ABSTRACT
For a successful man of a certain age to divorce his wife, marry a firm young woman with an evident willingness, buy a fast car in a loud color, and perhaps even establish a more or less manageable drug habit, all within the space of a few years, is perhaps disturbing but also seems so normal that we have a cliché to describe the situation, the so-called midlife crisis. But what is it, exactly, that is in crisis? Obviously, a midlife crisis may damage or even destroy many things-a marriage, relationships between fathers and children, jobs, health-but such destruction is seen as symptomatic of the crisis, not the crisis itself. The clichéd understanding is that the mid-life crisis is a psychological disturbance caused by a man’s sudden and profound realization of his own mortality. In this view, what is in crisis, indeed sick unto death, is a man’s sense of himself as immortal, or at least unbounded. The foolishness-the babe, the car-are the visible symptoms of a desperate psychological effort to deny that at least half of life is over.
