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Introduction
In 1965, the Canadian-born psychoanalyst and social scientist Elliott Jaques introduced a term, the ‘midlife crisis’, that continues to shape Western accounts of ageing, love and loss. Working at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, Jaques was well known for his studies of organizational structures, introducing terms such as ‘corporate culture’ into contemporary discussions of occupational hierarchies and working practices.1 His research was based on empirical studies of institutions such as factories, churches and hospitals. But it was also shaped by his practice as a psychoanalyst and by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. Psychoanalytical influences are particularly evident in his formulation of the midlife crisis. Jaques had begun to think about the concept in 1952—at the age of 35—when a period of personal reflection was prompted by the conclusion of his own analytical sessions with Klein and by reading Dante’s Inferno—a poetic account of a midlife journey into, and eventually through, darkness and depression. The ‘beautiful lines’ at the start of the Inferno, Jaques wrote many years later, ‘melded with my own inner experiences of the midlife struggle with its vivid sense of the meaning of personal death’.2
When Jaques first presented his paper on ‘death and the midlife crisis’ to the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1957, it generated only a muted response and was not accepted by the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis until eight years later.3 In the published version, which was based on a study of 300 creative artists as well as case histories from his clinical practice, Jaques argued that during the middle years of life, when the ‘first phase of adult life has been lived’, adjustment to a new set of circumstances was necessary: work and family had been established; parents had grown old; and children were ‘at the threshold of adulthood’. The challenge of coping with these pressures, when combined with personal experiences of ageing, triggered awareness of the reality of death: ‘The paradox is that of entering the prime of life, the stage of fulfilment, but at the same time the prime and fulfilment are dated. Death lies beyond.’4
According to Jaques, those who reached midlife without having successfully established themselves in terms of marriage and occupation were ‘badly prepared for meeting the demands of middle age’. As a result, they were likely to display what became the clichéd features of a midlife crisis: disillusionment with life; dissatisfaction with work; a desperation to postpone mental and physical decline; detachment from family responsibilities; and infidelity with a younger, more athletic accomplice. It was psychological immaturity, Jaques argued, that generated a depressive crisis around the age of 35 that was energetically masked by a manic determination to thwart advancing years:
The compulsive attempts, in many men and women reaching middle age, to remain young, the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern, are familiar patterns. They are attempts at a race against time.5
Jacqus warned that, for those who did not work carefully through the psychological anguish of midlife, impulsive strategies intended to protect against the tragedy of death were unlikely to be successful: ‘These defensive fantasies’, he insisted, ‘are just as persecuting, however, as the chaotic and hopeless internal situation they are meant to mitigate.’6
As Jaques’s turn of phrase became more popular on both sides of the Atlantic, he was regularly cited as the originator of the term.7 His concept of the midlife crisis shaped research into the life course and informed self-help and therapeutic approaches to the individual and relational challenges of middle age. Already by the late 1960s, Jaques’s work was framing attempts to understand and resolve the ‘search for meaning’ that was thought to typify the midlife identity crisis.8 In Britain, the impact of the midlife crisis on marriage inspired efforts to address the personal, familial and social determinants—and consequences—of rising levels of divorce. It also influenced the psychoanalytical approaches to resolving marital tensions adopted by Henry V. Dicks and his colleagues at the Tavistock Clinic.9 Elsewhere, the midlife crisis became a notable motif in the work of researchers investigating the impact of life transitions on marriage trajectories, personal identity, and health in men and women—most notably in studies by American authors such as Roger Gould, Gail Sheehy, George Vaillant and Daniel Levinson.10 The fantasies of middle-aged men hoping to retain their youthful vigour also figured in literary and cinematic treatments of marriage, love and loss during the middle years—most famously in novels by Sloan Wilson, David Ely, John Updike and David Nobbs.11
In the post-war decades, the midlife crisis was understood in two principal ways. On the one hand, problems of midlife were read in terms of . . .