WHEN I WAS a young doctor, starting to specialize in psychiatry, the notion of adult development scarcely impinged. Those of us who were psychoanalytically inclined were particularly interested in early childhood development and its supposed effect upon future mental health and character structure. We accepted the Freudian postulate, shared by the Jesuits, that the experiences of the first five years of life and the emotional influences affecting the child during that early period were all-important in shaping adult personality. Some of my contemporaries, strongly influenced by the ideas of Melanie Klein, went still further. They supposed that accurate reconstructions could be made of the infant’s experience from birth onward, and alleged that the first few months of extrauterine existence shaped the child’s fate for good or ill.
This concentration upon the individual’s early childhood, accompanied by the assumption that recall and reconstruction of the events of that period were essential to the restoration of psychic health, had the consequence that psychoanalysts showed little interest in later periods of life. The early psychoanalysts, although oversanguine about their ability to disinter the infant vicissitudes of their patients, were not at all confident about ameliorating the problems of older people, and could seldom be persuaded to take them on as patients. Freud himself wrote in an early paper:
The age of patients has this much importance in determining their fitness for psychoanalytic treatment, that, on the one hand, near or above the age of fifty the elasticity of the mental processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking—old people are no longer educable—and, on the other hand, the mass of material to be dealt with would prolong the duration of the treatment indefinitely.1
One implication of this statement was clear. If the powerful tool of psychoanalysis was unable to affect those approaching middle age, they must indeed be fixed in their ways.
This impression was, in the 1940s and 1950s, reinforced by clinical and educational psychologists who told us that optimum performance in intelligence tests occurred at about the age of sixteen. Following this peak, all we had to look forward to was a daily loss of some thousands of brain cells, accompanied by a progressive decline in intellectual ability. When, at the age of twenty-seven, I was in training at the Maudsley Hospital, I recall my gloom at realizing that I was already eleven years past my best.
Nor had the zoologists any comfort to offer. Students of animal behavior were interested in the development of animals from birth to sexual maturity, but showed little interest in any period, when such existed, beyond that at which the animal had fulfilled its reproductive potential. Once an animal had produced a family, or several families, and given them enough support and protection to ensure their own capability of reproduction, there seemed little left to live for.
When I was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, my tutor, C. P. Snow, introduced me to A Mathematician’s Apology, by his friend G. H. Hardy. In this classic account of the pleasures and rewards of being a mathematician, Hardy affirms that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game.2
Hardy reinforces this statement by pointing out that Newton’s greatest ideas came to him at about the age of twenty-four, and alleges that, although he continued to make discoveries until he was nearly forty, he did little but polish his earlier ideas after this, and gave up mathematics altogether when he was fifty (but see Chapter 3). Hardy states that “Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty.… I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.”3
Hardy’s book appeared in 1940. Had it been delayed for sixteen years, he would certainly have included Einstein in his list. Einstein’s greatest work belonged to his early years. He was born in 1879, published the special theory of relativity in 1905, and followed it with the general theory of relativity in 1916, when he would have been thirty-seven. The last half of his life was spent in searching for a unified field theory which would cover all the forces of nature at once. But he took a wrong turning. C. P. Snow records, “Einstein’s tremendous instinct for physics had sadly gone astray, and led him up a blind alley for the last forty years of his life.”4
When people so diverse in temperament and interests as psychoanalysts, zoologists, experimental psychologists, and mathematicians all concur in giving the impression that life, if not actually over at forty, is so ossified that not much change can be expected, a climate of opinion is created in which the concept of anything called “adult development” can scarcely be entertained. The study of adult decline, although it may be of interest to a few specialists working on dementia, is not an alluring topic.
However, this predominantly gloomy picture was gradually modified. A few bold spirits had the temerity to suggest that it was untrue to suppose that, from forty onward, life ground slowly to a halt. Some claimed that interesting changes took place around the mid-life period. Others proposed that even psychological developments proceeding into old age were well worth studying.
