Midlife Crisis

The term midlife crisis, or midlife transition, is generally defined as a period in an adult's life, believed to occur at or around the age of 40, in which there is a reappraisal of life's accomplishments, a more poignant recognition of health issues and ultimate mortality, and the potential for a change in lifestyle or behaviors. “Midlife crisis” is instantly recognized in the United States and increasingly in other Western nations. The recognition is most likely due to its prominent use in novels, movies, art, and advertising. People tend to use the term negatively, associating it with stereotypes about physical aging, career stagnation, and midlife marital boredom. The term is also most often associated with men's experiences, although recent research on popular beliefs about the term suggests that some women also believe that they have experienced midlife crises. In the United States, therapists, popular writers, and people outside the academic and therapeutic professions connect the midlife crisis to the strong cultural expectation that a successful and self-fulfilling work career is central to achieving success in life. The assumption is that if by age 40, career growth and development has stagnated, men (and increasingly women) will experience crises.

Although there is some evidence that age 40 held special cultural significance before the twentieth [Page 503]century, the term midlife crisis is a recent creation first introduced in 1965 by Elliott Jaques. In his article “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” Jaques argued that there is a critical stage of development among creative male artists in their late 30s, taking three forms: the cessation of creative activities, a marked change in the quantity or quality of the creative output, or death. The term crossed quite rapidly into popular usage, applied well beyond the original sample of observation.

Another major milestone was the work of Daniel Levinson and his colleagues. Their work Seasons of a Man's Life described a stage theory of adult development that gave prominent play to crises associated with transitions between key decades in life, including the transition into full middle age around age 35 to 40. Predictable stages of adulthood and throughout midlife were also popularized by Gail Sheehy in the book Passages.

The aging of the baby boom generation into midlife has brought the concept of midlife crisis to the fore in popular culture. It is important to note that scientific studies of emotional well-being at midlife have never established the midlife crisis as a universal or expectable stage of life in the general population. In fact, the scientific literature tends to reject the idea. There is also considerable scientific skepticism as to whether the traditional definition of the midlife crisis applies to middle-aged people at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some researchers, such as O. G. Brim and David Chiriboga, have argued that the concept may never have been an accurate description of the expectable course of midlife development. Marjorie Lachman found that the midlife crisis was reported by those who had life histories characterized by serious life events and adjustment disorders. Stanley Rosenberg has recently observed that it is more useful to think of the midlife crisis as an “ideal type” concept that has evolved into a popular myth and a staple of literary treatments of midlife. In sum, the influence of the midlife crisis in the scientific literature on adult development was relatively brief; already in the 1970s, researchers such as George Vaillant had published studies challenging the idea that midlife crises were expectable crises of life or universally experienced. The concept itself has psychiatric and therapeutic roots, and thus it was probably predictable that scientific skepticism would emerge.

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