The Midlife Crisis Revisited

The Midlife Crisis Revisited Stanley D. Rosenberg and Harriet J. Rosenberg Dartmouth Medical School, Lebanon, New Hampshire Michael P. Farrell State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York INTKODUCTION The task of "revisiting the midlife crisis" is a little like being asked to write a ghost story. The phantom has already, for example, had an extensive series of eulogies and postmortem examinations. Susan Whitbourne, in a thorough review, discusses the concept as pure figment, representing it as a sort of collective "fantasy" concocted by middle-aged white males for middle-aged white males (1986). Chapters and reviews by Chiriboga (1989a,b), Hunter and Sundel (1989), McCrae and Costa (1990), and Schaie and Willis (1986), have come to remarkably consistent conclu- sions: the empirical evidence in support of the concept of a general midlife crisis is so thin as to be absolutely ethereal. Some of these reviews have even credited our group (Farrell & Rosenberg, 1981a, 1981b; ILosenberg & Farrell, 1976) with help- ing to slay the offending hypothesis, or at least driving some of the nails into its coffin. However, like another famous ghost (Shakespeare's Banquo) the midlife crisis has the disquieting habit of reappearing from time to time, and even still draws an audience. Like most reappearing specters, it seems to have a story that it is attempt- ing to convey, and perhaps a need to correct some misunderstandings. We would like to borrow from another Shakespearean plot and exercise the somewhat perverse Life in the Middle Copyright 1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 47 48 S.D. tLosenberg et al. option of not coming to bury the corpse, but rather to praise it; that is, we would like to suggest that there is value in relistening to the story of the midlife crisis. In this chapter, we revisit midlife crisis theory in several different ways. First, we reexamine the concept, particularly as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the social science literature. Second, because the previously cited reviews have been so comprehensive, we discuss only briefly some of the research that called the theory into question. Third, we also revisit a group of men and their families whom we had first studied in the early 1970s in an attempt to assess the impact of the midlife transition. We have continued following trajectories of change in this sample as they have progressed from early to later middle age. This journey has enabled us to revisit our own thinking about midlife processes as represented in Men at Midlife (Farrell & 1Losenberg, 1981a), and led us to begin reconceptualizing the midlife crisis from the framework of narrative psychology. Emergent conceptualizations in narrative psychology, and their application to life-span development, appear to offer a compelling way to order the results of 20 years of theorizing and research on midlife crises. The evolving paradigm of narrative psychology, which has been buttressed by developments in the philosophy of science, has helped to underline the centrality of the "story" in shaping scientific theory (Landau, 1991; Suppe, 1974) as well as everyday experience. Like much in psychology, this way of understanding the role of narratives harks back to William James's (1897) observation that scientific theories "proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the crude order of our experience." This principle, as current research in memory and cog- nition shows, is perhaps nowhere more true than in the area of personal history. We develop and express our understandings and explanations of ourselves through stories, those deep structures that organize specific narratives. Despite some impor- tant statements in this area, for example, Propp's (1928/1968) Morphology of the Folktate, no definitive glossary of story types has yet been specified. However, there is considerable agreement that people utilize a rather limited set of story lines, often drawing on actions and character types from mythology, folktales, and legend, in narrating personal history. At the levels of characterization, ideology, and causal explanation, stories must also fit within culturally shared frames. The midlife crisis can be viewed as one such story, and can become, in Lakoff and Johnson's termi- nology, one of the "metaphors we live by" (1980). THE MIDLIFE CRISIS STORY IN THE 1960s AND 1970s An Identity Crisis Mthough it can be difficult to describe a chimera, the midlife crisis once had (or at least seemed to have) fairly recognizable dimensions; that is, like love (another great The Midlife Crisis Revisited 49 illusion, according to Freud), people recognized it when they saw it. The midlife crisis was not a professional crisis, nor a marital crisis, nor an economic crisis, although these surface manifestations could certainly signal its presence. "Midlife crisis theory," as it emerged in the 1970s, was less a paradigm than a set of beliefs or assumptions about the relation between the