Various attempts were made to subdivide the life cycle into a series of stages traversed by the individual in the course of normal development. Erik Erikson, whose first book, Childhood and Society,5 was published in 1950 and became a best seller, postulated “Eight Ages of Man,” the last three of which pertained to adulthood. All these stages are characterized by antinomies representing different psychosocial tasks or problems, each of which Erikson believes to be characteristic of a particular age period. The first stage, for example, is “basic trust versus mistrust,” a concept which is relevant to the understanding of the people whom psychiatrists label schizoid, and which fits quite well with Melanie Klein’s notion of the “paranoid-schizoid position” in infantile development. Erikson proposes three adult stages. In early adulthood, he suggests, the main issue to be resolved is that of “intimacy versus isolation.” He compares this stage of development with Freud’s end point of “genitality,” that is, the capacity to make a mature heterosexual relationship which is likely to progress toward creating a new generation.
Erikson’s next stage, which pertains to middle adulthood, centers on what he calls “generativity versus stagnation.” He defines generativity primarily as concern with establishing and guiding the next generation, but extends the concept to include productivity and creativity. Whether or not such a stage can be objectively demonstrated, the notion is still well within the bounds of a biological, evolutionary schema. Man’s infancy and childhood, relative to his total life-span, is considerably prolonged as compared with other primates. This extension of dependency is adaptive because it provides time for learning. The development of speech has made possible adaptation by means of the transmission of culture. For this to be effective, postponement of the age of attaining sexual maturity is desirable, since the child is thereby kept dependent and teachable. If the human child’s rate of development kept up the pace of the first five years, sexual maturity could be expected around the age of eight or nine; but the intervention of the so-called latency period postpones puberty for some years after this. If human adaptation requires the prolongation of childhood in order to provide time for learning, it is obviously desirable that adulthood should also be prolonged in order to ensure a supply of teachers: more especially, of teachers who have finished the task of reproducing themselves and who are therefore able to spread their attention beyond their own immediate families.
In this connection, it is pertinent to recall one observation of a zoologist working with baboons, which indicates that there is some interest in studying the behavior of animals which have passed their reproductive period. John Crook reports a personal communication from Robin Dunbar, who had been looking at the social organization of gelada baboons. When a younger male takes over the harem of an old male, the latter is not banished or killed, as happens in some other species. Instead, “the old male remains loosely attached to the harem and spends a great deal of time caring for his infants. No longer active sexually, he now invests his time and energy in caring for his last offspring.”6
Erikson’s postulated third and final stage of adult development takes us beyond the biological in the sense that its utility in Darwinian terms cannot easily be defined. Erikson formulates it as “ego integrity versus despair.” He writes:
Only in him who in some way has taken care of things and people and has adapted himself to the triumphs and disappointment adherent to being, the originator of others or the generator of products and ideas—only in him may gradually ripen the fruit of these seven stages. I know no better word for it than ego integrity.7
Erikson’s concept of ego integrity includes the notion that the individual has come to terms with the inevitability of death by an acceptance of his own life cycle as something that had to be, that could not really have been different. He contrasts this attitude of constructive resignation with despair, which he conceives as arising from the feeling that it is now too late to reach ego integrity by any other path. Despair, in this sense, is linked with the fear of death. Although many criticisms can be made both of Erikson’s stages of life and of the clumsy, turgid prose in which he struggles to express himself, clinical observation confirms that those who are most afraid of death are those who have been most afraid of some aspects of life, and who therefore continue to feel that, if they had shown more courage, life would have been more fulfilling.
In recent years, various other workers have been attracted to the idea that the developmental stages of adulthood are worthy of study. At Yale, Daniel Levinson and his associates have studied the life cycle in males.8 Like Erik Erikson, they conclude that there are “developmental tasks” characterizing different stages of life which every individual is compelled to tackle. Levinson’s original procedure was to study in depth the life cycles of a small number of American males: ten factory workers, ten biologists, ten business executives, and ten novelists. He claims to have detected a pattern of change in each individual which, both in nature and timing, is closely similar. By taking individuals from such different backgrounds and with such different interests, Levinson has at least avoided the common error of assuming that the life cycles of other people necessarily coincide with one’s own.
