One winter's day,
during a severe storm, a horse, an ox, and a dog came and begged for shelter in
the house of a man. He readily admitted them, and, as they were cold and wet,
he lit a fire for their comfort; and he put oats before the horse, and hay
before the ox, while he fed the dog with the remains of his own dinner. When
the storm abated, and they were about to depart, they determined to show their
gratitude in the following way. They divided the life of man among them, and
each endowed one part of it with the qualities which were peculiarly his own.
The horse took youth, and hence young men are high mettled and impatient of restraint;
the ox took middle age, and accordingly men in middle life are steady and hard
working; while the dog took old age, which is the reason why old men are so
often peevish and ill tempered, and, like dogs, attached chiefly to those who
look to their comfort, while they are disposed to snap at those who are
unfamiliar or distasteful to them (Aesop).
There are multiple theories, trying to apply the
psychological approaches to the life of the man, dividing the entire life
period into several stages, which can be characterized by the particular period
of the personal development. In this post, we would like to review several theories
of the man’s life staging. Why that may be important? When you see your life as
complex of the unrelated random events, some - happy, another – sad, you may lose
the global perspectives and general direction. As in all journeys, the map,
even rough and schematic, may help you to navigate through the problems,
misfortunes, and personal mistakes, you may fall in, and may help to get a
feeling of the life purpose and values.
Some people find the core in religion, other – in taking
care of their offspring, or in their carrier. But time comes, when religion
does not give answers to your questions, your kids are leaving the house, and
do not need you anymore, and retirement is inevitable in the near future. That
is a period of life, when many people revise their views and beliefs, that is a
period of time, when your medical problems may scream for relief, that is a
time, when families fall apart after long-term seemingly healthy marriage.
Remember, you are not alone. Your problems and concerns
might look unique to you, and they partially are. But ask any therapist, and
you will be surprise how similar are people’s stories, problems, and worries.
Try to understand what is going on now, and what will be happening with you
soon, and you will be able to prepare yourself as much as possible for the
future, and be able to enjoy your life regardless of the stressful life events
on your way.
Season’s of Man’s
Life (Daniel Levinson)
In his classic book, The Season's of a Man's Life (1985),
Daniel J. Levinson outlines a series of development stages which he feels are
universal to the life experience of all men. The stages are outlined in
the slide below.
He argues than men go through major life phases.
Within these phases are times of stability, generally lasting about 6-10 years
and transitional periods which may last about 4-5 years. The primary task
of every stable period is to build a life structure, to make key choices, form
a structure around them and to pursue goals and values within this
structure. This may be a tranquil or stressful times as options are
weighed and choices made. A transitional period terminates existing life
structures and creates the possibility for a new one. "The
primary tasks of every transition period are to question and reappraise the
existing structure, to explore the various possibilities for change in self and
world, and to move toward a commitment to crucial choices that form a basis for
a new life structure in the ensuing stable period."
As men complete a development phase called "settling
down", they enter into a life period which Levinson calls "Becoming
One's Own Man" (age 36-39). A man becomes a senior member in his own
world, he speaks with his own voice, and he has a greater measure of
authority. He carries the burden of greater responsibilities and
pressures. He gives up more of the "little boy within".
Hopefully, he fulfills his "Dream." Many men do not complete
this settling down in terms which are satisfactory to them. They do not
achieve their "Dream", they find themselves trapped in dead end
occupations, their marriages are no longer the Hollywood fantasy of perfection
and they enter into Mid-life with unresolved developmental issues.
Others, while quite successful in their lives, still
struggle with the new developmental tasks of mid-life since this is
perfectly normal. He will still ask "what have I done with
my life? What do I really get from and give to my wife, family
friends, etc.?" He yearns for a life in which his actual desires,
values, talents and aspirations can be expressed (and often he doesn't know
what they are). Much of this developmental turmoil may be "below
the surface" since many men are only marginally aware of their own
disquietude and/or do not communicate what is really happening to others.
