Psychoanalysis of Aging and Maturity

The Concept of Maturescence

Guillermo Julio Montero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000164053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Enfermería gerontológica

As developing countries increasingly confront the issues of an aging population, this important book identifies the key period in the life cycle in which changes to the body, as well as concomitant psychological developments, result in the entering ofa new phase of life, maturescence.

The author defines the metapsychology of maturescence from a psychoanalytic standpoint, detaching it from the concepts of midlife and middle age. Supported by clinical examples, the book defines the stimuli which are the precursors to this phase, before examining the complete set of psychological challenges it entails. The author also highlights how maturescence has been illustrated in key literary figures in the 20th century and draws parallels with the mythical cycle of the hero.

This fascinating and original book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and any professional working with issues around aging.

Chapter 1

Mid-life

Steps to be taken before the introduction of a new concept

The 1960s decade was paradigmatic because it was a time when many Western youngsters began to occupy a transcendental place that was different in the human vital cycle—a vital spot which had never been previously filled. From that moment on it was possible to define youth as an important stage of life with its own identity and subjectivity. This was not the result of any particular concession; on the contrary, it was the determination of making a commitment with their lives that perhaps attempted to avoid some of the phantoms and fears brought by the Second World War, long after it ended. The phenomenon can be understood as a reaction to the failure of a generation that led the world to such a manifested disaster: a way of self-defense, a desire of giving birth to something that was different to what their parents had endured. Furthermore, the sixties’ revolution can be conceived as a way of self-protection against an adult world that had sent a lot of young people to die in the Vietnam War.

These youths—as a generation—began to have their own voice, which demanded to be heard. Young people were convinced that they had something to say and this was an unprecedented phenomenon. The concept of an oncoming social revolution that would change the world order, the idea that a new man existed who had to be discovered, the possibility of investing in a future with a notion of renovated liberty, were premises that erupted in the public stage with unusual force, unknown until then. And this occurred simultaneously throughout the Western world as a synchronic phenomenon—an emerging global village before information technology (IT) developed its own revolution, transforming the world in an authentic global village. In fact, it had already been suggested by Marshall McLuhan (1962)—something that today remains sounding prophetic as well as anticipatory of a future of hyper-connectivity at all levels, anticipated by the available media of those days; innocent devices, compared to the ones available nowadays. Perhaps McLuhan never dreamt that his theory would become such a notorious reality as it actually turned out to be; neither did his followers and exegetes, but it all came to pass.

Important cities of the Western world were filled with young demonstrators who took to the streets demanding, confronting and affirming that they would never adopt the hypocritical and mediocre attitude received as their parents’ legacy; the latter had failed and therefore they would change the world forever. The youngsters’ motto, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” became famous and was repeated like a mantra during those years, serving as a rite of passage both in Europe and the United States. A similar phenomenon took place in Latin America, although the political situation was totally different to the one in the northern hemisphere. Each region had its own way of expressing itself within a context of discontent and desire for self-assertion.

The student revolt that took place in France in May, in 1968, the struggle against the war in Vietnam and the libertarian and anti-establishment movements that occurred in the United States (hippies, flower power, pacifism, situationism, surrealism, mysticism, Buddhism, experience with drugs, etc.), the Cuban revolution and guerrilla movements in Latin America, the sexual revolution, the appearance of new musical expressions—from the most well-known musical groups to the possibility of individuals experimenting the new music at home, connected by electricity, from massive rock shows to private ones held by musical elites of experimental jazz—are just some of the examples of the need for identification shared by thousands of youths, all with the aim of changing the world as it was known up to then.

Perhaps the poets of the Beat Generation in San Francisco, led by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as editor and Allen Ginsberg as the iconic messianic figure, who proposed a Howl against Society in ceremonies and street shows, were the authentic forerunners during the fifties of the youth movement of the subsequent decade; they had already fought against all types of prejudices, welcoming blacks, jews, drug addicts, homosexuals, communists and anarchists to their movement.

Nothing indicated in the sixties that in the midst of the youth revolution the concept of mid-life crisis—related to another very different stage of life—would appear with such overwhelming force; none the less it did. The pioneering work Death and the Mid-Life Crisis by Elliott Jaques was published in the The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1965, producing its own revolution; it was a concept that was there to stay.

