Is there a fundamental order in the human life course? Most people would say no. After all, each life is unique in its pattern at a given time and in its evolution over time, and many lives are notable for their disorderly, even chaotic quality. Yet two images common to virtually all societies suggest that underlying the manifest variety and disorder there is a basic sequence that all lives go through in their own individual ways.
(1) The life cycle: there may be seasons in the life course just as there are seasons in the year and evolving phases in many aspects of nature.
(2) Development is now ingrained in our thinking about childhood and can be extended into adulthood. The study of childhood is largely about child development—about the ways in which we develop, biologically, psychologically, and socially, from infancy to adulthood. Does development then stop? May not our adult lives evolve in accordance with developmental principles? These questions have been largely neglected in the human sciences.
My own conception of the life cycle and of developmental periods in adulthood is in part a product of the present study and might have been reserved for a concluding chapter. I discuss it here, however, because it gives the reader a perspective from which to examine and understand the individual lives described in subsequent chapters.
The idea of the life cycle goes beyond that of the life course. In its origin this idea is metaphorical, not descriptive or conceptual, but it is useful to retain the primary imagery while moving toward something more precise. The imagery implies an underlying order in the human life course; although each individual life is unique, everyone goes through the same basic sequence. The course of a life is not a simple, continuous process; there are qualitatively different phases or seasons. The metaphor of seasons appears in many contexts. There are seasons of the year. Spring is a time of blossoming, and poets allude to youth as the springtime of the life cycle. Summer is the season of greatest passion and ripeness. An elderly ruler is “the lion in winter.” There are seasons within a single day—dawn, noon, twilight, the full dark of night—each having its counterpart in the life cycle. There are seasons in love, war, politics, artistic creation, illness. The imagery suggests that the life course evolves through a sequence of definable seasons or segments. Change goes on within each season, and a transition is required for the shift from one to the next. Every season has its own time, although it is part of and colored by the whole. No season is intrinsically better or more important than any other. Each has its necessary place and contributes its special character to the whole.
What are the major seasons of the life cycle? Neither popular culture nor the human sciences provide a clear answer to this question. The modern world has no established conception—scientific, philosophical, religious, or literary—of the life cycle as a whole and of its component phases. We have no popular language to describe a series of age levels after adolescence. We use words such as youth, maturity, and middle age, but they are ambiguous in their age linkages and meanings. The ambiguity of language stems from the lack of any cultural or scientific definition of adulthood and how people’s lives evolve within it.
The predominant view divides the life course into three parts: (1) An initial segment of about twenty years is usually identified as childhood, or childhood and adolescence, or the “formative years” prior to adulthood. (2) A final segment starting at around 65 is known as old age, which is commonly regarded both as part of “adulthood” and as a sequel to it. Various euphemisms, such as “senior citizen” or “golden years,” have been used at times but do little to dispel our deep anxiety about this season of the life cycle. (3) Between these segments lies an amorphous time vaguely known as adulthood.
The study of child development seeks to determine the universal order and the process by which our lives become increasingly individualized. Historically, the great psychologists in this field, such as Freud and Piaget, conceived of development as the process by which we become adult—which means that it stops with the cessation of adolescence. Given this view, they had no basis for concerning themselves with the possibilities for adult development or with the nature of the life cycle as a whole.
An impetus to change came in the 1950s when geriatrics and gerontology were established as fields of human service and research. Unfortunately, gerontology has not gone far in generating a conception of the life cycle or of development in adulthood. One reason, perhaps, is that it skipped from childhood to old age without examining the intervening adult years. Our present understanding of old age will be enhanced when more is known about adulthood; the later seasons can then be connected more organically to the earlier ones.
Early in this century, Carl G. Jung was perhaps the first modern voice in psychiatry-psychology to focus on the possibility of adult personality development. He took the position that personality development simply cannot progress very far by the end of adolescence—just far enough to allow us to begin living as adults and assuming the responsibilities required by family, work, and community. The inner struggles of the twenties and thirties, said Jung, deal mainly with the “shadow,” the repressed childhood desires and attributes that Freud had brought to light. After 40, we may begin to develop many archetypes—potentials within the self—that remain relatively primitive until mid-life. The archetypes and the self assume increasing importance in middle and late adulthood.
At about the same time, the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep was examining the life cycle from a more societal perspective. His book Rites of Passage (first published in 1908) dealt with major life events such as birth, death, marriage, and divorce. Many societies deal with these events by constructing rites of passage—ceremonial occasions that shape the person’s movement from one status or group to another. Persons in passage or transition are a potential threat to society because they are poorly integrated in the groups they are leaving as well as in the groups they are entering. For society, rituals are a form of social control: they help to ensure that individuals properly terminate their membership in a particular generation or social position and become securely ensconced in a new one. For the individual, the rituals provide a collective vehicle for gaining personal control over the anxieties that such transitions generate.
As an anthropologist, van Gennep understandably dealt more with the cultural than the psychological aspects of this phenomenon. Psychologists and psychiatrists tend to go to the other extreme. An adequate understanding ultimately requires joint consideration of both culture and personality. Van Gennep viewed the life cycle as a series of major life events and passages occurring within a cultural framework. This approach must be combined with one that takes account of personality and that examines the entire life course, rather than just the highlighting events.
José Ortega y Gasset, the great Spanish historian-philosopher, presented in Man and Crisis (first published in 1933) a remarkable conception of the life cycle and the flow of generations in history. On the basis of both individual and societal considerations he identified five generations, each representing a season of the life cycle: childhood, age 0 to 15; youth, 15 to 30; initiation, 30 to 45; dominant, 45 to 60; and old age, 60+. Collectively, all five generations coexist at any moment in human society. Life in each generation is shaped by the particular point in history at which it exists. Each of us moves over time from one generation to the next. The generational divisions thus contribute to the shape of the life cycle, and the potentials in the life cycle affect the ways in which generational boundaries are drawn.