However, it breaks through in strange ways and behaviors-- often being
precipitated by acute crises or events in his life. Since clinical
depression is a common hallmark of repressed anger, ambivalence, and unresolved
inner turmoil, a typical characteristic of this time in a man's life is
depression which clinically appears far differently in man than women.
A man has several major tasks to work on during this
transition. Awareness of this by others may provide one tool for assistance so
that this transition is not too destructive. He must terminate early
adulthood. He has to review and reappraise this era of his life. He
often has to discover who he really is-- not the "self" of
social expectations, parental scripts, corporate environments, etc. He
may begin to modify negative elements of his existing life structure.
This may require experimentation and even failures until the redefinition is
clear.
He has to deal with the polarities of his life. There
are:
·
Young/Old--the mid-life male is caught between
poles. "Young" symbolizes birth, growth, possibility,
initiation, openness, energy, and potential. "Old" symbolizes
termination, fruition, stability, completion, and death. Young can be
heroic, fragile, and impulsive. Old can be senile, tyrannical, and
unconnected. The task of mid-life is to reintegrate these poles-- to seek
new energy for creation but with wisdom and balance. One of the major
problems here can be the inappropriate "quest for immortality" and
all the destructiveness this can lead to. Another aspect of this polarity
is man's quest for a "Legacy"-- what he passes on to the next
generation. This may take the form of satisfaction from children, work with
charitable organizations, mentoring, recognition for professional work etc.
·
Destruction/Creation--as a man reviews his life,
he becomes aware of how destructiveness everywhere inhibits creativity.
He needs to understand the destructiveness in his own life.. He needs to
take responsibility for his own destructive capabilities. He needs to
resolve issues of guilt, ambivalence, old anger, and grief over lost
opportunities. A man's new creativity in middle adulthood comes in part
with the relationship with his own destructiveness and from intensification of
the loving, life-affirming aspects of self.
·
Masculine/Feminine--these polarities-- strength
vs. weakness
·
Attachment/Separation-- to be attached is to be
engaged, involved, rooted, plugged in. To be separated is to be more
deeply involved in one's inner world. Separateness promotes creative
adaptation and inner growth. During the mid-life transition, men need to
reduce their heavy involvement in the external world. To do the
work of re-appraisal and disillusionment, he must turn
inward. As he leaves the dependencies of his earlier life (and this may
be a very negative and destructive act), he forms a more universal sense of
good and evil driven by his own newly emerging values as opposed to that of the
community. He strives to find a better balance between needs of self and
needs of society. With increased self caring and self awareness comes self
development and integrity.
Levinson states that as the mid-life transition begins to
resolve and reintegration of the Self occurs, that the man effects changes
in three components of the life structure:
·
The "Dream"--this symbolizes youth,
omnipotence, illusion, inspiration, and heroic drama. At mid-life, this
imagery needs to be modulated and the conflicts engendered by this resolved.
·
Mentoring--As the man gives up the
"Dream", so he also gives up being mentored, He must accept the loss
and disappointment of being ejected from the youthful generation. He much
become the mentor and derive satisfaction from furthering the development of
younger men and women--facilitating their efforts to form and live out their
own Dreams. Mentoring involves altruism, self-rejuvenation, and
creativity. The hazards of inappropriate control, exploitation, jealousy,
and excessive involvement are well known.
·
Marriage--A man may come to recognize that his
marriage was flawed from the start. As he comes to know himself better,
he comes to know his wife as a real person. He needs to either
recommitment to his marriage on new terms and, in doing that, accept some
responsibility for his own motivation and character or enter into a new primary
relationship. Obviously issues with the Young/Old polarity create major
problems here.
The Eight Stages of Life (Eric Erikson)
Eric Erikson is most famous for his work in refining and
expanding Freud's theory of stages. Development, he said, functions by the epigenetic
principle. This principle says that we develop through a predetermined
unfolding of our personalities in eight stages. Our progress through
each stage is in part determined by our success, or lack of success, in all the
previous stages.