In some way, the concept of a mid-life crisis functioned as a cultural reaction of the adult generation to the attacks of the youth of that time so as to re-delineate adult identity, something that was becoming blurred, overrode and somehow debased.

From mid-life crisis to the uncanny and universal midlife crisis

The concept of mid-life crisis was fully accepted by psychoanalysts from its very beginning when it was proposed by Jaques (1965). This is not the place to debate if he was right—or whether this author agrees with Jaques’ ideas or not—but he was wise enough to give a Kleinian and useful background to a psychological phenomenon. So far, everything is normal: a new and successful concept within the psychoanalytic framework in the midst of a changing world.

Can we think of the success of the concept as a reaction by the adult world—in this case—with respect to youths that endeavoured to acquire a precise identity in the life cycle, almost for the first time in history?

Be it as it may, something strange happened with the idea of mid-life crisis because the concept immediately popped out from its psychoanalytic origin and spread throughout society—something rather uncommon. Popular culture made the rest, adopting it as one of its dearest ideas: films, novels, soap operas, cartoons, jokes, a lot of popular and artistic creations and media contents made the concept theirs:

How can this be explained?

Why did it occur and why is it still happening?

We may think that the disturbing evidence of something really special happening during mid-life crisis worked not only as a sociological and anthropological answer but also as a psychoanalytic interpretation and insight, and led society to appropriate this concept as the expression and natural way out of an uncanny evidence of the shadow of unconscious feelings that dwell within us. And here the word uncanny is the proper one because it places strangeness in the ordinary world—something oddly familiar rather than simply mysterious, as; Freud (1919h) [p. 219] states.

But this uncanny feeling is not enough to make the concept of mid-life crisis so popular. The power of the concept not only comes from its uncanny roots: it is enhanced and stressed due to its universality: everybody goes under an equivalent psychic state of mind at a certain age in the life cycle.

More, the concept of mid-life crisis continues moving us in the same way that Greek tragedy does, created more than two thousand years ago. In the case of Greek tragedy, it is because of its universality: certain human conflicts have not changed; otherwise, they would have been played and enjoyed at the moment but immediately forgotten. From this vertex, mid-life crisis succeeded as a popular concept because of its twofold constitution: not only an uncanny feeling but also its universality are its components.

This author believes that the power and pregnancy of the concept of mid-life crisis comes from the inner and mysterious uncanny place where all human beings remain tied to biology—as if they were powerful minds trying to overwhelm and defeat the power of biology and its mandate, instead of assuming their humble and transient bodies, trying to find a meaning to nonsense while life lasts.

Up to this moment, the concept of mid-life remains tied to the concept of crisis as if they were just one—and they remain linked as if they were one from the beginning.

Why does this occur?

What is the crisis of mid-life?

What would have happened if Jaques’ concept were just mid-life or if he would have dealt only with mid-life?

Possibly, nothing would have happened and perhaps the concept would have been forgotten. Mid-life is a stage of life—of course, a long and universal one—but it lacks the uncanny content of crisis—another universal. Both universals are needed to give the concept its power. From this perspective, crisis may be the proper qualifying adjective for mid-life.

What does crisis mean?

Is crisis the needed universal component for mid-life?

It may be thought that crisis has a strong effect on the expression mid-life crisis because this qualifying factor is something that makes evident the enormous amount of psychic work demanded by specific unconscious feelings. Summarizing: mid-life is posed as a stage of life—a long period of years—and mid-life crisis may be understood as the beginning of this stage of life called mid-life—up to that moment commonly known as middle age—such a common word as to discard the hyphen and simply consider it as midlife.

A historical perspective on the concept of midlife crisis

In retrospect, the success of the concept could be related to an adult reaction to the youth movement of those days. Almost as if adult identity could have rebelled against the power that the youth movement pretended to sustain or really did possess at the time. In other words, this adult identity manifested itself like a reactive formation, maintaining an identitary affirmation in the midst of so much discredit to adulthood per se. In this way, not only the young reinforced their generational identity but so did the new so-called midlifers.

