Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film

Jungian and Eriksonian Perspectives

Steven F. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415666985
• eBook ISBN: 9781136581540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Steven F. Walker considers the midlife transition from a Jungian and Eriksonian perspective, by providing vivid and powerful literary and cinematic examples that illustrate the psychological theories in a clear and entertaining way.

For C.G. Jung, midlife is a time for personal transformation, when the values of youth are replaced by a different set of values, and when the need to succeed in the world gives place to the desire to participate more in the culture of one's age and to further its development in all kinds of different ways. Erik Erikson saw "generativity, " an expanded concern for others beyond one's immediate circle of family and friends, as the hallmark of this stage of life. Both psychologists saw it as a time for growth and renewal. Literary texts such Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, or Sophocles' Oedipus the King, and films such as Fellini's 8 ½ and Campion's The Piano, have the capacity to represent, sometimes more vividly and with greater dramatic concentration than actual life histories or case studies, the archetypal nature of the drama and in-depth transformation associated with the midlife transition.

Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film focuses on the specific male and female archetypal paradigms and presents them within the general context of midlife transformation. For men, the theme of death of the young hero presides over the crisis and the transformative ordeal, whereas for women the theme of tragic abandonment acts as the prelude to further growth and independence.

This book is essential reading for anyone studying Jung, Erikson, or the midlife transition. It will interest those who have already been through a midlife transition, those who are in the midst of one, as well as those who are yet to experience this challenging period.

Chapter 1

Jung, Erikson, midlife transformation
and the oneiric text

C.G. Jung's 1931 essay “The Stages of Life” (Campbell 1976: 3-22) defined the entry into midlife as a transition period fraught with drama and even tragedy. Jung's focus on midlife had much to do with the development of his own originality as a psychologist in the wake of his break with Freud in 1912, when he was in his late thirties and had enjoyed for a number of years his status as the young heir apparent of the Freudian movement. This painful break was followed by what Anthony Storr has called a “near psychotic breakdown” (Storr 1991: 15), in the course of which Jung confronted a flood of images from the unconscious of almost overwhelming intensity. Having experienced the power of what he would later call the “collective unconscious,” Jung originated a theory of the unconscious in its deeper archetypal dimension that expanded Freud's conception of the psyche to include more—much more—than the purely personal contents described by his erstwhile mentor. Whereas Freud's theory of the unconscious had assumed that all its contents derived from repressed personal memories, Jung posited that beyond this personal unconscious lay a “collective unconscious,” whose “archetypal” contents were not the result of repression, but rather preexisted the birth of the individual and constituted the psycho-instinctual substratum common to all humanity. Jung viewed the psychic growth and creative transformation he experienced at midlife as archetypal in nature, in that the images that triggered his transformation were not only associated with personal memories and associations, but were also linked with disturbingly powerful mythic images.

In Jungian terms, midlife transformation can be seen as programmed in the psyche in the same way as the transformation processes associated with adolescence or young adulthood. It has no doubt an extremely important personal dimension—people live out their midlife transitions in their own particular ways—but it also manifests archetypal patterns which are based on a template in the psyche that involves the individual at midlife in a process that is recognizably similar to what all other individuals undergo, regardless of the specific cultural milieu in which their lives are embedded. In order to illustrate clearly the nature of a few of these patterns, I have chosen examples from literature and film and especially from the type of texts I call oneiric, that is, those which present significant mythological and dreamlike characteristics. They are texts that can be read as dream-texts, but dreams metamorphosed, polished and clarified by art, and made more accessible and entertaining for those who might be understandably bewildered and put off by the complexity and apparent confusion of personal accounts of actual dreams.

In the course of this book I will present not only examples drawn from literary and film texts of our own time, but also examples taken from the literature of other times and places, in order to highlight what they have to offer in terms of powerfully symbolic representations of the midlife transformation process. Such oneiric texts may be said to constitute a treasure house of symbolic representations of human experience. My assumption, which is shared by most Jungians, is that the archetypal characteristics of the human psyche are slow to change. Jung has written that

the collective unconscious, being the repository of man's experience and at the same time the prior condition of this experience, is an image of the world which has taken aeons to form. In this image certain features, the archetypes or dominants, have crystallized out in the course of time. They are the ruling powers, the gods, images of the dominant laws and principles, and of the typical, regular occurring events in the soul's cycle of experience.