According to Levinson, the life cycle alternates between stable periods of consolidation and less stable periods of transition. The first of the periods of transition occurs between adolescence and full entry into the adult world. In our culture, this stage usually occupies the years between eighteen and twenty-two. After settling into an occupation and perhaps embarking upon marriage, there is usually another transition period between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two. This is a time when the young man is apt to question his original choices of occupation and of marital partner, and may well change both. Between thirty-two and about forty-one is another period of consolidation. This is succeeded by the mid-life transition, between thirty-nine and forty-two.
Like other writers, Levinson emphasizes the storminess of the mid-life transition, often referred to as the mid-life crisis. It is sometimes a period of agonizing reappraisal, when many men have to come to terms with the fact that they cannot hope to fulfill all their youthful dreams. It is also a period at which neglected parts of the self clamor for expression. Levinson, like Jung, believes that the achievement of conventional goals in Western society involves making choices which necessarily exclude or minimize certain aspects of the person as a whole. This one-sidedness is apt to cause trouble in the mid-life period. Clinically, when faced with cases of mid-life depression, I have found it useful to encourage the patient to recall the daydreams and interests of his adolescence. This brings to light aspects of the self which have been neglected and which, if pursued, have a compensatory therapeutic effect.
Levinson’s explorations of later adulthood are incomplete and will not be pursued further here. The sequences of crises and resolutions which he describes seem too closely tied to narrow time spans and are also rather tediously similar. The period of transition at adolescence, or the mid-life transition, may occur at very different times in different individuals. Human beings mature at different rates, both mentally and physically.
However, there may be a valid underlying principle in Levinson’s scheme, although he himself does not spell it out. In our Western culture, though not in all cultures, man seems so constituted that he can never rest upon his laurels. The moment he has achieved something, be it a position in the world, marriage and a family, a successful piece of research, a new book, painting, or musical composition, he is driven to question its value and look for something more. If problems are not there, he will invent them. Man seems to be a problem-seeking as well as a problem-solving animal. We are programmed to change, develop, and meet new challenges until we die. We are compelled to be perpetual travelers. If we travel hopefully, that is as much as we ought to expect. If we do not, we become depressed. The idea that we can ever arrive at a stable state in which life’s problems are settled is an illusion. The only “final solution” is death.
Another study worth looking at is by George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist.9 His subjects were Harvard students. Vaillant’s emphasis is quite different from Levinson’s. He is not so concerned with stages of the life cycle but more with “patterns of defense” in the Freudian sense; that is, with how the individual comes to terms with instinctual drives. As examples of pathological defenses, he cites the following: the paranoid one of always blaming others for one’s own shortcomings; retreating into a world of fantasy; or “acting out” with overtly disturbed behavior. Healthy mechanisms of defense include suppression as opposed to repression, altruism, and sublimation. Vaillant’s study, in contrast with what might be expected from early Freudian theory, indicates that childhood trauma is a poor guide to predicting adult neurosis or health. However, children who have not developed “basic trust,” or who have not been encouraged to be autonomous, are likely to show delay in maturation. As in Terman’s famous studies of gifted children,10 physical health and mental health generally march hand in hand, although there are some exceptions.
But what emerges most strikingly from these biographical studies is the fact that more development toward maturity takes place during adult years than most psychiatrists had imagined. Even highly disturbed adults who have habitually employed one of the pathological defenses already mentioned, and who may have been labeled “psychopathic,” can lose their symptoms, abandon their disturbed patterns of behavior, and adopt maturer mechanisms of defense. Vaillant discovered that a surprisingly large number of adults only feel free to “do their own thing” by the time they are fifty or older. This finding is relevant to the changes which occur in some notably creative people, which are discussed below. It looks as if the length of the period during which the human child is educable may carry with it the disadvantage of embedding his early training so firmly within him that emancipation from its influence is difficult when this is needed.