Some data can evince this phenomenon a bit better. For example, Google’s N-Gram browsing tool, after digitalizing millions of books published between 1800 and 2010, show a trend with a certain degree of validity. The N-Grams demonstrate the frequency with which a word appears in books—newspapers, magazines are not included—that were being edited, without discriminating between scientific production and dissemination production. This may indicate the importance of a word as social representation or its presence in the collective worldview.

The search with the expression midlife crisis or mid-life crisis confirms the affirmation of an irruption of the concept: it makes its appearance during the mid-1960s—without any mention prior to that date—showing a sharp rising curve in the number of mentions which is surprising. It should be noted that the result is the same if only the word midlife (without hyphen) is considered.

Moreover, the mid-life crisis concept did not just function as a reaction but as a kind of psychoanalytic interpretation as well, in a manner equivalent to how interpretation functions in psychoanalysis, since it affected the understanding of the life cycle in a manner unknown until then. An interpretation decentralizes: it operates a change and allows for a new understanding of a phenomenon. This is precisely what occurred with Jaques’ pioneering concept and work because it immediately became part of popular culture—newspapers, literary works and plays, scientific works, etc.—as already anticipated, perhaps leading to the assumption that everyone would undergo what was beginning to be identically termed as midlife crisis.

It can undoubtedly be sustained that the midlife crisis is a universal. However, one of the purposes of this book is to make evident that it is not possible to determine the value of a psychic phenomenon by its external semiology. On the contrary, it must be done by also using a metapsychology that can evince the specific working-through processes—not necessarily inferable by the conduct. For this reason, many of the efforts made to understand the midlife crisis only linked the manifested content of the conduct with a stereotype. This led to the erroneous assumption that everyone had to undergo the midlife crisis in a similar way.

In order to illustrate this point, we could consider that a person is experiencing a creative process every time he or she paints a picture or writes a poem. From this perspective, the manifested behavior could lead to an error because the result of the creative experience—experience is a significant word that will be examined in a later chapter—cannot be assessed only by the supposedly created artistic product but rather by the inner psychic processing that the individual experiences during the creative process. A great external similarity exists between a creative process and an evacuative process, as well as a huge intra-psychic difference. Both processes can only be distinguished by means of a metapsychological understanding—an exclusive territory of psychoanalysis—since the latter makes it possible to distinguish both types of psychic processes. Psychoanalytically speaking, if the perspective of internal processing is not considered, it is impossible to say a word about the authentic provenance of one or the other of these extreme vertexes.

From this perspective, therefore, it is possible to affirm that the midlife crisis is a universal, but a universal that is psychically processed by the individual according to the availability of the psychic working-through of each one, taking into account processing possibilities that are always completely different because they depend on complementary series, prevailing defensive mechanisms, different conflict situations, etc.

However, considering the midlife crisis as a universal implies an authentic definition and characterization of this universal:

What are we referring to when we sustain this universal?

What universal is the word universal referring to?

All this will be dealt with in the following chapter.

But—returning to the function of midlife crisis as interpretation—in order for an interpretation to produce a change, a need for that change is always necessary beforehand. The interpretation must coincide with that which the individual intimately hopes will happen—even though he or she might not initially recognize it as his or her own. We could maintain, therefore, that the concept midlife crisis existed in a latent state in society, a kind of Bionian pre-conception that Jaques was able to conceptualize—almost in the manner of an interpretation. This is why it lasted and started to represent a phenomenon that expanded rapidly with a value of its own. From then on, an exegetical effort commenced in order to have access to its authentic meaning, giving rise to a great quantity of books and papers that referred to the topic.

So many efforts in defining the concept perhaps led to a certain darkness of representations, reason why many times what Jaques termed mid-life crisis can be confused with middle age—confusing a specific moment with a more extended period, as has already been anticipated.

Some characteristics and factors of the midlife crisis

Various authors maintain that the midlife crisis—midlife crisis as a general concept in this case—can promote a greater wisdom (Erikson, 1951), an increment or transformation of one’s creativity (Jaques, 1965), the possibility of enjoying a renewed intimacy (Neugarten, 1996), a better use of one’s time (Colarusso, 1999), and many other factors and characteristics.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to consider that these characteristics can be t...