In Our Prime (19 page)

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 sudden 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.

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 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.