(Jung 1956: 105)

For that reason, even ancient texts, such as some Greek tragedies or ancient myth narratives such as the Sumerian myth of the Descent of Inanna, remain relevant to the problems of the midlife transition in modern times, and, in spite of their cultural specificity, may provide precious insights into its archetypal foundations.

It was Jung's personal experience of a quasi-initiatory midlife ordeal involving mental anguish and even the threat of insanity and death that turned him into a creative and original psychologist in his own right, and not merely a brilliant follower of Sigmund Freud. A “midlife crisis” is thus not a sign of neurotic regression—although it can certainly involve neurotic regression—but a sign of the ongoing growth and transformation of the psyche. In fact, writes Jung, neurotic regressiveness at midlife is primarily the result of resisting change and transformation: “the very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion” (Campbell 1976: 14).

Jung's essay “The Stages of Life,” particularly as regards what it has to say about the challenges of midlife transformation, would have been a good place for him to have brought up the case of Oedipus, had he not, throughout his later career, been consistently gun shy of the Freudian master myth, which saw in the myth of Oedipus a paradigmatic symbolic representation of a young boy's fantasies of murdering his father and marrying his mother. Jung might have pointed out that the later story of Oedipus, as dramatized in Sophocles’ great tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant, could be taken as an equally powerful symbolic representation of a man on the brink of midlife transformation. Sophocles shows Oedipus not only as resisting knowledge about his own past (the murder of his father and his incestuous marriage with his mother), but also resisting midlife transformation and the new identity it will be his fate to realize and live out in the second half of his life. As I will demonstrate later, in Chapter 3, Oedipus’ tragic willfulness and pigheaded stubbornness in Sophocles’ tragedy can be taken as symbolic of the rigidity of midlife resistance to new values and to the process of assuming a new identity—a resistance to change all the more intense if, as was the case with Oedipus, the values of youth have led to what seems to be unqualified worldly success. At the height of his power as tyrant of Thebes, Oedipus seems to have done it all, and done it very well. He has vanquished the monstrous sphinx and saved the people of Thebes, thus becoming a heroic legend in his own time; he has married the widow of the former king and has had sons and daughters with her; he is respected and even idolized by his people; he is at the apex of his social achievements and at the zenith of his strength and glory.

But the great hero Oedipus, having risen so high, is soon due for a fall. Jung compared the course of life to the journey of the sun from dawn to sunset, with the moment when youth begins to give way to middle age being equated symbolically with the sun's highest position in the sky. At that moment things get dramatic: “at the stroke of noon,” writes Jung, “the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal [enantiodromia] of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning” (Campbell 1976: 15). Jung found this solar analogy very meaningful, and expanded on it as follows:

Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia: the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength . . . The transition from morning to afternoon means a re-valuation of earlier values. There comes the urgent need to appreciate the value of the opposite of our former ideals, to perceive the error in our former truth.

(Jung 1956: 74-75)

For Oedipus, the experience of this descent is particularly tragic, since by the end of Sophocles’ play he has lost everything (his high position, his wealth, the respect he enjoyed) and everyone (his wife, his children, his people) that he valued in his life. And he was almost totally unprepared for this tragic catastrophe. All the qualities that had served him so well in his youth (cleverness, self-assertion and youthful heroism) are of little use to him now. That is why Sophocles’ tragic and dramatic portrayal of a maturing Oedipus, as opposed to the more youthful heroic Oedipus as he appears in the traditional myth utilized to great effect by Freud, can be taken as symbolically paradigmatic of the midlife crisis faced by many people today. Modern people are sometimes as unprepared as Oedipus for this enantiodromia, this midlife reversal of values. Jung deplored the absence of “schools for forty-year olds” (Campbell 1976: 16), which would educate them and prepare them for the inevitable descent, since

whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning . . . must pay for so doing with damage to his soul just as surely as a growing youth who tries to salvage his childish egoism must pay for this mistake with social failure.

