ABSTRACT
I first came to see the importance of the crises and transitions that restructure each individual life when, thrown into a particular life crisis of my own, I read a wonderful literate article called “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis” by Elliott Jacques (1965). He documented the changes that occurred in the organization of the lives of so many creative figures at approximately the middle of their lives. Many showed a major shift in the quality of their art or their themes: Shakespeare moved from comedy to tragedy. Some stopped writing or painting; some, like Gauguin, began; some ended their creative careers, as, for instance, van Gogh did through suicide. Jacques’s argument that development normally resulted in a major reorganization at midlife illuminated my own struggles, whereas his examples gave me a feeling of being connected to the ages. The article also broadened my understanding of development. I had been accustomed to thinking of child development when I trained as a child psychiatrist, but I now saw that my own continued development as a (then) young adult was continuing the process of shifts in life that did not stop after adolescence or getting married-or ever until death. That article had a particularly personal impact on me. Jacques called the transition he was studying a life crisis, and indeed these periods of transition often have the feel of introducing such a radical discontinuity into a life (as that period did in mine) that they feel like a crisis. But these are the ordinary stuff of life, the shifts that mark life’s continual growth and that reflect the fact that we all have a reservoir of creativity that lets us take what we have up to a certain point and recreate our patterns in infinite ways that mark our lifelong potential to change the way we live (Levinson, 1978, 1996; Scarf, 1987; Sheehy, 1976; Viorst, 1986). I still think it’s a fascinating story that has enhanced my work with patients of all ages-from birth to old age-at every step of my career doing psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and family, couple, and sex therapy with people whose problems (the life difficulties that bring them to us) always intertwine with their development.