Ortega’s youth generation (age 15–30) roughly corresponds to what I call the novice phase of early adulthood. In this phase, we take our first tentative steps toward working, building a family, and establishing a place in the adult world. His initiation generation (30–45) is, from my perspective, in the culminating phase of early adulthood. In our early thirties we are responsible but junior members of a social world. By our early forties we are entering a more senior position and joining the dominant generation. In the initiation generation we receive the wisdom and control of our seniors; we also begin slowly to assert our own authority and to create moderately or radically new ideas and goals. In the dominant generation we join and to some degree modify the establishment that governs every social institution. At any given moment in history, the initiation and dominant generations largely determine the future of society, and the relations between them are of tremendous historical importance. It is ironic that the years from approximately age 30 to 60, about which we know the least, have the most fundamental significance for the collective as well as individual well-being of humanity.
The culminating figure in this brief review is Erik H. Erikson. With the publication of Childhood and Society in 1950, he became the most influential developmental theorist of the time. The book might well have been called “Life Cycle and Society.” Its distinctive creativity was to place childhood within an articulated framework of the life cycle and to generate the study of adult development. Erikson’s developmental concepts deal primarily with the individual life course. He emphasized the process of living, the idea of life history rather than case history, the use of biography rather than therapy or testing as the chief research method. In studying a life, his first step was to examine its course over the years. He then sought to explore the ways in which the life course reflected the engagement of self (psyche, personality, inner world) and external world (society, culture, institutions, history).
Erikson posited a sequence of eight ego stages. Each stage predominates in, and is most appropriate for, a specific age segment of the life cycle. The first five stages cover a series of age segments from infancy through adolescence. The last three stages occur in age segments identified by Erikson as young adulthood, adulthood, and old age. Stage six, Intimacy vs. Isolation, clearly begins at the start of “young adulthood” at around 20. Stage eight, Integrity vs. Despair, initiates “old age” in the sixties. Erikson was most elusive about the onset of stage seven, Generativity vs. Stagnation, and has been interpreted variously. My own reading of his texts, especially Gandhi’s Truth, is that generativity begins at about 40 and remains a primary concern throughout middle adulthood. A key issue in this stage is one’s relationship to the generations of younger adults. In Ortega’s terms, generativity is a major task of the dominant generation, which has the responsibility for educating the youth generation and fostering the development of the initiation generation so that they will, in time, be ready to succeed (and perhaps exceed) their seniors.
Erikson had a complex view of the childhood years. His view of the adult years from roughly 20 to 60, and of the two ego stages within them, provides a valuable starting point for the study of adult development, but much more is needed. The problem of segments of the life cycle is not Erikson’s alone; it is a fundamental issue that has generally been ignored or blurred. Most textbooks on human development devote 60 percent or more of their pages to childhood, 20 percent or less to adulthood, and about 20 percent to old age.
On what basis can we distinguish one season of the life cycle from another? A segment of the life cycle must be characterized by an underlying unity in the overall character of living during those years. It cannot be defined solely in terms of one aspect of living. There is now a well-established life cycle framework for the first twenty years or so. We refer to it broadly as childhood: the season of growth toward adulthood. Within it is a series of smaller segments such as early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence (which is, in effect, late childhood). There is no corresponding consensus about the adult seasons of the life cycle, even though a good deal has been learned about specific features of adult life—social roles and relationships in family, work, and other contexts, adaptation to major life events, stability and change in personality.
In order to establish adult development as a major field of study, we must address three major tasks: to describe the individual life course as it evolves; to form a conception of the life cycle and the place of adulthood within it; and to determine how development proceeds in adulthood. This will provide a framework within which specific events, roles, relationships, and developmental processes can be studied in a more integrated fashion. I turn now to my own conception of the life cycle and adult development.
I conceive of the life cycle as a sequence of eras (see this page). Each era has its own bio-psycho-social character, and each makes its distinctive contribution to the whole. There are major changes in the nature of our lives from one era to the next, and lesser though still crucially important changes within eras. They are partially overlapping; a new era begins as the previous one approaches its end. A cross-era transition, which generally lasts about five years, terminates the outgoing era and initiates the next. The eras and the cross-era transitional periods form the broad structure of the life cycle, providing an underlying order in the flow of all human lives yet permitting myriad variations in the individual life course.
Every era and developmental period begins and ends at a well-defined average age, with a range of about two years above and below this average. The idea of age-linked phases in adult life goes against our conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, research on women as well as men consistently reveals these age linkages.
The first era, childhood, extends from birth to roughly age 22. It is the era of most rapid growth. The first few years of life provide a transition from birth into childhood. During this time the newborn becomes biologically and psychologically separate from the mother and establishes an initial distinction between the “me” and the “not-me”—the first step in a continuing process of individuation. Early childhood is followed by middle childhood and adolescence.
The years from about 17 to 22 constitute the Early Adult Transition, a developmental period in which the era of childhood draws to a close and early adulthood gets under way. It is part of both eras and not fully within either. We modify our relationships with family and other components of the childhood world, we begin forming an adult identity, and we begin taking our place as adults in the adult world. From a childhood-centered perspective, one can say that development is now largely completed and the child has gained the maturity to be an adult. Textbooks on developmental psychology commonly take this view. Taking the perspective of the life cycle as a whole, however, we recognize that the developmental attainments of one era provide only a starting point from which to begin the next. The Early Adult Transition represents, so to say, both the full maturity of childhood and the infancy of early adulthood. We are at best off to a shaky start, and new kinds of development are required in the new era.
