Trained as a sociologist, Elder was inclined to look for social as well as psychological explanations. The particular historical circumstances had to be critical, he thought, perhaps even more so than the sequence of life stages that Erikson and others had proposed. In his now classic 1974 book Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience, Elder argued that individual turning points occur at different ages in response to what is happening in the larger world. A teenager during the hungry years of the Depression might have less in common with a teenager raised in the affluent sixties and more in common with a 50-year-old who grew up during hard times. “Lives are lived in specific historical times and places, and studies of them necessarily call attention to changing cultures, populations, and institutional contexts,” Elder wrote. The Oakland children who were young teenagers during the Depression fared much better than one might expect. They were able to understand what was happening and contribute to the household. The military rescued many from poverty and afterward marriage steadied them. This group “experienced the prosperous postwar years and many took advantage of educational benefits from the G.I. Bill,” Elder explained.

  Elder later contrasted the Oakland subjects with the younger Berkeley participants, who had spent their earliest, most vulnerable years in the darkest days of the Depression and their adolescence in empty households when fathers were fighting in World War II and mothers were frequently drawn into the workplace. The Berkeley children “hit both the Depression and war years at ‘an untimely point’ in their lives, and they followed a path of life-long disadvantage into the later years.”

  These long-term studies were a gold mine, but they had flaws. For starters, their creators did not necessarily assume they would continue for decades. Louis Terman, for instance, was thinking about bright children when he designed the questions, not middle-agers. Funding was scarce, limiting the extent of the surveys. Research methodologies and statistical computations were also not as advanced as they are today. The participants may not have accurately represented the population or been randomly selected. Similarly, Vaillant’s findings were enlightening, but the experiences of privileged Harvard men could hardly be expected to apply to all Americans.

  Elder realized some of these problems as early as 1962, when he worked as a part-time researcher at UC Berkeley figuring out how to code responses from study subjects. What struck Elder was that the information collected did not always match what he and others wanted to know about the participants: “How did they make it to middle age? Did they go into the military, into college? What kinds of careers did they pursue? And what about the impact of social change?”

  Before the 1970s, most studies were organized around comparisons. Researchers could scan a list of facts describing a person on his tenth birthday, and then his twentieth, thirtieth, and fortieth, but they did not know why or how he moved from one to the other. The research offered a series of snapshots, not a moving picture. What happened in between was anyone’s guess. “The intervening years remained a black box, open to speculation, not scientific understanding,” Elder said, reflecting on this first wave of work.

  Elder was intent on opening that box. Individual psychological development was important, but so were circumstances. Midlife could not be studied in splendid isolation but had to be located in the context of an entire life, grounded in a particular time and place, and situated in a mesh of family and community ties. “If historical times and places change, they change the ‘way people live their lives,’” he realized. “And this change alters the course of development and aging. Likewise, changing people and populations alter social institutions and places.”

  Elder started by looking at a group of men in the early years of middle age, but his research led him to widen his frame and fit middle age into a larger panorama. The problem with theories that divided a human life into stages was that they missed the connective tissue. Erikson was sensitive to history and culture, but his Eight Stages of Man did not account for them. Elder wanted to construct a theory that would.

  Other social scientists, including Bernice Neugarten, expressed similar reservations about age-based stages that uniformly proceeded in an orderly progression. She had only to look around. Feminism was propelling middle-aged women in new directions. Social strictures surrounding the timing of sex, marriage, parenthood, and careers were loosening. Better health and longer life spans were altering the customary path toward old age. In 1974, the same year that Children of the Great Depression appeared, Neugarten labeled the cluster of active, engaged people between 55 and 75 the “young-old” and distinguished them from the middle-aged and the “old-old.” The emergence of the “young-old” was interfering with the familiar social clock, which she predicted would eventually help create “an age-irrelevant society.” Neugarten built on Erikson’s seminal work but eventually moved beyond a rigid notion of sequenced steps. “The psychological themes and preoccupations of adults, although they are often described by psychologists as occurring in succession do not in truth arise at regular moments in life, each to be resolved and put behind as if it were a bead on a chain,” she observed. “It is therefore a distortion to describe the psychology of adulthood and old age as a series of discrete stages, as if adult life were a staircase.”

  Other kindred spirits also stepped away from the staircase. Pioneering psychologists like K. Warner Schaie and Paul Baltes, to name just two, were already at work constructing a more encompassing alternate theory of lifelong development.

  The person who ultimately brought many of these leading thinkers together in the 1970s was Bert Brim, the man who would later spearhead the world’s largest study of middle age.

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  Middle Age Under the Microscope

  The original members of the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on Midlife, 1992. Bert Brim, top row, far right.

  Stage theories are a little like horoscopes. They are vague enough so that everyone can see something of themselves in them. That’s why they are so popular.

  —Bert Brim

  The research revolution that gained momentum in the 1970s among social scientists studying the middle decades culminated in 1989 with the creation of the MacArthur Foundation’s nearly $10 million, ten-year investigation into midlife. Sundry theories about middle age had been floating through academic circles and the popular culture for nearly a century: it was the prime of life, it was a depressing low point; it was stagnant
, it was crisis-ridden; it was ruled by genetics, it was governed by circumstance. None, however, had been scientifically verified. Finally, here was a comprehensive, scientific, and interdisciplinary search for hard evidence that could clear away the thicket of conflicting assumptions.

  The ambitious undertaking was largely the work of Bert Brim. Seated at his dining room table in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, Brim, now retired, talked about the path that led him to become the impresario of research on middle age. He was born in 1923 in Elmira, a small town in the northeastern part of New York, the baby of the family and the first boy after three girls. He enrolled at Yale, but left in 1943 when World War II spread to America’s shores to join the air force and fly B-24s, the cumbersome long-range bombers. Brim, lean with white hair, paused for a moment as he remembered his days soaring over the Pacific more than sixty-five years ago. “Sometimes you look back at your different selves,” he said, peering through the glass patio doors at the Long Island Sound as if searching for the younger Brim. “I don’t recognize that self at all.”

  Brim returned to Yale after his military service and pursued his plan to become a novelist. He finished a tale of wartime adventure and, filled with confidence, took the train from New Haven to Grand Central to deliver his freshly typed manuscript to Random House’s midtown office.