Forty: The Age and the Symbol
Autor Stanley Brandesen Limba Engleză Paperback – mar 1987
"Brandes's tour through numerology and etymology is rich and entertaining." —Psychology Today
"The midlife crisis is a popular topic these days, but this book is unique in that it draws upon psychology, history, literature, religion, anthropology, and folklore to present a summary of our past and present attitudes towards both the number and the age 40. An imminently readable book." —Library Journal
"Forty gratifies and consoles, as its author demonstrates how it is in our power to alter the scenario; we can change the third act in the life span, or altogether exchange the stage play/life analogy for a more truthful and rewarding vision of our lives." —Newsday
"The book is avaliant effort to formulate a perspective on the darkness and bewilderment that all too frequently descend on this 'unstable moment.' It is a friendly and supportive book. For anyone about to shoulder this yoke of years unguided, Forty is a handsome volume and a relevant gift." —Wilson Library Bulletin
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780870495168
ISBN-10: 087049516X
Pagini: 168
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 13 mm
Greutate: 0.23 kg
Ediția:First Edition, First Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN-10: 087049516X
Pagini: 168
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 13 mm
Greutate: 0.23 kg
Ediția:First Edition, First Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
Notă biografică
Stanley Brandes is an emeritus professor of folklore at the University of California at Berkley. He has studied Mexico's Day of the Dead from an historical and ethnographic perspective, including Latin America, Europe, and the US. His work on photography and anthropology, particularly the ways in which ethnographic photographs, intentionally or not, have communicated information and impressions about the Other has been carried out primarily in Spain.
Extras
CHAPTER ONE
WHY FORTY?
In the year 1302, just after his banishment from Florence, Dante Alighieri began composing The Divine Comedy. Having reached his late thirties, and beset by unforeseen circumstances, he opened his poem with one of the most profound and powerful statements of the human condition ever formulated: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / che la diritta via era smarrita (In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself within a dark forest / where the straight way was lost).” Continues Dante, “Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of / that savage and harsh and dense forest / the thought of which arouses my fear! / So bitter is it that death is hardly more so.”
It is often difficult to translate the concepts of one place and era into another, but if we were asked to provide a contemporary American rendition of this opening stanza, we might say that Dante was describing a mid-life crisis. I say a mid-life crisis because, for all we know, the mid-life crisis as a named, shared, readily recognizable phenomenon did not exist in early Renaissance Italy. In fact, as reported and popularized in the February 14, 1983, issue of Newsweek (Begley 1983), anthropologists have begun to mount considerable evidence from non-Western peoples—everyone, as the article states, “from macaques to Malays”—to demonstrate that middle age does not produce the sorts of psychological stress that seem to be encountered regularly among twentieth-century Westerners. The mid-life crisis—or mid-life transition, as some scholars prefer to call it (e.g., Clausen 1972.; Levinson et al. 1978; Lowenthal et al. 1975)—would appear to be specific to certain cultures at particular periods of time. Indeed, if we can judge from the abundance of academic and popular literature on the topic, circumstances in the contemporary United States have favored the widespread appearance of this often painful, if sometimes productive, life experience. And yet there is no doubt that people at other times and places, as The Divine Comedy illustrates, have also felt its effects.
Despite flourishing research on adult development, there are still many aspects of the mid-life crisis that remain obscure. One such unknown is why the crisis is so often attributed to forty-year-olds. Does some shared physiological change precipitate a crisis, or do cultural circumstances influence the way we feel and behave at forty? By answering this question, we might hope to determine the relative impact of human biology and culture on the life course. We might state whether nature or nurture takes priority in defining our progression through the long trajectory from birth to death. This volume is, in large measure, directed toward that overall problem.
THE GOALS OF THIS BOOK
Among academic and popular psychologists in the United States, it has become common to cite age forty as a turning point, the time when we leave one stage of life behind and enter another. To these writers—virtually unchallenged experts in the field of adult development—the age of forty represents an unstable moment, flanked before and after by periods of relative equilibrium. But belief in the significance of forty as a watershed is hardly limited to the scientific world. It in fact constitutes one of our most tenaciously held and widespread folk notions about the life course.