(Campbell 1976: 18)

In “The Stages of Life,” Jung emphasized that

we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

(Campbell 1976: 17)

As we have seen, Jung's concern with midlife, which he felt began typically “between the thirty-fifth and fortieth year” (Campbell 1976: 8), although its onset can occur well into a person's fifties, was partly the result of his own personal experience of an unusually transformative midlife passage, which led him to distinguish his own analytical psychology's goals and objectives from those of Freud's. Freudian psychology was mainly concerned with enabling the individual “to love and to work”— achievements no doubt valuable at any stage of life, but of most specific and crucial value to youth and early adulthood, when marriage, acquiring friends and professional success are traditionally of prime concern. However, it is not such personal goals, but rather “culture” that Jung wants to assign as the task of the second half of life:

Money-making, social achievement, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature, not culture. Culture lies outside the purpose of nature. Could by any chance culture be the meaning and the purpose of the second half of life?

(Campbell 1976: 18)

Jung felt, however, that modern culture tended to ignore and even to discourage the potentially momentous shift in values and psychological orientation that can occur at midlife. He had visited the United States on two separate occasions, during which he had had the opportunity to become acquainted with mainstream American culture and the dominant social values of the early twentieth century, when the modern cult of youth and youthfulness had become well established. In America, he wrote:

For the most part our old people try to compete with the young. In the United States it is almost an ideal for a father to be the brother of his sons, and for the mother to be if possible the younger sister of her daughter.

(Campbell 1976: 18)

But Jung had also had the opportunity of getting acquainted with the tribal society of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, and its respect for traditional values and the wisdom of the elders made a great impression on him. Jung thus felt able to make the following comparison between modern culture and traditional tribal culture:

In primitive tribes we observe that the old people are almost always the guardians of the mysteries and the laws, and it is in these that the cultural heritage of the tribe is expressed. How does the matter stand with us? Where is the wisdom of our old people, where are their precious secrets and their visions?

(Campbell 1976: 18)

His conclusion was that modern culture was tending more and more to identify with the goals of youth as the only goals worth realizing, and so to ignore that momentous enantiodromia of midlife where these youthful goals begin to lose their value and change their valence.

It was—somewhat paradoxically—the Freudian Erik Erikson, in close collaboration with his wife, Joan, who was to shed light on the period of the onset of midlife as a major stage of growth and transformation, thus taking a giant step beyond the Freudian emphasis on the problems of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Without specific reference to (and perhaps without knowledge of) Jung's earlier essay on the stages of life, Erikson in the late 1940s began to describe mature adulthood as a stage of life in which generativity came into conflict with what he termed stagnation; a successful resolution of this conflict would endow the individual with a broadened sense of concern for others and for the culture at large.

But it is interesting to note that, in their first formulation of his theory of the stages of life, the Eriksons almost omitted the stage of midlife! In her preface to the extended version of The Life Cycle Completed (1997), Joan Erikson tells how the couple was on the way to Los Angeles, where her husband was to present their recently elaborated theory publicly to a gathering of psychiatrists and psychologists, along with a chart showing clearly seven successive stages of life. Suddenly they remembered that in his comedy As You Like It, Shakespeare had presented the “seven ages” of man, just as in their sequence, but realized that in Shakespeare's listing there was a glaring omission as regards the flowering of mature adulthood. They then asked themselves whether they too had skipped a stage. Joan Erikson later remembered that “in a shocking moment of clarity I saw what was wrong: the seven chart stages jumped from ‘Intimacy’ (stage six [Young Adulthood]) to ‘Old Age’ [at that point stage seven].” Realizing, she wrote, that “we surely needed another stage between the sixth and the seventh” (Erikson 1997: 3), they quickly developed the idea of a stage of life in which the conflict between generativity and stagnation would be the dominant characteristic.