Each stage involves certain developmental tasks. Although he
follows Freudian tradition by calling them crises, they are more drawn out and
less specific than that term implies. The various tasks are referred to by two
terms. The infant's task, for example, is called
"trust-mistrust." Erikson made it clear that there it is a balance we
must learn: Certainly, we need to learn mostly trust; but we also need to learn
a little mistrust, so as not to grow up to become gullible fools!
Each stage has a certain optimal time as well. It is no use
trying to rush children into adulthood, as is so common among people who are
obsessed with success. Neither is it possible to slow the pace or to try to
protect our children from the demands of life. There is a time for each task. If
this one of the stages of life is managed well, we carry away a certain virtue
or psychosocial strength which will help us through the rest of the stages of
our lives. On the other hand, if we don't do so well, we may develop maladaptations
and malignancies, as well as endanger all our future development.
A malignancy is the worse of the two, and involves too
little of the positive and too much of the negative aspect of the task, such as
a person who can't trust others. A maladaptation is not quite as bad and
involves too much of the positive and too little of the negative, such as a
person who trusts too much.
- The first stage. The first one of the stages of life, infancy or the oral-sensory stage, is approximately the first year or year and a half of life. The task is to develop trust without completely eliminating the capacity for mistrust. If the proper balance is achieved, the child will develop the virtue hope, the strong belief that, even when things are not going well, they will work out well in the end. This ability, in later life, gets us through disappointments in love, our careers, and many other domains of life.
- Stage two. The second stage is the anal-muscular stage of early childhood, from about eighteen months to three or four years old. The task is to achieve a degree of autonomy while minimizing shame and doubt. If you get the proper, positive balance of autonomy and shame and doubt, you will develop the virtue of willpower or determination. One of the most admirable -- and frustrating -- thing about two- and three-year-olds is their determination. "Can do" is their motto. If we can preserve that "can do" attitude (with appropriate modesty to balance it) we are much better off as adults.
- Stage three. Stage three is the genital-locomotor stage or play age. From three or four to five or six, the task confronting every child is to learn initiative without too much guilt. A good balance leads to the psychosocial strength of purpose. A sense of purpose is something many people crave in their lives, yet many do not realize that they themselves make their purposes, through imagination and initiative. Perhaps an even better word for this virtue would have been courage, the capacity for action despite a clear understanding of your limitations and past failings.
- Stage four. Stage four is the latency stage, or the school-age child from about six to twelve. The task is to develop a capacity for industry while avoiding an excessive sense of inferiority. Children must "tame the imagination" and dedicate themselves to education and to learning the social skills their society requires of them. Ideally one will develop the right balance of industry and inferiority -- that is, mostly industry with just a touch of inferiority to keep us sensibly humble. Then we have the virtue called competency.
- Stage five. In the stages of life, Stage five is adolescence, beginning with puberty and ending around 18 or 20 years old. The task during adolescence is to achieve ego identity and avoid role confusion. It was adolescence that interested Erikson first and most, and the patterns he saw here were the bases for his thinking about all the other stages. If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will have the virtue Erikson called fidelity. Fidelity means loyalty, the ability to live by societies standards despite their imperfections and incompleteness and inconsistencies. We are not talking about blind loyalty, and we are not talking about accepting the imperfections. After all, if you love your community, you will want to see it become the best it can be. But fidelity means that you have found a place in that community, a place that will allow you to contribute.
- Stage six. The sixth of the stages of life is young adulthood, which lasts from about 18 to about 30. The ages in the adult stages are much fuzzier than in the childhood stages, and people may differ dramatically. The task is to achieve some degree of intimacy, as opposed to remaining in isolation. If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will carry with you for the rest of your life the virtue or psychosocial strength Erikson calls love. Love, in the context of his theory, means being able to put aside differences and antagonisms through "mutuality of devotion." It includes not only the love we find in a good marriage, but the love between friends and the love of one's neighbor, co-worker, and compatriot as well.