The second era, early adulthood, lasts from about 17 to 45. It begins with the Early Adult Transition. It is the adult era of greatest energy and abundance, and of greatest contradiction and stress. Biologically, the twenties and thirties are the peak years of the life cycle. In social and psychological terms, early adulthood is the season for forming and pursuing youthful aspirations, establishing a niche in society, raising a family, and, as the era ends, becoming a “senior member” of the adult world. This can be a time of rich satisfactions in terms of love, sexuality, family life, occupational advancement,creativity, and realization of major life goals. But there can be crushing stresses, too: we undertake the burdens of parenthood and, at the same time, of forming an occupation; we incur heavy financial obligations when our earning power is still relatively low; we have to make crucially important choices regarding spouse, family, work, and lifestyle before we have the maturity or life experience to choose wisely. Early adulthood is the era in which we are most buffeted by our own passions and ambitions from within, and by the demands of family, community, and society from without. Under reasonably favorable conditions, the rewards of living in this era are enormous; but the costs often equal or exceed the benefits.
The Mid-life Transition, from roughly 40 to 45, brings about both the termination of early adulthood and the start of middle adulthood. My research indicates that the character of a life is always appreciably different in the middle forties than it was in the late thirties.
This book deals primarily with the lives of women in early adulthood, as they traverse the developmental periods from the Early Adult Transition through the Mid-life Transition.
The third era, middle adulthood, starts with the Mid-life Transition and lasts from about 40 to 65. During this era our biological capacities are below those of early adulthood but normally still sufficient for an energetic, personally satisfying, and socially valuable life. Unless our lives are hampered in some special way, most of us during our forties and fifties become “senior members” in our own particular worlds, however grand or modest they may be. We are responsible not only for our own work and perhaps the work of others, but also for the development of the current generation of young adults who will soon enter the senior generation. It is possible in this era to become more maturely creative, more responsible for self and others, more universal in outlook and less tied to narrow tribal values, more dispassionately purposeful, more capable of intimacy and sensual loving than ever before. Unfortunately, middle adulthood is for many persons a time of progressive decline—of growing emptiness and loss of vitality.
The next era, late adulthood, starts at about 60. The Late Adult Transition, from 60 to 65, is a developmental period linking middle and late adulthood. I have discussed this era in Chapter 2 of The Seasons of a Man’s Life.
This conception of the life cycle requires us to re-examine the very idea of development. We commonly think of development in childhood as synonymous with growth, with the realization of individual potential. In its basic meaning, however, development is a process of evolution. It is not the same as growing; or, to put it more precisely, it has the twin aspects of positive growth and negative growth—of “growing up” and “growing down.” A term for the former is adolescing, which literally means “moving toward adulthood” and suggests positive growth toward a potential optimum. A term for the latter is senescing, which means moving toward old age and suggests negative growth and dissolution.
Both adolescing and senescing go on during the entire life cycle, but their character and relative balance change appreciably from era to era. Our approach to development in one era cannot provide a literal model for development in other eras. In childhood we are mostly adolescing, although each step in growth may entail some form of loss. The child’s growth in understanding the “real” world may be associated with a decline in creative imagination. Theories of child development deal chiefly with positive growth: the successive stages form a progression from lower to higher on a developmental scale. Dramatic advances in body size and function, cognitive complexity, adaptive capability, and character formation support the idea that each stage represents a “higher developmental level” than the previous one. However, the attributes that show such rapid growth up to age 20 or so tend to stabilize in early adulthood and then gradually decline after about 40, when biological senescing begins its inexorable predominance over adolescing. Childhood-centered views of development are thus likely to yield a rather bleak picture of adult development, since they tend to ignore the often rich potentialities and achievements of middle and late adulthood.
In late adulthood we are mostly senescing, but some vitally important adolescing may be done toward the end of the life cycle as we seek to give fuller meaning to our lives, to life and death as ultimate stages, and to the condition of being human. The approach of death itself may be the occasion of our growing to full adulthood.
In early and middle adulthood, adolescing and senescing coexist in an uneasy balance. The study of adult development must take account of both. Our adult lives are a story of interweaving growth and decline. Although the potential for positive growth exists in adulthood, it is less assured than in childhood and takes different forms. There is also some degree of negative growth, but it takes different forms in the successive eras. For some persons, early and middle adulthood is primarily a time of increasing vitality and fulfillment (though not without struggle and pain); for others, it is a time of increasing triviality, stagnation, and inner deadness. Both of these extremes, and the large middle ground between them, can teach us a great deal about human strength and vulnerability. Adult development has its own distinctive character. It has to be studied in its own right, not simply as an extension of childhood or a prelude to old age.
My approach to adult development grows out of, and is shaped by, the foregoing views regarding the life course and the life cycle. I am primarily interested in apprehending the nature of a person’s life at a particular time and the course of that life over the years. Personality attributes, social roles, and biological characteristics are aspects of the life and, from a life course perspective, should be placed within the context of the life.
The key concept to emerge from my research is the life structure: the underlying pattern or design of a person’s life at a given time. This book, like The Seasons of a Man’s Life, is largely about the development of the life structure in adulthood. The developmental periods described here are periods in life structure development. I’ll start with the concept of life structure and then go on to its evolution in adulthood.
The meaning of this term can be clarified by comparing life structure and personality structure. A theory of personality structure provides a way of thinking about a concrete question: What kind of person am I? Different theories offer numerous ways of thinking about this question and of characterizing oneself or others in terms of attributes such as wishes, conflicts, defenses, traits, skills, values.
A theory of life structure is a way of thinking about a different question: What is my life like now? As we begin reflecting on this question, many others come to mind: What are the most important parts of my life, and how are they interrelated? Where do I invest most of my time and energy? Are there some relationships—to spouse, lover, family, occupation, religion, leisure, or whatever—that I would like to modify, to make more satisfying, or to eliminate? Are there some things not in my life that I would like to include? Are there interests and relationships, now absent or occupying a minor place, that I would like to make more central? In pondering these questions, we begin to identify those aspects of the external world that have the greatest significance to us. We characterize our relationship with each of them and examine the interweaving of the various relationships. We inevitably find that our relationships are imperfectly integrated within a single pattern or structure.