Shakespeare's evocation in As You Like It (Act II, scene 7) of a parade of representative figures of the Seven Ages of Man does in fact include a figure who could be taken as symbolizing mature adulthood, but in anything but generative terms:

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.”

The satirical and negative cast of Shakespeare's portrayal of his midlife figure as a violent and braggart soldier (miles gloriosus) corresponds nicely, however, to what Erikson called the negative (dystonic) “ritualism” that is “potentially rampant in adulthood,” and is “authoritive” and linked to the “antipathetic trend” of “rejectivity.” “Authoritism” he defined as “the ungenerous and ungenerative use of sheer power for the regimentation of economic and familial life” (Erikson 1997: 70)—a kind of bullying that is brutal and self-seeking in its use of force. “Rejectivity” is defined as “the unwillingness to include specified persons or groups in one's generative concerns—one does not care to care for them” (Erikson 1997: 68). Rejectivity can even lead to the hybris of pseudospeciation, a term Erikson later devised to designate hostile behavior towards other human beings, treating them as though they belonged to a different and lower species. “Stagnation” is the result of seeking to prolong youth beyond its normal bounds, thus resisting midlife transformation, and of the failure to become generative and generous-minded.

One must be careful, I feel, in making too broad a use of the term “stagnation,” which is associated in Erikson's mind with the term “self absorption,” as the main pitfall in the attainment of midlife generativity. This is where Eriksonian and Jungian theories of midlife begin to clash. Erikson's theory is mainly concerned with an individual's level of functioning in the outside world, whether for better or for worse. In terms of social adaptation, generativity is good, and stagnation is bad. But, in the Jungian perspective, stagnation can also represent a long stage of liminality, of a slow psychic preparation for transformation. Jungian theory is also rather more open than Eriksonian theory to the idea that contemplative and spiritual values may play a large role in midlife transformation. The midlife crisis can also be a spiritual crisis, and Jung was prone to see it, at least for the analysands he had to deal with, as primarily that. In addition, the introverted and introspective aspect of Jungian analytical psychology contrasts vividly with the extroverted and socially concerned slant of Eriksonian theory. Jung was prone to speak of inner transformation and introspective depth, whereas Erikson stressed social adaption and responsibility. But I see their two approaches as wonderfully complementary, and in the course of this study will turn to one or the other, depending on which one seems most illuminating for the particular hermeneutic context.

Like Jung's discussion of midlife transformation, Erikson's theory of the stages of life is presented as gender-free, equally applicable, at least in principle, to either sex, even though Erikson's examples are drawn almost entirely from the lives of men. Jungian theory, by contrast, thanks to its stress on the important contrasexual dimensions of the anima and the animus, is, at least potentially, more open to the possibility that there will be differences and even major differences between a male paradigm of midlife transformation and one that would apply specifically to women; my analysis in Chapter 5 of the midlife transformation of Penelope in the Odyssey, is one of my attempts to sketch out what those differences might be in terms of divergent archetypal paradigms. But, at least in the case of the Odyssey, however much Homer's imagination might have been richly androgynous, there is always the possibility that the figure of his Penelope might deserve the strictures of Virginia Woolf, who argued that many of the great female characters created by male authors “are by no means what they pretend to be.” Some of them, she argues, “are plainly men in disguise; others represent what men would like to be, or are conscious of not being” (Woolf 1979: 42). The same problem exists with other figures that seem to provide rich material for the analysis of the female midlife transformation, such as Shakespeare's Cleopatra. In Jungian terms, such a female character might be the result of a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Jung, Erikson, midlife transformation and the oneiric text
• 2 The shadow and the contrasexual side at midlife
• 3 Oedipus, mentors and male midlife transformation
• 4 Ariadne, abandonment and female midlife initiation
• 5 Homer’s Odyssey and midlife transformation
• 6 Tragedy, inflation and midlife transformation
• 7 Modernist midlife initiations: Marcel in Proust’s TimeRegained and Clarissa in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
• 8 Some classical Hindu perspectives on midlife
• Bibliography
• Index