In Our Prime (17 page)

—Carl Jung (1933)

“
Middle age is certainly the
least understood phase of the life cycle, and in terms of its opportunities, the most misunderstood,” Thomas Desmond lamented in a 1956
New York Times Magazine
article. Desmond, a New York State senator and the chairman of the state's Joint Legislative Committee on Problems of the Aging, called for more study of this neglected and maligned period of life. “Americans slump into middle age grudgingly, sadly, and with a tinge of fear. As a result of this immature reaction to maturity we carelessly fritter away what should be truly the ‘prime of life.'”

A pinched view of the middle years had reigned since the twenties. In popular culture, middle-aged characters were pathetic: figures of ridicule, like the overwrought husband in
The Seven Year Itch
(1955), who is tempted to cheat by Marilyn Monroe's vent-blown white skirt; or figures of pity, like the 50-year-old silent-screen star Norma Desmond desperately hanging on to her youth in
Sunset Boulevard
(1950). Biologists were interested in middle age only in regard to how it affected the functioning of the body's hormones, glands, tissues, and organs.
As for psychologists, when it
came to explaining human development, most took Sigmund Freud's lead and assumed that the first years of life were all that mattered. In Freud's view, individual personality—that complex blend of affinities, fears, quirks, and humor—was largely set by age five. Those who got stuck in one of the early psychological and sexually related stages that Freud outlined were fated to be burdened with it as adults. Smoking, drinking, overeating, or nail-biting? Must be due to an oral fixation traced to infancy. Social institutions, religion, and historical circumstances were disregarded. Most psychologists did not consider the midlife period worth sustained examination.
Freud thought middle-aged patients
were poor candidates for psychoanalysis because they lacked the necessary “elasticity of the mental processes” and were “no longer educable,” as he wrote in 1905. It is not surprising an air of stagnation surrounded middle age; stasis was essentially built into the definition.

There were dissenters.
In his eighth decade G. Stanley Hall
, who had hosted Freud during his visit to the United States, argued in his 1922 opus that “senescence, like adolescence, has its own feelings, thoughts, and wills, as well as its own physiology, and their regimen is important,
as well as that of the body.” Doctors had explored the “physiological and pathological aspects” of aging; Hall insisted the “subjective and psychological” perspective was similarly significant.

As Hall was reevaluating the second half of life, one of Freud's closest disciples, Carl Jung, also started to question the narrow focus on childhood.
In 1913, his bitter falling-out
with Freud sent him into a disorienting spiral of confusion and doubt. At 38, he embarked on a four-year period of intense self-examination that ultimately led him to form his own comprehensive psychological theory. “I felt something great was happening to me,” he wrote.

Psychological Types
was published in 1921, when Jung was 46 and “the unbearable age” of youth had turned into “the period of maturity,” as he later put it. The book contained the beginning of a coherent theory of middle age renewal. Reflecting back, Jung saw how misguided it was to think that an individual's personality was wholly and permanently formed during childhood. “The middle period of life is a time of enormous psychological importance,” he wrote in 1933. Jung believed a person could retrieve characteristics that had been repressed, bring them to the surface, and successfully integrate them into his personality.
The more mature man has had
“his consciousness . . . widened by the experience of life.” He was ready to search for meaning and purpose. In this sense, Jung's vision of midlife had more in common with the Calvinist view of aging as a spiritual journey than with the biological preoccupations of his contemporaries.

Neither Jung's nor Hall's ideas on middle age were expanded on or popularized at the time, and for decades the notion of psychological progress beyond childhood remained alien.
Bernice L. Neugarten, a groundbreaking
researcher of middle age, remembered that students in her graduate course on aging in the early 1950s “were amazed at the idea that one developed throughout life. Children developed, they thought, but not adults. The same views were held by most psychologists and by the public. It was generally assumed that you reached a plateau simply called adulthood and you lived on that plateau until you went over the cliff at age sixty-five.” In 1951, when she was assigned to teach the first college-level course on aging at the University of Chicago's Committee on
Human Development, Neugarten was unable to find published material to put on the syllabus. “There were no psychology or other social science books on the topic that I can recall,” she said, because everyone assumed development occurred only in childhood. “
No one earlier had seemed
to be thinking about development in adulthood—no one except Erik Erikson.”

Though Erikson was born in Germany, in his outlook and optimism he was a consummate American.
He arrived in the United States
with his wife, Joan, in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Speaking only a few words of English, the 31-year-old émigré nonetheless found America's eager embrace of progress energizing, and it influenced his visionary theories about how individual identity is formed. In this rapidly changing nation, the possibility of self-invention in adulthood did not seem strange. Erikson himself took advantage of the opportunity. He did not know his biological father and as a child took his stepfather's surname, Homburger. He decided to rechristen himself Erik H. Erikson when he signed his naturalization papers, taking advantage of what he called “the freedom in America to become your own adult.” At 37, he created himself anew.

Erikson considered himself a devoted Freudian. He trained at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna and had been psychoanalyzed by Freud's daughter, Anna. But his differences with the master were ultimately what turned him into one of the postwar era's most creative and influential figures. Erikson began to see development as a lifelong process. He also parted company with Freud's single-minded focus on the inner psyche and sexuality. Identity was the result of one's place in history and culture and one's shifting relationships with others, Erikson maintained. Parents not only affected a child's development; they were, in turn, enormously affected by their children.