The primary components of a life structure are the person’s relationships with various others in the external world. A significant relationship may be with an immediately present Other—a friend, lover, spouse, parent, or offspring. The Other also may be a person from the past, a symbolic or imagined figure, a group or institution, an aspect of nature, a loved (or hated) place, even a painting or a book.
In describing a relationship we must consider: (1) what the Person and the Other do with each other; (2) the subjective meanings involved; (3) what the Person gives and receives—materially, emotionally, socially; (4) the social context of the relationship; (5) the place of the relationship in the person’s life structure and how it connects to other relationships; (6) its evolution over time within the life structure.
The concept of life structure requires us to examine the nature and patterning of an adult’s relationships with all significant others, and the evolution of these relationships over the years. Relationships are the stuff our lives are made of. They give shape and substance to the life course. They are the vehicle by which we live out—or bury—various aspects of ourselves; and by which we participate, for better and for worse, in the world around us.
A life structure may have few or many components. The central components are those that have the greatest significance for the self and the life. They receive the greatest share of one’s time and energy, and they strongly influence the character of the other components. Only one or two components—rarely as many as three—occupy a central place in the structure. The peripheral components are easier to change or detach. They involve less investment of self and can be modified with less effect on the fabric of one’s life. There may also be important unfilled components: a person urgently wants but does not have a meaningful occupation, a marriage, a family; and this absent component plays a major part in the life structure.
Most often, marriage/family and occupation are the central components of a person’s life. There are wide variations, however, in their relative weight and in the importance of other components. Seen as a component of the life structure, the family is a complex world that involves many persons, activities, and social contexts. It may include the current nuclear family of spouses and children (or the part of it that is intact), previous marriages and families, the family of origin (parents and offspring), the extended family, “the family” as a symbol that includes many generations in the past and implies continuity with future generations. The relationship to family is also interwoven with the relationship to ethnicity, race, occupation, cultural traditions.
Likewise, occupation is likely to be a major component of the life structure. Occupation is not simply a matter of specific work activities and rewards; nor is it simply a matter of membership in a particular occupational category. Work engages a person in an elaborate occupational world. To understand what part work plays in a woman’s life, we must examine her manifold relationships to various parts of the work world and to the whole, and see how occupation is interwoven with other components of the life structure.
In addition to family and occupation, the life structure often includes other components: love relationships; friendships; relationships to politics, religion, ethnicity, and community; leisure, recreation, and the use of solitude; relationship to the body (including bodily health and illness, vigor and decline); memberships and roles in many social settings. Underlying and permeating all relationships with the external world is the relationship to the self.
The life structure forms a boundary between self and world and mediates the relationship between them. This boundary can be understood only if we see it as a link, as something that connects self and world yet is also partially separate. It is in part the cause, the vehicle, and the effect of that relationship. The life structure grows out of the engagement of self and external world. Its evolution is shaped by factors in the self and in the world. It requires us to think simultaneously about self and world rather than making one primary and the other secondary or derivative. A theory of life structure must draw equally upon psychology and the social sciences (and biology, when it deals with adult biological development).
As we get clearer about the basic structure of a life, we can explore in more detail the external aspects—events, social contexts, roles, influences of all kinds—as well as the internal aspects—subjective meanings, motives, conflicts, personal qualities. The life structure is the framework within which these aspects are interwoven. To see only the outlines of the structure without its specific content is to have only a schematic view of the life. To focus on details—even a large number of details—without grasping the overall evolving structure is to perceive fragments but to miss the life. To include both in some balance is a major aim of this book.
There is not much order in the sequence of specific events, actions, social roles, and personality changes within an individual life course, and certainly no universal order. When we examine the evolution of the life structure, however, an underlying order (with infinite variations) does emerge: the life structure develops through a standard sequence of periods during the adult years. In this sequence, periods in which we build and maintain a structure alternate with transitional periods in which the structure is transformed.
The primary tasks of a structure-building period are to form and maintain a life structure and enhance our life within it: we make certain key choices, form a structure around them, and pursue our values and goals within this structure. Even when we succeed in maintaining a stable structure, life is not necessarily tranquil. The tasks of making major life choices and building a structure are often stressful indeed and may involve many kinds of change. Structure-building periods ordinarily last five to seven years. Then the life structure that has formed the basis for stability comes into question and must be modified.
A structure-changing or transitional period terminates the existing life structure and creates the possibility for a new one. The primary tasks of every transitional period are to reappraise the existing structure, to explore the possibilities for change in self and world, and to move toward commitment to the crucial choices that form the basis for a new life structure in the ensuing period. Transitional periods ordinarily last about five years. Almost half our adult lives is spent in developmental transitions. No life structure is permanent—periodic change is a part of the nature of our existence.
The periods of early and middle adulthood are shown on this page. Each period begins and ends at a well-defined average age, within a variation of two years above and below the average. Our main concern in this book is with early adulthood. A summary of the periods in middle adulthood gives a backdrop for our understanding of early adulthood and of the Mid-life Transition that bridges the two eras. The formulation of the developmental periods from 45 to 65 is based upon exploratory studies of women and men, using interviews and biographies. The pattern shown differs from the corresponding one in The Seasons of a Man’s Life in two respects: the names of the structure-building periods have been changed in the interest of theoretical preciseness (but the meanings are the same); and the present diagram shows more clearly that every cross-era transition is part of both the eras it links. The developmental periods unfold as follows:
(1) Early Adult Transition (age 17–22) is a cross-era transition in which we terminate childhood and initiate early adulthood. A cross-era transition involves not only a change in life structure but a fundamental turning point in the life cycle. We are on the boundary between eras—concluding one and creating a basis for the next, without a clear idea of what is to come. This period is part of the two eras and not fully in either.
