Fears of middle-aged superfluity nonetheless continued after World War II, when younger GIs returned home and entered the competition for jobs. “How Old Is Old?” Business Week asked in 1945, referring to a surplus of aging workers. Resuscitating the rhetoric of the 1930s, Conard Miller Gilbert issued a call to arms in 1948 titled We Over Forty: America’s Human Scrap Pile. “Now is the time to fight. . . . There are millions, yes, millions of men and women past forty who are seeking employment and who are barred on account of their age. These folks are the tragic figures of this era,” he wrote. “The purpose of this book is to arouse the interest of every man and woman over forty so that they will join with their fellows in a nationwide movement to aid in the fight to earn an honest living.”
Again, a federal commission reported that bias against these workers was not based on any diminution in work quality, but the perception that middle-aged workers were not as valuable stuck. Fictional portrayals of the middle-aged reflected the negative sentiments. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway in 1949 and presented an aching portrait of Willy Loman, a man who in midlife discovers he is no longer of any consequence in mid-century America.
How much the nation’s attitudes toward middle age shifted since its emergence is starkly illustrated by Martin Martel’s comparison of magazine fiction published in 1890 and in 1955. After carefully analyzing the differing narratives, the sociologist discovered that nineteenth-century stories regularly portrayed “mature middle age” as the prime of life, whereas the later ones clearly depicted young adulthood as the best. “Age changes its meaning,” Martel observed, “from the connotations of ‘experience,’ ‘wisdom’ and ‘seasoning’ to those of ‘past the prime,’ partly ‘out of it,’ and perhaps to some degree of being ‘not with it.’” For men, “the change applies most of all to work roles where age progressively becomes a negative factor in open-competition with youth,” he wrote. For women, “age becomes associated with loss of glamour and function.”
The obsession with the physiological aspects of midlife never waned, a constant reminder of the middle-aged body’s deterioration, but in the fifties a fresh interest in midlife developed in a wholly different sphere. A small group of researchers provided a new lens through which to view middle age: as a stage of psychological development.
Part II
Middle Age Is Rediscovered
7
The Sixties and Seventies: The Era of Middle Age
Erik Erikson, 1969
We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
—Carl Jung (1933)
“Middle age is certainly the least understood phase of the life cycle, and in terms of its opportunities, the most misunderstood,” Thomas Desmond lamented in a 1956 New York Times Magazine article. Desmond, a New York State senator and the chairman of the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on Problems of the Aging, called for more study of this neglected and maligned period of life. “Americans slump into middle age grudgingly, sadly, and with a tinge of fear. As a result of this immature reaction to maturity we carelessly fritter away what should be truly the ‘prime of life.’”
A pinched view of the middle years had reigned since the twenties. In popular culture, middle-aged characters were pathetic: figures of ridicule, like the overwrought husband in The Seven Year Itch (1955), who is tempted to cheat by Marilyn Monroe’s vent-blown white skirt; or figures of pity, like the 50-year-old silent-screen star Norma Desmond desperately hanging on to her youth in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Biologists were interested in middle age only in regard to how it affected the functioning of the body’s hormones, glands, tissues, and organs. As for psychologists, when it came to explaining human development, most took Sigmund Freud’s lead and assumed that the first years of life were all that mattered. In Freud’s view, individual personality—that complex blend of affinities, fears, quirks, and humor—was largely set by age five. Those who got stuck in one of the early psychological and sexually related stages that Freud outlined were fated to be burdened with it as adults. Smoking, drinking, overeating, or nail-biting? Must be due to an oral fixation traced to infancy. Social institutions, religion, and historical circumstances were disregarded. Most psychologists did not consider the midlife period worth sustained examination. Freud thought middle-aged patients were poor candidates for psychoanalysis because they lacked the necessary “elasticity of the mental processes” and were “no longer educable,” as he wrote in 1905. It is not surprising an air of stagnation surrounded middle age; stasis was essentially built into the definition.
There were dissenters. In his eighth decade G. Stanley Hall, who had hosted Freud during his visit to the United States, argued in his 1922 opus that “senescence, like adolescence, has its own feelings, thoughts, and wills, as well as its own physiology, and their regimen is important, as well as that of the body.” Doctors had explored the “physiological and pathological aspects” of aging; Hall insisted the “subjective and psychological” perspective was similarly significant.
As Hall was reevaluating the second half of life, one of Freud’s closest disciples, Carl Jung, also started to question the narrow focus on childhood. In 1913, his bitter falling-out with Freud sent him into a disorienting spiral of confusion and doubt. At 38, he embarked on a four-year period of intense self-examination that ultimately led him to form his own comprehensive psychological theory. “I felt something great was happening to me,” he wrote.