Although all life transitions are by definition unsettling, the age forty seems to have earned a particularly notorious reputation. It is regularly portrayed as a time of emotional upheaval, when individuals lose the firm control over their lives that they had developed throughout the course of several preceding decades. Forty-year-olds, it is said, suffer an identity crisis. Men are reported to abandon their jobs, leave their wives and children; housewives to spruce themselves up, acquire lovers, and enter the job market. Such events, we are told, may be temporarily harmful, but as they are described in the literature, they usher in a new life stage in which the individual acquires deeper insight and a more highly integrated personality structure than before.
These notions, as I intend to show, are integral to the way most Americans think about the life course. Indeed, the age forty is so commonly pictured as transitional—in newspapers, magazines, and daily conversation—that people simply assume the occurrence of an emotional crisis at this time. The “forty-year-old jitters,” as anthropologist Jules Henry once called the syndrome (1973, 12.8–48), are popularly reputed to be a natural, regularly expectable feature of life.
My own anthropological training has led me to suspect that any personality syndrome that is widespread and firmly believed in probably has a cultural rather than an organic origin. In the 1920s, when Margaret Mead carried out her Samoan research, she was similarly skeptical with regard to an issue that bears very much on the one addressed in this volume. As is well known, Mead went to Samoa to demonstrate the relative insignificance of biological factors in the formation of adolescent personality. She believed that if teenaged Samoans could be shown to avoid the emotional turmoil characteristic of their American counterparts, then we could assume that cultural, rather than physiological, processes account for adolescent unhappiness in the United States. It was integral to her project, too, to discover whether adolescence was defined as a separate stage of life in Samoa, as it is in America. She found out, of course, that adolescence was not so defined; nor was it a period of expectable turbulence. She therefore concluded that the particular constellation of social and cultural circumstances prevailing in the United States must account for American adolescent unrest.
In the concluding chapter of this volume, I discuss the ongoing debate that Mead’s research has occasioned, and its relation to my own findings about the age forty. After all, popular views regarding the age forty bear many similarities to those relating to adolescence. Both age periods are considered emotionally tumultuous; both, too, are said to be life turning points. My basic conclusion parallels Mead’s: there are cultural, rather than biological, reasons why the age forty is perceived as transitional and why it is accorded such an unfavorable image. That many Americans undergo unhappy experiences at forty is undeniable. But the popular and scientific conception of forty-year-olds as almost genetically programmed to undergo a life transition is hardly defensible.
To formulate my opinions, I have relied on a wide array of sources: literature, folklore, religion, pop psychology, scholarly research, and personal observations. If at times I seem to judge folkloristic or literary evidence as on a par with scientific findings, it is because I believe that scholarship, objective though it may appear, is inevitably influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the cultural milieu in which it is produced. Hence, from the perspective of this essay, academic treatises are as much a product of culture as are proverbs or biblical injunctions. In fact, one of my major goals is to show that psychological scholarship, in particular, may be read as much for what it reveals about our cultural assumptions as for what it conveys about the subject under explicit investigation. Unwittingly, life-span psychologists (the usual denomination for scholars who specialize in adult development) have adopted culturally defined categories and boundaries. At least with regard to their view that forty represents a developmental turning point, they unconsciously reveal their cultural conditioning. I hope that by demonstrating this point, I underscore the need for a generally critical posture regarding ideas about transitional ages and stages.
***
MY THESIS
In the end, this book reinforces a cultural perspective on the etiology of mental disturbance. The stance I shall take is the following: that the age forty is and has been important in Western civilization for centuries, but that it has assumed different symbolic meanings from one historical epoch to the next. In the present era, the age forty has played a prominent role in the increasingly evident definition of age grades. Popularization of this age as one in which critical personal transitions occur may actually have influenced the statistical frequency of mid-life crises, which in turn has reinforced popular impressions of the age forty as a period of vulnerability. Nothing biological produces emotional upheavals in forty-year-olds; rather, it is our culture, including our psychological theories, that imbues forty with special meaning and thereby exerts a subtle, unconscious influence on many of us.