(2) Entry Life Structure for Early Adulthood (age 22–28). The tasks now are to make some key choices (especially regarding love/marriage/family, occupation, separation from family of origin, and lifestyle) and to organize one’s life as a young adult. The first life structure built in an era is necessarily provisional; it is an initial attempt to make a place for oneself in a new world and a new generation.
(3) Age 30 Transition (age 28–33) occurs in mid-era. It provides an opportunity to reappraise the Entry Life Structure, to do some further work on individuation (including undone work of earlier transitions), and to explore new possibilities out of which the next structure can be formed. It is a time of moderate to severe developmental difficulty for most women and men.
(4) Culminating Life Structure for Early Adulthood (age 33–40). The primary developmental task here is to form a structure within which we can try to establish a more secure place for ourselves in society and to accomplish our youthful dreams and goals. We are moving from “junior” to “senior” membership in the adult world.
(5) Mid-life Transition (age 40–45) is a developmental bridge between early and middle adulthood and is part of both eras. We terminate the life structure of the thirties, come to terms with the end of “youth” as it existed in early adulthood, and try to create a new way of being young-and-old appropriate to middle adulthood. The work of mid-life individuation is an especially important task of this period; it forms the inner matrix out of which a modified self and life evolve over the rest of this era.
(6) Entry Life Structure for Middle Adulthood (age 45–50). The primary task of this period is to create an initial structure for the launching of middle adulthood. This structure is often dramatically different from that of the late thirties. Even when it is superficially similar (for example, one is in the same job, marriage, community), there are important differences in the relationships that form the central components of the life structure. We establish an initial place in a new generation and a new season of life.
(7) Age 50 Transition (age 50–55) is an opportunity to reappraise the Entry Life Structure, to engage in some further exploration of self and world, and to create a basis for the structure to be formed in the ensuing period. It is a mid-era transition, analogous to the Age 30 Transition. Developmental crises are common in this period, especially for persons who have made few significant life changes, or inappropriate changes, in the previous ten to fifteen years.
(8) Culminating Life Structure for Middle Adulthood (age 55–60). This structure, like that of the thirties, provides a vehicle for the realization of the era’s major aspirations and goals.
(9) Late Adult Transition (age 60–65) concludes middle adulthood and initiates late adulthood. It requires a profound reappraisal of the past and a shift to a new era. We create a basis for building, in the next period, an Entry Life Structure for Late Adulthood.
We thus find the same sequence of developmental periods in early adulthood and middle adulthood:
(1) A Cross-era Transition (17–22, 40–45, 60–65) terminates the outgoing era and initiates the new one.
(2) A period of building and maintaining an Entry Life Structure (22–28, 45–50) for the era.
(3) A Mid-era Transition (28–33, 50–55) permits reappraisal and modification of the Entry Life Structure and exploratory efforts toward the formation of a new one.
(4) A second, Culminating Life Structure (33–40, 55–60) for the era.
(5) and (1) A Cross-era Transition brings this era to a close and, at the same time, thrusts us into the next era.
The first three periods of early adulthood, from roughly 17 to 33, constitute its novice phase. They provide an opportunity to move beyond adolescence, to build a provisional but necessarily flawed Entry Life Structure, and to learn the limitations of that structure. The two final periods, from 33 to 45, form a concluding phase which brings to fruition the efforts of this era and launches us into the next.
A similar sequence exists in middle adulthood. It, too, begins with a novice phase of three periods, from 40 to 55. The Mid-life Transition is both an ending and a beginning. In our early forties we are in the full maturity of early adulthood and completing its final chapter; we are also in the infancy of middle adulthood, just beginning to learn about its promise and dangers. We remain novices in every era until we have a chance to try out an Entry Life Structure and then to question and modify it in the Mid-era Transition. In the concluding phase—the periods of the Culminating Life Structure and the Cross-era Transition that follows—we complete an era and begin the shift to the next. During the novice phase we are, to varying degrees, both excited and terrified by the prospects of living in a new era. To varying degrees, likewise, we experience the concluding phase as a time of rich satisfactions and of bitter disappointments, discovering as we so often do that the era ultimately gives us much more and much less than we had envisioned.
This view of a standard, age-linked sequence of eras and developmental periods in adulthood violates the conventional wisdom of our culture, and of the human sciences, in several major respects. It appears to contradict the widespread finding that there is no comparable sequence of periods in the adult development of personality, cognition, occupational careers, families. Why should an age-linked sequence hold for life structure development when it does not hold for the others? I do not know why this sequence exists, but that it does exist is indicated by the research evidence. As I see it, my theory and the others are different but not contradictory. The sequence of eras and periods provides a framework within which the evolution of more specific aspects of living can better be understood. In time, I believe, we will have the basis for a more inclusive theory within which all aspects of development can be contained.
Finally, I must admit that I am surprised and even somewhat embarrassed by the order and elegant simplicity of this sequence. Between 17 and 65 we go through two eras, early and middle adulthood, which begin and end with a Cross-era Transition. Each era provides the opportunity for an Entry Life Structure and a Culminating Life Structure, which are linked by a Mid-era Transition. I did not initially expect to find much order, and certainly not an order of this kind. I must report, however, that this construction best fits the available evidence for women as for men.