Erikson felt the force of that idea in his own life. In 1944, Joan gave birth to their fourth child, Neil, who had Down syndrome.
Shocked and bewildered, Erikson immediately
institutionalized Neil while his 41-year-old wife was recovering from the difficult birth. Two close friends, the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead and the Jungian analyst Joseph
Wheelwright, both agreed that Neil should be sent away even before his mother had a chance to hold him. In fairness, little was known about Down at the time, not even that it was caused by an extra chromosome, and the prevailing medical opinion was that professionals were best equipped to handle such children. Though plagued by guilt and doubt, Joan did not push to reverse the decision after she got better. The couple told their three other children that their newborn brother had died, although there was no funeral or burial. The children were instructed not to mention the subject or ask questions. Many of the family's close friends first learned of Neil's existence when Lawrence J. Friedman published his biography of Erikson in 1999.

Erikson, who had been exposed to Jung's thinking on adult development through Wheelwright, had worked on a theory about the life cycle before World War II. After Neil's birth, he decided to return to the topic.
Both Friedman and Erikson's daughter
, Sue Erikson Bloland, believe that Neil's handicap and banishment were behind the couple's renewed compulsion to put together a picture of healthy “normal” development from childhood through adulthood, something their own son would not experience. Friedman describes their work “as a path away from the crisis of family dysfunction rooted in Neil's birth.”

Although Joan had a master's degree in sociology and a deep interest in child development, she viewed her own role primarily as devoted helpmate to her brilliant and charismatic husband. Joan, born in Canada, had always assisted Erik with his written English, co-authoring or editing his books. This time, she took the lead in urging Erik to look more carefully at their own family's development, and collaborated much more closely with him as he worked on his ideas about life as a series of stages. Erik created the theoretical framework, but the two shared most of the work. “
My life cycle theory
” was “really ours,” he said decades later.

Like her husband, Joan was skeptical
of psychoanalysis's preoccupation with sex. She credited Shakespeare with a much deeper understanding of human nature and the interplay of social forces by citing Jaques's famous speech on the seven stages of man in the second act of
As You Like It
. The couple read the passage aloud to each other:

 

At first the infant, mewling, and puking in the nurse's arms:

Then the whining school-boy with his . . . shining morning face . . .

Then the lover, sighing like furnace . . .

Then, a soldier . . . quick in quarrel . . .

Then, the justice . . . in fair round belly . . .

The sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon . . .

Last scene of all . . . is second childishness and mere oblivion.

 

They began to use Jaques's characterizations as a frame for their own ideas about development, incorporating experiences from case studies that had not previously fit into child-centered theories. In Shakespeare's verse, the schoolboy followed the infant, but in constructing their model, the couple inserted a stage in between that focused on play, when the toddler overcame feelings of doubt and developed autonomy.

Joan Erikson remembered the moment when she was first struck by the idea of middle age as a separate stage. She was driving with her husband in 1950 from their home in the Berkeley hills to the train station in south San Francisco. Erikson had been invited to deliver a paper at a White House conference, and he was scheduled to give a preliminary version to a group of psychologists in Los Angeles. They were delighted with their discovery of a stage (the toddler) that Shakespeare himself had missed. “We felt amused and very wise,” she wrote. But then, “sitting with the life cycle chart on my lap while Erik drove, I began to feel uneasy. Shakespeare had seven stages, as did we, and he had omitted an important one. Had we too left one out? In a shocking moment of clarity, I saw what was wrong: ‘We' were missing,” Joan recalled, referring to Erik and herself, who had both turned 48 that year. The last two stages of the couple's schema were Intimacy, when individuals entered into a long-term relationship, followed by Old Age. “We surely needed another stage between the sixth and seventh,” she said. Middle age was absent from their chart. (Shakespeare's ages did not neatly match the Eriksons' progression.) Erikson called the new addition the “generative” stage and generally referred to it simply as “adulthood.”
As he summarized in a lecture
he gave in 1973: “In youth you find out what you care to do and who you care to be—even in changing roles. In young adulthood you
learn whom you care to be with—at work and in private life, not only exchanging intimacies, but sharing intimacy. In adulthood, however, you learn to know what and whom you can take care of.”

In the Eriksons' typology, called
“The Eight Stages of Man,” each psychological stage is characterized by a normal “crisis”—a conflict between two opposing personality traits—that could be resolved in a positive or negative way. Infants are torn between trust and mistrust; young lovers between intimacy and isolation. The psychological struggle of their newly discovered adult stage pitted “generativity,” the “concern in establishing and guiding the next generation,” against self-absorption and stagnation. A successful resolution meant, in Joan Erikson's words, wanting to “pass on to the next generation what you've contributed to life.” This benevolent stage includes activities like raising children, creating a work of art, or mentoring an assistant on the job. Erik Erikson explained: “A person does best at this time to put aside thoughts of death and balance its certainty with the only happiness that is lasting, to increase, by whatever is yours to give, the goodwill and higher order in your sector of the world.”

Erikson's conception of middle age seemed to owe more to philosophy than psychology.
Nearly a century earlier, John
Stuart Mill wrote in his autobiography that those who are truly happy “have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others or the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.”

A shortened version of the White House essay appeared as the seventh chapter in
Childhood and Society,
published in 1950. “
Human personality in principle
, develops according to pre-determined steps,” Erikson wrote, and society encourages and reinforces the orderly unfolding of those steps. (The Eriksons added a ninth stage, wisdom, in 1988, when they were both in their late eighties.) Decades earlier, a rational system of classification informed Taylor's theory of scientific management and physicians' schedules of biological development. The Eriksons borrowed the idea of a prescribed sequence of stages from doctors and applied it to the process of psychological development.