An important facet of the proof for this position comes from the impact of changing sex roles on our ideas about life transitions. Specifically, women until recently have remained relatively immune to the mid-life crisis at forty. Their own developmental cycle has been perceived, rather, as being linked to such biological processes as the onset of menstruation and menopause. In recent years, however, women have become blanketed in with men, for whom forty has long been a turning point. We can see here, as in so many other domains of life, that women are increasingly defined with greater reference to culture, lesser consideration to nature. Equality does not always confer advantages. In this case, women now experience the traumas that were previously reserved for—or at least excused in—men. Conceptions of the age forty and its role in the life course have profoundly influenced personal identity. In the United States, individual identities are produced by a complex interaction of ethnic, regional, sexual, occupational, and other considerations. We can state pretty confidently that one’s generation is an important component of identity in virtually every known culture: to one degree or another, people everywhere measure and rank themselves relative to their ancestors and descendants, to their seniors and juniors. In only certain times and places, however, has absolute age—for example, reaching the age of sixteen or twenty-one or sixty-five—assumed major importance. We live in a society in which absolute ages such as these have acquired widespread symbolic meaning. It is to this type of age grading, and the role of forty within it, that we now turn.
WHY FORTY?
In the year 1302, just after his banishment from Florence, Dante Alighieri began composing The Divine Comedy. Having reached his late thirties, and beset by unforeseen circumstances, he opened his poem with one of the most profound and powerful statements of the human condition ever formulated: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / che la diritta via era smarrita (In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself within a dark forest / where the straight way was lost).” Continues Dante, “Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of / that savage and harsh and dense forest / the thought of which arouses my fear! / So bitter is it that death is hardly more so.”
It is often difficult to translate the concepts of one place and era into another, but if we were asked to provide a contemporary American rendition of this opening stanza, we might say that Dante was describing a mid-life crisis. I say a mid-life crisis because, for all we know, the mid-life crisis as a named, shared, readily recognizable phenomenon did not exist in early Renaissance Italy. In fact, as reported and popularized in the February 14, 1983, issue of Newsweek (Begley 1983), anthropologists have begun to mount considerable evidence from non-Western peoples—everyone, as the article states, “from macaques to Malays”—to demonstrate that middle age does not produce the sorts of psychological stress that seem to be encountered regularly among twentieth-century Westerners. The mid-life crisis—or mid-life transition, as some scholars prefer to call it (e.g., Clausen 1972.; Levinson et al. 1978; Lowenthal et al. 1975)—would appear to be specific to certain cultures at particular periods of time. Indeed, if we can judge from the abundance of academic and popular literature on the topic, circumstances in the contemporary United States have favored the widespread appearance of this often painful, if sometimes productive, life experience. And yet there is no doubt that people at other times and places, as The Divine Comedy illustrates, have also felt its effects.
Despite flourishing research on adult development, there are still many aspects of the mid-life crisis that remain obscure. One such unknown is why the crisis is so often attributed to forty-year-olds. Does some shared physiological change precipitate a crisis, or do cultural circumstances influence the way we feel and behave at forty? By answering this question, we might hope to determine the relative impact of human biology and culture on the life course. We might state whether nature or nurture takes priority in defining our progression through the long trajectory from birth to death. This volume is, in large measure, directed toward that overall problem.
THE GOALS OF THIS BOOK
Among academic and popular psychologists in the United States, it has become common to cite age forty as a turning point, the time when we leave one stage of life behind and enter another. To these writers—virtually unchallenged experts in the field of adult development—the age of forty represents an unstable moment, flanked before and after by periods of relative equilibrium. But belief in the significance of forty as a watershed is hardly limited to the scientific world. It in fact constitutes one of our most tenaciously held and widespread folk notions about the life course.
Although all life transitions are by definition unsettling, the age forty seems to have earned a particularly notorious reputation. It is regularly portrayed as a time of emotional upheaval, when individuals lose the firm control over their lives that they had developed throughout the course of several preceding decades. Forty-year-olds, it is said, suffer an identity crisis. Men are reported to abandon their jobs, leave their wives and children; housewives to spruce themselves up, acquire lovers, and enter the job market. Such events, we are told, may be temporarily harmful, but as they are described in the literature, they usher in a new life stage in which the individual acquires deeper insight and a more highly integrated personality structure than before.
These notions, as I intend to show, are integral to the way most Americans think about the life course. Indeed, the age forty is so commonly pictured as transitional—in newspapers, magazines, and daily conversation—that people simply assume the occurrence of an emotional crisis at this time. The “forty-year-old jitters,” as anthropologist Jules Henry once called the syndrome (1973, 12.8–48), are popularly reputed to be a natural, regularly expectable feature of life.