I referred before to the reluctance of the early psychoanalysts to treat middle-aged patients. However, C. G.Jung, after he parted company with Freud in 1913, developed a psychotherapeutic practice which consisted largely of older patients. Jung’s ideas about the development of personality are explored in Chapter 9 of this book. In this context, it should be emphasized that he was a pioneer in the study of adult development. In Chapter 9, Jung’s own experience of going through a mid-life crisis is related to the growth of his interest in the problems of the middle-aged. In 1931, Jung wrote:
The clinical material at my disposal is of a peculiar composition: new cases are decidedly in the minority. Most of them already have some form of psychotherapeutic treatment behind them, with partial or negative results. About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives. I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age. Fully two thirds of my patients are in the second half of life.11
Jung’s own subjective upheaval was partly responsible for directing his attention to such patients, but there were other reasons as well. Jung did not share Freud’s assumption that the events of early childhood were the prime cause of neurosis, and did not therefore believe that getting the patient to recall his first five years was always essential.
Jung also accumulated older patients who had had previous treatment because he became famous enough to be regarded as a last resort who might succeed where other analysts had failed. Some of those who were suffering from the “senselessness and aimlessness of their lives” were undoubtedly Americans like the Mellons and Fowler McCormick who possessed enormous wealth and did not know what to do with themselves. At Mary Mellon’s first appointment with Jung, her opening words were “Dr. Jung, we have too much money. What can we do with it?”12
I earlier referred to my own practice of asking patients to recall their adolescent fantasies and interests. This psychotherapeutic technique is taken from Jung, who wrote:
The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.13
Jung then comments upon statistics which show an increased incidence of depression around the age of forty in men, rather earlier in women. He believes that these disturbances are often evidence of an important change taking place in the psyche which has its origin in the unconscious. Occasionally, these changes can be almost catastrophic. Jung quotes the case of an excessively pious and intolerant churchwarden who became more and more morose and moody. Finally, at the age of fifty-five, he sat up in bed one night and said to his wife, “Now at last I’ve got it! I’m just a plain rascal.” Jung reports that he spent his declining years in riotous living!14 This is a crude and comical example of Jung’s notion of self-regulatory compensation, described in Chapter 9.
Why should this process of compensation be particularly noticeable at the mid-life period or later? Jung considered that the first half of life was primarily concerned with the young person establishing himself or herself as a separate entity, with breaking the emotional ties with parents and home, with achieving a position in the world, and with beginning a new family. When all this had been accomplished, it might well happen that the person concerned became depressed; feeling perhaps that there was nothing to aim for, no definite direction to go in. Jung’s way of treating such problems is outlined in Chapter 9.
Whereas Jung interpreted the mid-life crisis in terms of the reemergence of aspects of the self which had been neglected and were seeking recognition, other observers took a different view. One of these is Elliott Jaques, whose paper “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis”15 has become a classic. Elliott Jaques qualified in medicine at Johns Hopkins, obtained a Ph.D. in social relations at Harvard, and also trained as a Kleinian analyst. He was, for some years, head of the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University in West London. Jaques is one of the very small number of psychoanalysts who have taken an interest in industrial relations. His work on management in industry has become deservedly famous.
Jaques became interested in the mid-life period when he became aware of
a marked tendency towards crisis in the creative work of great men in their middle and late thirties.… This crisis may express itself in three different ways: the creative career may simply come to an end, either in a drying-up of creative work, or in actual death; the creative capacity may begin to show and express itself for the first time; or a decisive change in the quality and content of creativeness may take place.
Jaques studied a random sample of 310 creative men of genius and found a sudden jump in the death rate between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine. This group included Mozart, Raphael, Chopin, Rimbaud, Purcell, Baudelaire, and Watteau.
As an example of “drying-up,” Jaques cites Racine, who had thirteen years of success, culminating with Phèdre at the age of thirty-eight. For the next twelve years he produced nothing. Another example is that of Ben Jonson, who had produced all his best plays by the time he was forty-three, although he continued to write masques and some other plays which are generally considered of less interest.
Gauguin, who gave up his job in a bank at the age of thirty-three, is an obvious example of an artist who did not really get going until the mid-life period. George Eliot did not turn to fiction until she was nearly forty. Studies in Hysteria, the first psychoanalytic book, was not published until Freud was thirty-nine.