Psychological Types was published in 1921, when Jung was 46 and “the unbearable age” of youth had turned into “the period of maturity,” as he later put it. The book contained the beginning of a coherent theory of middle age renewal. Reflecting back, Jung saw how misguided it was to think that an individual’s personality was wholly and permanently formed during childhood. “The middle period of life is a time of enormous psychological importance,” he wrote in 1933. Jung believed a person could retrieve characteristics that had been repressed, bring them to the surface, and successfully integrate them into his personality. The more mature man has had “his consciousness . . . widened by the experience of life.” He was ready to search for meaning and purpose. In this sense, Jung’s vision of midlife had more in common with the Calvinist view of aging as a spiritual journey than with the biological preoccupations of his contemporaries.
Neither Jung’s nor Hall’s ideas on middle age were expanded on or popularized at the time, and for decades the notion of psychological progress beyond childhood remained alien. Bernice L. Neugarten, a groundbreaking researcher of middle age, remembered that students in her graduate course on aging in the early 1950s “were amazed at the idea that one developed throughout life. Children developed, they thought, but not adults. The same views were held by most psychologists and by the public. It was generally assumed that you reached a plateau simply called adulthood and you lived on that plateau until you went over the cliff at age sixty-five.” In 1951, when she was assigned to teach the first college-level course on aging at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development, Neugarten was unable to find published material to put on the syllabus. “There were no psychology or other social science books on the topic that I can recall,” she said, because everyone assumed development occurred only in childhood. “No one earlier had seemed to be thinking about development in adulthood—no one except Erik Erikson.”
Erik Erikson’s Revolution
Though Erikson was born in Germany, in his outlook and optimism he was a consummate American. He arrived in the United States with his wife, Joan, in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Speaking only a few words of English, the 31-year-old émigré nonetheless found America’s eager embrace of progress energizing, and it influenced his visionary theories about how individual identity is formed. In this rapidly changing nation, the possibility of self-invention in adulthood did not se
em strange. Erikson himself took advantage of the opportunity. He did not know his biological father and as a child took his stepfather’s surname, Homburger. He decided to rechristen himself Erik H. Erikson when he signed his naturalization papers, taking advantage of what he called “the freedom in America to become your own adult.” At 37, he created himself anew.
Erikson considered himself a devoted Freudian. He trained at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna and had been psychoanalyzed by Freud’s daughter, Anna. But his differences with the master were ultimately what turned him into one of the postwar era’s most creative and influential figures. Erikson began to see development as a lifelong process. He also parted company with Freud’s single-minded focus on the inner psyche and sexuality. Identity was the result of one’s place in history and culture and one’s shifting relationships with others, Erikson maintained. Parents not only affected a child’s development; they were, in turn, enormously affected by their children.
Erikson felt the force of that idea in his own life. In 1944, Joan gave birth to their fourth child, Neil, who had Down syndrome. Shocked and bewildered, Erikson immediately institutionalized Neil while his 41-year-old wife was recovering from the difficult birth. Two close friends, the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead and the Jungian analyst Joseph Wheelwright, both agreed that Neil should be sent away even before his mother had a chance to hold him. In fairness, little was known about Down at the time, not even that it was caused by an extra chromosome, and the prevailing medical opinion was that professionals were best equipped to handle such children. Though plagued by guilt and doubt, Joan did not push to reverse the decision after she got better. The couple told their three other children that their newborn brother had died, although there was no funeral or burial. The children were instructed not to mention the subject or ask questions. Many of the family’s close friends first learned of Neil’s existence when Lawrence J. Friedman published his biography of Erikson in 1999.
Erikson, who had been exposed to Jung’s thinking on adult development through Wheelwright, had worked on a theory about the life cycle before World War II. After Neil’s birth, he decided to return to the topic. Both Friedman and Erikson’s daughter, Sue Erikson Bloland, believe that Neil’s handicap and banishment were behind the couple’s renewed compulsion to put together a picture of healthy “normal” development from childhood through adulthood, something their own son would not experience. Friedman describes their work “as a path away from the crisis of family dysfunction rooted in Neil’s birth.”
Although Joan had a master’s degree in sociology and a deep interest in child development, she viewed her own role primarily as devoted helpmate to her brilliant and charismatic husband. Joan, born in Canada, had always assisted Erik with his written English, co-authoring or editing his books. This time, she took the lead in urging Erik to look more carefully at their own family’s development, and collaborated much more closely with him as he worked on his ideas about life as a series of stages. Erik created the theoretical framework, but the two shared most of the work. “My life cycle theory” was “really ours,” he said decades later.
Like her husband, Joan was skeptical of psychoanalysis’s preoccupation with sex. She credited Shakespeare with a much deeper understanding of human nature and the interplay of social forces by citing Jaques’s famous speech on the seven stages of man in the second act of As You Like It. The couple read the passage aloud to each other:
At first the infant, mewling, and puking in the nurse’s arms:
Then the whining school-boy with his . . . shining morning face . . .
Then the lover, sighing like furnace . . .