As noted above, many theories of child development propose a sequence of stages in which each stage is developmentally higher or more advanced than the preceding one. This view may hold for childhood, but it is questionable at best for adulthood. We know too little about the complexities and contradictions of the human life course to make the judgment that one life structure is developmentally higher than another. The Culminating Life Structure of the thirties is not necessarily more advanced developmentally than the Entry Life Structure of the twenties. Likewise, in comparing the Culminating Life Structure of early adulthood with the Entry Life Structure of middle adulthood, we have to take account of the change in eras, which present new possibilities and new burdens. I use the term “period” rather than “stage” in order to evoke the imagery of an evolving historical process rather than a layered series of static entities. When we know more about the kinds of life structures people build at different ages, under different conditions, we may be better able to identify variations in developmental level among life structures.
While deferring the question of developmental level, I have found it useful to develop another concept: the satisfactoriness of the life structure. Like all other attributes of the life structure, satisfactoriness has both external and internal aspects. Externally, it refers to the structure’s viability in the external world—how well it works, what it provides in the way of advantages and disadvantages, successes and failures, rewards and deprivations. Internally, it refers to the structure’s suitability for the self, that is, what aspects of the self can be lived out within this structure? What aspects must be neglected or suppressed? What are the benefits and costs of this structure for the self? In attempting to evaluate the satisfactoriness of a life structure, we must consider both its viability and its suitability, in the light of external circumstances as well as inner resources.
Satisfactoriness of the life structure is not the same as “level of adjustment” or “life satisfaction” as these are usually assessed in survey research. A person’s self-rating on a nine-point scale of “life satisfaction” tells us virtually nothing about the satisfactoriness of his or her life structure. Some people feel quite satisfied with lives that are reasonably comfortable and orderly but in which they have minimal engagement or sense of purpose. Their lives have much viability in the world but little suitability for the self. When the self is so little invested in the life, the life in turn can offer little to the self. Likewise, people who are passionately engaged in living, and who invest the self actively in the life structure, may experience more turmoil and suffering than those who are less engaged. They may ask more of life than it can provide. The intense engagement in life yields more abundant fruits but exacts a different and in some ways greater toll. Assessing the satisfactoriness of the life structure is thus a complex matter. It cannot be done by means of a few behavioral criteria or questionnaire items.
It is important to distinguish between the development of the life structure and the development of the self. Many psychologists who have intellectual origins in the study of childhood think of development as growth in various aspects of the self. The study of adult development inevitably goes beyond the focus on the self. It requires us to examine the life course, to study the engagement of the self in the world, and to move beyond the view of the self as an encapsulated entity. As we learn more about the evolution of the life structure, we will have a sounder basis for studying the adult development of the self.
The idea of transition is central to many theories. A transition is a process of change that forms a bridge between X and Y. X and Y may be two subjects in discourse, two jobs or cities, two themes in a musical composition, two distinctive structures. To be “in transit” is to be in the process of leaving X (without having fully left it) and, at the same time, of entering Y (without being fully a part of it). The transition forms a boundary region linking X and Y. This boundary space is part of X and Y yet qualitatively different from both. A transition thus carries the imagery of a turning point, a shift in course, a process of cutting, sifting, separating, an attempt to resolve contradictions, a time of transformation rather than stability. Only by giving up what I now have at X do I create the opportunity to enter Y. A transition is a time of promise, of hope and potential for a better future. It is also a time of separation and loss.
A transitional period in life structure development involves three main developmental tasks: (1) termination of the existing life structure; (2) individuation; and (3) initiation of a new structure. One might suppose that these tasks follow a consecutive order: first, we terminate the past. Third, we initiate a new life; in between, as a basis for change, is the work of individuation. But development does not proceed in so logical a manner. The three tasks may interweave throughout a transitional period; or a person may attempt to initiate a new structure at the start of a transition, before doing much terminating or individuating. I’ll discuss each task briefly in turn.
A termination is, most simply, an ending, a conclusion, a final step. However, the termination of a significant relationship plays an important part in our lives precisely because it represents not only an ending, but also a beginning. It is more realistic to conceive of a termination as a major qualitative change in the character of a relationship; it ends one form of the relationship and starts a new form. This view places the termination in a broader time perspective, regarding it as both an outcome of the past and a starting point for the future.
The “Other” in a significant relationship may, as noted earlier, be a person (living, dead, or imaginary), a group, institution, or social movement, a symbol or place. If the Other has little value or significance for me—if I lose a possession of no importance, if I lose contact with a person or group of only casual interest to me—it passes out of my life with almost no consequences. The situation is very different for relationships which form major components of my life structure and in which I have made a great investment of self. The termination of such relationships is more protracted and has far greater consequences for my future life.
The most dramatic terminations involve total loss of contact with the Other: a loved one dies; a valued group is dissolved; the therapy ends, and I no longer see the therapist; a bitter quarrel leads to permanent parting from a friend or mentor; a geographical move (voluntary or coerced) forces me to leave a world I may never see again. I experience a profound loss and must come to terms with painful feelings of abandonment, helplessness, grief, and rage. Although the Other is no longer externally available, the relationship does not die. Over time the lost Other is more fully internalized and exists as an internal figure. The relationship continues to evolve in my self and my life; certain aspects of it are ended but other aspects survive and new ones are added. Losing the earlier relationship, I gradually create a new one.
In most cases, however, termination does not involve total separation from the Other. We continue to have some contact, but a crucial change occurs in the character of the relationship. An intense mentoring relationship is followed by bitter conflict or by affectionate but distant acquaintanceship. A marriage ends in divorce, and the relationship goes on in new forms.
A termination is thus not an ending but a turning point: the relationship must be transformed. There is sometimes, but not always, a clear-cut terminating event such as a death, divorce, geographical move, graduation. The event dramatizes one point in the termination process, which generally begins long before the identifying event and continues long after. The termination creates anxiety over being left behind, guilt over deserting or betraying the other, fear of having to start out afresh on one’s own. It is important for both parties to determine what they will keep in the relationship and what they will give up. They need time to see whether there is a basis for an improved relationship, whether the whole thing must go under, whether they will remain in an essentially oppressive or dead relationship.