My own anthropological training has led me to suspect that any personality syndrome that is widespread and firmly believed in probably has a cultural rather than an organic origin. In the 1920s, when Margaret Mead carried out her Samoan research, she was similarly skeptical with regard to an issue that bears very much on the one addressed in this volume. As is well known, Mead went to Samoa to demonstrate the relative insignificance of biological factors in the formation of adolescent personality. She believed that if teenaged Samoans could be shown to avoid the emotional turmoil characteristic of their American counterparts, then we could assume that cultural, rather than physiological, processes account for adolescent unhappiness in the United States. It was integral to her project, too, to discover whether adolescence was defined as a separate stage of life in Samoa, as it is in America. She found out, of course, that adolescence was not so defined; nor was it a period of expectable turbulence. She therefore concluded that the particular constellation of social and cultural circumstances prevailing in the United States must account for American adolescent unrest.
In the concluding chapter of this volume, I discuss the ongoing debate that Mead’s research has occasioned, and its relation to my own findings about the age forty. After all, popular views regarding the age forty bear many similarities to those relating to adolescence. Both age periods are considered emotionally tumultuous; both, too, are said to be life turning points. My basic conclusion parallels Mead’s: there are cultural, rather than biological, reasons why the age forty is perceived as transitional and why it is accorded such an unfavorable image. That many Americans undergo unhappy experiences at forty is undeniable. But the popular and scientific conception of forty-year-olds as almost genetically programmed to undergo a life transition is hardly defensible.
To formulate my opinions, I have relied on a wide array of sources: literature, folklore, religion, pop psychology, scholarly research, and personal observations. If at times I seem to judge folkloristic or literary evidence as on a par with scientific findings, it is because I believe that scholarship, objective though it may appear, is inevitably influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the cultural milieu in which it is produced. Hence, from the perspective of this essay, academic treatises are as much a product of culture as are proverbs or biblical injunctions. In fact, one of my major goals is to show that psychological scholarship, in particular, may be read as much for what it reveals about our cultural assumptions as for what it conveys about the subject under explicit investigation. Unwittingly, life-span psychologists (the usual denomination for scholars who specialize in adult development) have adopted culturally defined categories and boundaries. At least with regard to their view that forty represents a developmental turning point, they unconsciously reveal their cultural conditioning. I hope that by demonstrating this point, I underscore the need for a generally critical posture regarding ideas about transitional ages and stages.
***
MY THESIS
In the end, this book reinforces a cultural perspective on the etiology of mental disturbance. The stance I shall take is the following: that the age forty is and has been important in Western civilization for centuries, but that it has assumed different symbolic meanings from one historical epoch to the next. In the present era, the age forty has played a prominent role in the increasingly evident definition of age grades. Popularization of this age as one in which critical personal transitions occur may actually have influenced the statistical frequency of mid-life crises, which in turn has reinforced popular impressions of the age forty as a period of vulnerability. Nothing biological produces emotional upheavals in forty-year-olds; rather, it is our culture, including our psychological theories, that imbues forty with special meaning and thereby exerts a subtle, unconscious influence on many of us.
An important facet of the proof for this position comes from the impact of changing sex roles on our ideas about life transitions. Specifically, women until recently have remained relatively immune to the mid-life crisis at forty. Their own developmental cycle has been perceived, rather, as being linked to such biological processes as the onset of menstruation and menopause. In recent years, however, women have become blanketed in with men, for whom forty has long been a turning point. We can see here, as in so many other domains of life, that women are increasingly defined with greater reference to culture, lesser consideration to nature. Equality does not always confer advantages. In this case, women now experience the traumas that were previously reserved for—or at least excused in—men. Conceptions of the age forty and its role in the life course have profoundly influenced personal identity. In the United States, individual identities are produced by a complex interaction of ethnic, regional, sexual, occupational, and other considerations. We can state pretty confidently that one’s generation is an important component of identity in virtually every known culture: to one degree or another, people everywhere measure and rank themselves relative to their ancestors and descendants, to their seniors and juniors. In only certain times and places, however, has absolute age—for example, reaching the age of sixteen or twenty-one or sixty-five—assumed major importance. We live in a society in which absolute ages such as these have acquired widespread symbolic meaning. It is to this type of age grading, and the role of forty within it, that we now turn.