Human Growth and Development / Unit 14 HGD 1961 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Midlife Crisis
The idea
The midlife crisis is a familiar image: a forty-something who buys a sports car, has an affair or quits a job in a panic about aging. The term was coined by the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, and the idea draws on psychoanalytic notions of inner turmoil. It became popular through writers who described midlife as a time of upheaval. The evidence tells a different story. Erikson and Levinson saw midlife as a challenge that can bring growth, not as an inevitable breakdown. In Vaillant's long-term Harvard study, a midlife crisis was rare, and midlife brought no more distress than other ages. Vaillant argued that Levinson's cross-sectional design had produced the impression of an inevitable crisis. In the national Midlife in the United States survey, fewer than a quarter of respondents reported a midlife crisis, and those who did usually tied it to a major life event, such as illness, divorce or job loss, rather than to fear of aging.
In practice
Two fifty-year-olds who each quit a job: one after a layoff and a divorce in the same year, the other after years of quietly planning a new career, neither in a crisis about aging.
Where people slip
The misconception is that most people have a midlife crisis. Most do not, and when turmoil occurs it usually follows events that can happen at any age. The popular image persists partly because vivid cases are memorable, the availability heuristic from unit eleven, and partly because the term gives a name to ordinary midlife re-evaluation. Re-evaluation is common; crisis is not. The same caution applies to the claimed U-shaped dip in happiness at midlife, which this unit weighs later. For the exam, know Jaques's term, the psychoanalytic roots, and the evidence that a midlife crisis is not typical.
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