The termination of a single relationship is difficult enough. In a life structure transition the problem is compounded: it is necessary to terminate the current structure of one’s life and, in a cross-era transition, the outgoing era. The basic question is not simply: What am I going to do about my marriage, or my work, or my lack of leisure? It is, rather: What am I going to do about my life? I may concentrate first on one particular component—the most painful one, or the one that seems most amenable to change—but in time I will have to deal with the others and with the overall structure.
In the Early Adult Transition, for example, we are in the process of separating from parents. The developmental task is not to end the relationship altogether. It is important to reject certain aspects (for instance, being the overly submissive or defiant child in relation to all-controlling parents). But it is important also to sustain other, more valued aspects, and to build in new qualities such as mutual respect between distinctive individuals who have separate as well as shared interests. The parents, often in their forties and working on their own developmental tasks, are at least as involved in the effort to transform the relationship. If it cannot be modified in a way appropriate to the life season of both parents and offspring, it will become increasingly stressful and may even wither away. Moreover, the relationship with parents is but one component of the initial adult life structure. This component influences, and is influenced by, relationships to occupation, to friends and lovers, perhaps to the political, religious, and cultural worlds in which the person is becoming a member. In a transitional period many relationships must be weighed, sifted, tested, and selectively incorporated into a fragile structure.
Individuation, or the “separation-individuation process,” is widely recognized as an important aspect of child development. During the first few years of life we take the first step in individuation, establishing a boundary between the “me” and the “not-me,” and forming more stabilized relationships with the external world. In this first cross-era transition, we shift from life in the womb to existence as a person in the world. Individuation advances further in the Early Adult Transition, with the initial consolidation of an adult identity, greater differentiation from parents, and preparation for a future life as an adult. But we still have a long way to go. If we do not become more individuated in middle adulthood than we were at 20, our lives are very limited indeed.
Individuation is often regarded as a process occurring solely within the self. In my view it is broader than this: it involves the person’s relationship both to self and to external world. With greater individuation of the self, we have a clearer sense of who we are and what we want. We draw more fully on our inner resources (desires, values, talents, archetypal potentials). We are more autonomous, self-generating, and self-responsible. The self is more integrated and less rent by inner contradictions. Individuation occurs as well in our relation to the external world. With more individuated relationships, we feel more genuinely connected to the human and natural world. We are more able to explore its possibilities and to understand what it demands and offers. We give it greater meaning and take more responsibility for our personal construction of meaning. We are capable of more mutual relationships, without being limited to a narrowly “selfish” concern with our own gratification or to an excessively “altruistic” concern with the needs of others. We accept more the ultimate reality of both our aloneness and our membership in the cosmos.
I conceive of individuation in part as a developmental effort toward the resolution of four polarities, which are of fundamental importance in human evolution and in the individual life cycle. They are: Young/Old, Destruction/Creation, Masculine/Feminine, Engagement/Separateness. Each of these pairs forms a polarity in the sense that the two terms represent opposing tendencies or conditions. Although they are in some sense antithetical, both sides coexist in every person and every society.
At every age we are both Young and Old. At 40, for example, we feel older than the youth, but not ready to join the “middle aged” generation. We feel alternately young, old, and in-between. If we cling too strongly to the youthfulness of our twenties, we cannot establish our place in the generation of middle adulthood. If we give up on being young and on sustaining our ties to the youth, we become dry, rigid, prematurely old. It is a problem of balance: the developmental task in every transitional period is to become Young/Old in a new way appropriate to that era in the life cycle.
The Destruction/Creation polarity presents similar problems of conflict and reintegration. Every transition activates a person’s concerns with death and destruction. In the Mid-life Transition of the early forties, for example, we experience more fully our own mortality and the actual or impending deaths of others. We become more aware of the many ways in which other persons, even our loved ones, have acted destructively toward us (with malice or, often, with good intentions). What is perhaps worse, we realize that we have done irrevocably hurtful things to our parents, lovers, spouse, children, friends, rivals (again, with what may have been the worst or the best of intentions). At the same time, we have a strong desire to become more creative and loving: to create products that have genuine value for self and others, to participate in collective enterprises that advance human welfare, to contribute more fully to the coming generations in society. In middle adulthood a person can come to know, more than ever before, that powerful forces of destructiveness and of creativity coexist in the human soul—in my soul—and can be integrated in many ways, though never entirely.
Likewise, all of us at mid-life must come more fully to terms with the coexistence of masculine and feminine parts of the self. The splitting of masculine and feminine, so strong in childhood, cannot be overcome in early adulthood. It is a continuing task of middle and late adulthood.
Finally, we must integrate the powerful need for engagement in the external world with the antithetical but equally important need for separateness. The integration of these and other polarities is a great vision which many have sought to realize but no one can fully attain.
We can work on these polarities at any time during the life course. During the transitional periods, however, both the opportunity and the need to attain greater integration are strongest. When the life structure is up for reappraisal and change, when we feel to some degree suspended between past and future, it is especially important to heal the deep divisions in the self and in our most significant relationships. (For a fuller discussion of polarities, see The Seasons of a Man’s Life.)
As noted earlier, a transition is both an ending and a beginning. As an ending, it requires us to deal with termination, loss, separation, departure, completion. As a beginning it presents the task of initiation: exploring new possibilities, altering our existing relationships, and searching for aspects of self and world out of which new relationships might evolve. The process of exploring, making and testing provisional choices, and questing in new directions may go on throughout a transitional period.