Then, a soldier . . . quick in quarrel . . .
Then, the justice . . . in fair round belly . . .
The sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon . . .
Last scene of all . . . is second childishness and mere oblivion.
They began to use Jaques’s characterizations as a frame for their own ideas about development, incorporating experiences from case studies that had not previously fit into child-centered theories. In Shakespeare’s verse, the schoolboy followed the infant, but in constructing their model, the couple inserted a stage in between that focused on play, when the toddler overcame feelings of doubt and developed autonomy.
Joan Erikson remembered the moment when she was first struck by the idea of middle age as a separate stage. She was driving with her husband in 1950 from their home in the Berkeley hills to the train station in south San Francisco. Erikson had been invited to deliver a paper at a White House conference, and he was scheduled to give a preliminary version to a group of psychologists in Los Angeles. They were delighted with their discovery of a stage (the toddler) that Shakespeare himself had missed. “We felt amused and very wise,” she wrote. But then, “sitting with the life cycle chart on my lap while Erik drove, I began to feel uneasy. Shakespeare had seven stages, as did we, and he had omitted an important one. Had we too left one out? In a shocking moment of clarity, I saw what was wrong: ‘We’ were missing,” Joan recalled, referring to Erik and herself, who had both turned 48 that year. The last two stages of the couple’s schema were Intimacy, when individuals entered into a long-term relationship, followed by Old Age. “We surely needed another stage between the sixth and seventh,” she said. Middle age was absent from their chart. (Shakespeare’s ages did not neatly match the Eriksons’ progression.) Erikson called the new addition the “generative” stage and generally referred to it simply as “adulthood.” As he summarized in a lecture he gave in 1973: “In youth you find out what you care to do and who you care to be—even in changing roles. In young adulthood you learn whom you care to be with—at work and in private life, not only exchanging intimacies, but sharing intimacy. In adulthood, however, you learn to know what and whom you can take care of.”
In the Eriksons’ typology, called “The Eight Stages of Man,” each psychological stage is characterized by a normal “crisis”—a conflict between two opposing personality traits—that could be resolved in a positive or negative way. Infants are torn between trust and mistrust; young lovers between intimacy and isolation. The psychological struggle of their newly discovered adult stage pitted “generativity,” the “concern in establishing and guiding the next generation,” against self-absorption and stagnation. A successful resolution meant, in Joan Erikson’s words, wanting to “pass on to the next generation what you’ve contributed to life.” This benevolent stage includes activities like raising children, creating a work of art, or mentoring an assistant on the job. Erik Erikson explained: “A person does best at this time to put aside thoughts of death and balance its certainty with the only happiness that is lasting, to increase, by whatever is yours to give, the goodwill and higher order in your sector of the world.”
Erikson’s conception of middle age seemed to owe more to philosophy than psychology. Nearly a century earlier, John Stuart Mill wrote in his autobiography that those who are truly happy “have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others or the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.”
A shortened version of the White House essay appeared as the seventh chapter in Childhood and Society, published in 1950. “Human personality in principle, develops according to pre-determined steps,” Erikson wrote, and society encourages and reinforces the orderly unfolding of those steps. (The Eriksons added a ninth stage, wisdom, in 1988, when they were both in their late eighties.) Decades earlier, a rational system of classification informed Taylor’s theory of scientific management and physicians’ schedules of biological development. The Eriksons borrowed the idea of a prescribed sequence of stages from doctors and applied it to the process of psychological development.
Their depiction of middle age was skeletal, no more than two pages in the initial printing of Childhood and Society, but it was sufficient to build on. Erikson presented
the first comprehensive model of how a person grew throughout the “life cycle,” and he included middle age as a discrete and meaningful period. He profoundly shaped the emerging field of child development and laid the groundwork for a new field of adult development. Texts about aging and human behavior frequently date the “discovery” of middle age to this postwar period.
Assumptions that sentenced those in middle age to a steady, inexorable slump were upended by Erikson’s theory. Midlife was not a period of malaise and rigidity but a work in progress, a phase as momentous in character-building as adolescence. Indeed, middle age, when one generation nurtured and mentored the next, could be seen as the period in which the most important work of an individual and a society was done.
In Erikson’s welcoming model, generativity was not confined to a rarefied group of enlightened individuals like Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln. With effort and self-conscious examination, anyone could work toward a more meaningful life.
Erikson’s book Childhood and Society created a stir. It spurred psychologists to revise theories about personality development and adaptation, and prompted sociologists to rethink assumptions about social change and influence. In 1961, Margaret Mead nominated it in the American Scholar as the most important book of the last twenty-five years. As significant in popularizing his ideas was Erikson’s publisher W. W. Norton, which in 1963 issued a revised paperback edition specially discounted for colleges that helped to spread his thinking on campuses. Childhood and Society became required reading in many courses, exposing a large cadre of students to his ideas.
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