Donatello and Goethe are quoted as examples of men of genius whose styles, in their late thirties, showed considerable change. Jaques might also have referred to Ibsen. It was not until Ibsen was thirty-eight that he achieved considerable success with the publication of Brand. At the same time, his manner, appearance, and even his handwriting underwent considerable changes.
Jaques’s explanation of the significance of the mid-life period is that this is the period when individuals become truly aware that they must die; a possibility which, in youth, seems infinitely remote.
Jaques alleges that, in earlier years, creative production tends to be intense, spontaneous, lyrical, and rapid. After the mid-life crisis, works become more “sculpted,” that is, more carefully considered, worked over, and externalized. He associates the first kind of creativity with the idealism and optimism of youth, quoting Shelley as an example of someone who, according to his wife’s account, thought that all the evil in the world would disappear if only men would will it to be so.
In Kleinian terms, such an idealistic attitude is based on unconscious denial of reality and the employment of manic defenses. The change which takes place at the mid-life period is consequent upon an acceptance of the existence of hate and destructive impulses within the self, as well as upon recognizing and accepting the reality of death. Jaques uses the phrase “constructive resignation,” which aptly expresses this change of attitude. Mature insight leads to serenity, and this manifests itself in an artist’s work.
Jaques illustrates his thesis, rather convincingly, by quoting the opening of The Divine Comedy, which was begun by Dante after his banishment from Florence at the age of thirty-seven.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found that I was in a dusky wood;
For the right path, whence I had strayed, was lost.
Ah me! How hard a thing it is to tell
The wildness of that rough and savage place,
The very thought of which brings back my fear!
So bitter was it, death is little more so.16
Jaques argues that the poem is an account of the poet’s first conscious, full encounter with death. He has to be led by Virgil through both hell and purgatory before he eventually finds his own way into Paradise.
One might argue that the mid-life crises of creative people are hardly typical of the general run of mankind. However, I am inclined to agree with Jaques that what can be more easily discerned in men and women of genius because it is recorded in their works also occurs in some form or other in more ordinary mortals. Indeed, the changes taking place in adult life can perhaps best be studied by considering the records left by creative artists. Longitudinal studies of change in ordinary people from adulthood to death are still hard to come by, although I earlier referred to some attempts in this direction. But there is certainly a consensus among observers writing from very different theoretical standpoints that, somewhere around the late thirties or early forties, changes in attitude take place in many human beings which are often accompanied by emotional upheavals. How far such changes are a product of our particular culture is an open question.
Jung and Jaques are content to delineate two main periods of adult life, separated by the mid-life crisis. In the case of creative people, however, critics have often defined three periods rather than two. The so-called “third period” is of particular interest. As I have written about it at some length elsewhere,17 I shall refer to it only briefly. The first period in an artist’s life is one in which he is learning his craft and in which, in varying degree, he still exhibits indebtedness to his teachers. The second period is the time at which the artist has achieved mastery of his art, and has also found his own, individual way of expressing himself. Some artists reach this second period without difficulty. Others, like Giacometti, may go through agonies before they feel that they have succeeded in reaching the essence of an individual vision. Many of the greatest geniuses have not passed beyond this second stage because they have died prematurely, like Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Purcell, and the others referred to earlier.
The mid-life crisis may occur at any time between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. When an artist lives long enough to be said to have entered a third period of creative production, he will usually be in his fifties or sixties.
Third-period works are those of an artist who is looking inward rather than outward. He is concerned with an internal process rather than with appealing to his public. Very often, third-period works are unconventional in form. They seem to be exploring remote, suprapersonal areas of experience and may, for this reason, appear incomprehensible. The last quartets of Beethoven, which exhibit all the qualities to which I have just referred, were initially considered impossibly “difficult.” From Beethoven’s death in 1827 until the beginning of this century, performances of the last five quartets were rare. Today, they are among our most treasured musical possessions; but everyone who knows anything about music agrees that this last set of quartets is in an entirely different category from the six of Opus 18, or the five quartets which are usually grouped together as belonging to the middle period.
The same kind of late change can be seen in the works of Liszt, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and J. S. Bach. It can also be detected in the novels of Henry James, whose three periods are sometimes facetiously referred to as those of James I, James II, and James the Old Pretender.