To initiate is to make a choice, and the work of initiation is most clearly reflected in the choices we make. In the simplest case, a choice is a single act, such as selecting a scarf or an item on a menu. The most important life choices are more complex. We do not select a friend, spouse, occupation, religious or political outlook in a momentary, all-or-none way. Instead, we go through a much more extended thinking-feeling-exploring process. The initial choice is to enter into a relationship with an Other (person, group, entity of whatever kind). I start to make some investment of self in the relationship, often without a conscious sense of choosing. I count on some reciprocal response from the Other. The relationship evolves over time. The Other and I make many specific choices along the way: to end the relationship, to continue it as is, to modify it in one direction rather than another. The choice may be based to various degrees on our own preferences and on external opportunities/constraints. The process of choosing often has both conscious and unconscious aspects. I understand it in one way as it happens and in other ways at different times in the future. From a developmental point of view, the process of “getting married” ordinarily goes on for several months or years before and after the wedding. And it is one of many phases in an enduring relationship.
Every significant relationship is thus not a static entity but an evolving process in which both parties make a series of choices. Each choice must be seen within the broader temporal sequence, especially during a transitional period. Even when it is made with great enthusiasm, a choice made in a transitional period necessarily has a provisional quality that stems from the exploratory quality of a transition. Exploration requires tentativeness: if we are highly committed to one option, we are not free to explore others.
As a transition comes to an end, it is time to make more long-term choices, to give these choices meaning and commitment, and to start building a life structure around them. The choices mark the beginning of the next structure-building period. They are, in a sense, the major product of the transition. When all the efforts of the past several years are done—all the struggles to improve work or marriage, to explore alternative possibilities of living, to come more to terms with the self—we must decide, “This I will settle for,” and start creating a life structure that will provide a vehicle for the next step in the journey.
Some transitions evolve fairly smoothly: we re-form the existing life structure without much overt disruption or conscious distress. The period is experienced as a time of relative stability or positive change in which the difficulties are readily manageable. A transition may go smoothly because the previous structure was quite satisfactory and needed only minor changes. In some cases, however, the life structure is unsatisfactory but the transition passes without much change because we are not ready (for various internal and external reasons) to acknowledge the flaws and to work at modifying them. The unacknowledged problems often surface in a later period, when they exact a heavier cost.
A developmental crisis occurs when a person is having great difficulty in meeting the tasks of the current period. Transitional periods are often times of moderate to severe crisis. The crisis is about being suspended in transit—caught between the ending of one life structure and the beginning of another, not knowing which way to turn. During a severe crisis we feel that we can move neither forward nor backward, that we are in imminent danger of the loss of a future. Crises may also occur in structure building-maintaining periods. A crisis at the start of such a period stems from severe problems in establishing an adequate structure. It occurs late in the period if the established structure becomes extremely difficult to sustain.
In The Seasons of a Man’s Life, I introduced the concept of the Mid-life Transition and of the developmental crises that often occur within it. Since then, the term “mid-life crisis” has been widely used in the mass media as well as the academic literature, and is often attributed to me. Unfortunately, most writers use this term as a sort of catchall, without explicitly defining it or putting it in context. The most common view of it is that a mid-life crisis is an inappropriate or maladaptive response to a stressful event. These writers have in mind not a developmental crisis but an adaptive crisis—a problem in coping with a highly stressful situation such as combat, illness, or abuse. Such adaptive crises may occur anywhere in the “middle years.” The age at which a crisis occurs depends primarily on the external event that triggers it. Age is of little import in this point of view, since it has no conception of the life cycle or of age-linked periods in adult development. A mid-life crisis is regarded as entirely negative and to be avoided. A woman is said to be undergoing a mid-life crisis when, for example, she responds to family problems or bodily signs of aging with “out of character” behavior such as getting divorced, having an affair, or “acting like an adolescent.” The way to resolve the crisis is to gain some coping skills to reduce the level of stress, or to get treatment for the neurotic problems that interfere with successful adaptation.
A crisis in life structure development is qualitatively different from an adaptive crisis. They may go on concurrently but must be understood and managed differently. We cannot understand either without taking both into account. A stressful situation is more likely to produce an adaptive crisis if it occurs within a developmental period that is problematic in other ways. Likewise, the severity of a developmental crisis will be increased by a highly stressful event.
To determine whether a person is in a developmental crisis, and what it is about, we must look beyond the single stressful event and the emotional-behavioral adaptation to it. We must consider the person’s life more broadly, identify the current period in life structure development, and assess the extent of difficulty she is having with the developmental tasks of that period—tasks of building and maintaining a life structure, or transitional tasks of termination, individuation, and initiation.
Developmental crises are influenced by specific external stresses and internal vulnerabilities, but they are not due solely to these factors. They have multiple sources in the difficulties of forming or transforming a life structure. The “causes” of a particular life change are more complex than any current theory recognizes; the outcome of a developmental period (especially a transitional one) cannot be predicted. Finally, a developmental crisis is not solely negative. It may have both benefits and costs. The potential costs involve anguish and pain for oneself, hurt to others, and a less satisfactory life structure. The potential benefits involve the formation of a life structure more suitable for the self and more viable in the world.
This alternating sequence of structure building-maintaining periods and transitional periods holds for both women and men. It thus provides a general framework of human development within which we can study the lives of individuals of all classes, cultures, and genders. Both genders go through the same periods of adult life structure development just as they go through the same periods of infancy and adolescence. These periods are part of human development and have common human characteristics. Nevertheless, they operate somewhat differently in females and males. Within the general framework of human life structure development, the genders differ greatly in life circumstances, in life course, in ways of going through each developmental period. Women form life structures different from those of men. They work on the developmental tasks of every period with different resources and constraints, external as well as internal.
The developmental perspective must thus be combined with a gender perspective—a way of thinking about the meanings of gender and the place of women and men in the current epoch of human history. The gender perspective emerging from this study is presented in the next chapter.