subject's experience of self (generally, although not always explicitly, as conveyed in life story accounts) and correlative attitudes, symptoms, and personality dimensions. The end of young adulthood and the beginning of middle age was thought to produce a reevaluation of the self, and (potentially) accompanying symptoms of depression, anxiety, and manic flight. Al- though there were many variants represented, a true midlife crisis, circa the 1960s and 1970s literature, was, first and foremost, a crisis of identity, and such crises were almost always attributed to males; that is, midlife was frequently portrayed, in both popular and scholarly literature, as a time of dramatic personality change and life review. As a predictable life stage event, it was thought to include increased intro- spection, a realization of time passing (mortality, generativity concerns), and focus on opportunities lost (sexual, relational, occupational). Symptomatic changes in behavior including increased substance abuse, divorce, and suicide were alleged and later disproved empirically. It was a concept reflective of the shifting ideological and explanatory frameworks characteristic of the late 1960s and early 1970s: an era that included a culture of alienation, questioning of societal norms, and a burgeoning of alternate lifestyles (Rosenberg, 1976; Rosenberg & Bergen, 1976). The notion of a universal midlife crisis was compelling; it provided a rationale for perceived despair, an opportunity/justification for lifestyle change. It was a notion conceived in an era when much of the popular culture, and most especially the youth culture, ques- tioned the value of living one's life to achieve a socially validated identity. While Erikson (1950) had argued for a psychological ideal whereby the developing adult found authenticity by expressing his or her innermost self through enactment of social roles in a culture that made sense, the "midlife crisis" represented a repudia- tion of that ideal. In "A Culture of Discontent" (Rosenberg, 1976), the very idea that authenticity could be found, except in opposition to a dehumanizing, irrational society, was seen as absurd. In the midlife crisis of theater, film, and novel (Updike, Heller, Vonnegut), the dramatic action was launched by the protagonist's "awaken- ing" to the perception that his earlier life, structured around the pursuit of identity, was a kind of madness or self-deception (Rosenberg & Farrell, 1976). If the culture was unmasked by the reported atrocities of Vietnam, what internal value could be served by finding a place in that system? At the same time, the crisis concept allowed hope for personal development, for a new synthesis between a reworked personality and a revamped life course. If conventional, conformist approaches to fulfillment and authenticity were bogus, crisis protagonists were still portrayed as finding free- dom and rebirth once they dared to throw off the shackles of conventional identity. Of course, this idea evoked fear as well as fascination. The specter loomed: the midlife crisis could lead to catastrophic risk taking or it could offer an opportunity to create a more satisfactory self. 50 S.D. Rosenberg et al. Testing the Midlife Crisis Theory The problem of translating these ideas into more formal theory was that the core claims associated with, or derivative of, the midlife crisis construct were misun- derstood. In the several excellent reviews referred to above, for example, there seems to be less than perfect agreement as to what the "midlife as crisis" model consisted of; what its conceptual roots may have been, and what sort of empirical tests were required to confirm or disconfirm its validity. This is partially due to the fact that midlife crisis theory represents a fuzzy set, with some reviewers, for example, seeing the work of Elliot Jaques (1965) as seminal and others not even referencing it. Various writers have either emphasized or ignored Jung's (1923, 1950/1959) theory of adult developmental change as a point of embarkation for midlife crisis theory. The core group of crisis theorists to whom virtually all reviewers refer consists of Daniel Levinson (Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, & McKee, 1978), Roger Gould (1978), and George Vaillant (1977). Although all can be characterized as ego psychologists, Levinson's approach was the most sin- gularly rooted in Erikson's (1950) conception of crisis in development. Vaillant, on the other hand, can be seen as an outlier in this group in that he describes multiple paths of development, not all of which involve crisis in the midlife period. Unfortunately, the proponents of crisis theory were neither always terribly explicit nor necessarily in agreement with one another on the major points of the model. Clearly, each of the three writers viewed the male midlife experience through a somewhat different lens. For a fuller explication of each of these theorists, and the differences among them, see Whitbourne and Weinstock (1986, pp.

Load more