Michelangelo is an interesting example of an artist who is claimed by Jaques as having had a long fallow period in mid-life, between forty and fifty-five. What Jaques does not mention is that Michelangelo turned to poetry. The majority of his sonnets were written during the last thirty years of his long life. A very late change of style can be detected in the last sculpture of Michelangelo, the Rondanini Pietà, on which he was still working six days before his death at the age of eighty-nine. Michael Ayrton has described this piece in his introduction to Michelangelo’s sonnets:
The Rondanini Pietà is a statue so stripped, so bare, so passive and so patient that all the spent strength of the titan is drained away and only the spirit remains within a slim and fragile shell of stone.… The Dead Christ, slim and worn as a sea-washed bone, is as remote from the all-conquering athlete of The Last Judgement as sleep is from earthquake. The thrust is gone, the weight is gone, the articulation no longer describes energy. In the Rondanini Pietà is the still centre.18
Enough has been said to illustrate the point that, even toward the end of life, psychological changes are still taking place. There is often a lessening of interest in interpersonal relationships. Both Jung and Freud survived into their eighties; and both almost abandoned interest in psychotherapy in favor of abstract ideas. Instead of being concerned with conventional achievement or with impressing others, there is a wish to be rid of superfluities, a greater concern with essentials. So far as we know, man is the only creature who can see his own death coming. The realization concentrates the mind wonderfully. He prepares for death by freeing himself from mundane goals and attachments, and turns toward the cultivation of his own interior garden. This is surely the common factor which links Jaques’s “constructive resignation” with Erikson’s “ego integrity” and Jung’s “individuation.”
We are living in a culture in which the proportion of the elderly and old is constantly increasing. At the same time, unemployment is a major problem, and one which brings increasing pressure on those in work to seek early retirement. It is important that psychologists and psychiatrists should devote more attention to adult development, and to increasing our understanding of psychological changes taking place in older people. It is still too often the case that retirement is seen as having to give up work because of incapacity, and hence often accompanied by depression. It is known that a good many people die shortly after losing a spouse. I am impressed with the number who die shortly after retirement, though I cannot give statistics. My friend Kingsley Martin, the famous editor of the New Statesman, dreaded retirement because, he said, all the editors he had known had died within two years of doing so. Within three years of his own retirement, he had a stroke. Although he did not die, he was never really well again.
Suppose that properly controlled studies demonstrate that the processes we see taking place in creative people are examples of a more general pattern, a part of normal human development. Our attitude to retirement might change, and the prospects of keeping our aging population well and happy might improve. If retirement could be looked upon as an opportunity for self-development and fulfillment rather than as a kind of defeat, it would greatly increase the happiness of a large number who now regard the prospect with dread, and also encourage them to get out of the way of the young. Perhaps we should all retire at fifty. There seems no realistic prospect of decreasing the number of the unemployed in most Western countries in the foreseeable future.
NOTES
1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 7:264.
2. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 10.
3. Ibid., pp. 11, 12.
4. C. P. Snow, The Physicists (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 132–33.
5. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).
6. John H. Crook, The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 83.
7. Erikson, Childhood and Society, p. 259.
8. Daniel J. Levinson, with Charlotte N. Darrow, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Knopf, 1978).
9. George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).
10. L. M. Terman and Melita H. Oden, The Gifted Child Grows Up (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).
11. C. G. Jung, “The Aims of Psychotherapy,” in Collected Works, 20 vols., trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953–79), vol. 16, para. 83.
12. Quoted in William McGuire, Bollingen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 20.
13. Jung, “The Stages of Life,” in Collected Works, vol. 8, para. 772.
14. Ibid., para. 775.
15. Elliott Jaques, “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 46, part 4 (1965). Reprinted in Work, Creativity and Social Justice (London: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 38–63.
16. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Lawrence Grant White (New York: Pantheon, 1948), p. 1.
17. Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 1988).
18. Michael Ayrton, introduction to The Sonnets of Michelangelo, trans. Elizabeth Jennings (London: Folio Society, 1961), pp. 14–15.