- Stage seven. The seventh of the stages of life is that of middle adulthood. It is hard to pin a time to it, but it would include the period during which we are actively involved in raising children. For most people in our society, this would put it somewhere between the middle twenties and the late fifties. The task here is to cultivate the proper balance of generativity and stagnation.
Generativity is an extension
of love into the future. It is a concern for the next generation and all future
generations. As such, it is considerably less "selfish" than the
intimacy of the previous stage: Intimacy, the love between lovers or friends,
is a love between equals, and it is necessarily reciprocal. Oh, of course we
love each other unselfishly, but the reality is such that, if the love is not
returned, we don't consider it a true love. With generativity, that implicit
expectation of reciprocity isn't there, at least not as strongly. Few parents
expect a "return on their investment" from their children; If they
do, we don't think of them as very good parents!
Although the majority of people
practice generativity by having and raising children, there are many other
ways as well. Erikson considered teaching, writing, invention, the arts and
sciences, social activism, and generally contributing to the welfare of future
generations to be generativity as well -- anything, in fact, that satisfies
that old "need to be needed."
Stagnation, on the other
hand, is self-absorption, caring for no-one. The stagnant person ceases to be a
productive member of society. It is perhaps hard to imagine that we should have
any "stagnation" in our lives, but the maladaptive tendency Erikson
calls overextension illustrates the problem: Some people try to be so
generative that they no longer allow time for themselves, for rest and
relaxation.
The person who is overextended no
longer contributes well. An example is the person who belongs to so many clubs,
or is devoted to so many causes, or tries to take so many classes or hold so
many jobs that they no longer have time for any of them!
More obvious, of course, is the
malignant tendency of rejectivity. Too little generativity and too much
stagnation and you are no longer participating in or contributing to society.
And much of what we call "the meaning of life" is a matter of how we
participate and what we contribute.
This is the stage of the "midlife
crisis." Sometimes men and women take a look at their lives and ask
that big, bad question "what am I doing all this for?" Notice the
question carefully: Because their focus is on themselves, they ask what, rather
than whom, they are doing it for.
In their panic at getting older and
not having experienced or accomplished what they imagined they would when they
were younger, they try to recapture their youth.
Men are often the most flamboyant
examples: They leave their long-suffering wives, quit their humdrum jobs, buy
some "hip" new clothes, and start hanging around singles bars. Of
course, they seldom find what they are looking for, because they are looking
for the wrong thing! But if you are successful at this stage, you will have a
capacity for caring that will serve you through the rest of your life.
- Stage eight. This last one of the stages of life, referred to delicately as late adulthood or maturity, or less delicately as old age, begins sometime around retirement, after the kids have gone, say somewhere around 60. Some older folks will protest and say it only starts when you feel old and so on, but that's an effect of our youth-worshipping culture, which has even old people avoiding any acknowledgement of age. In Erikson's theory, reaching this stage is a good thing, and not reaching it suggests that earlier problems retarded your development!
The task is to develop ego
integrity with a minimal amount of despair. This stage, especially
from the perspective of youth, seems like the most difficult of all. First
comes a detachment from society, from a sense of usefulness, for most people in
our culture. Some retire from jobs they've held for years; others find their
duties as parents coming to a close; most find that their input is no longer
requested or required.
Then there is a sense of biological
uselessness, as the body no longer does everything it used to. Women go through
a sometimes dramatic menopause; Men often find they can no longer "rise to
the occasion." Then there are the illnesses of old age, such as arthritis,
diabetes, heart problems, concerns about breast and ovarian and prostrate
cancers.
There come fears about things that
one was never afraid of before -- the flu, for example, or just falling down. Along
with the illnesses come concerns of death. Friends die. Relatives die. One's
spouse dies. It is, of course, certain that you, too, will have your turn.
Faced with all this, it might seem like everyone would feel despair.
In response to this despair, some
older people become preoccupied with the past. After all, that's where things
were better. Some become preoccupied with their failures, the bad decisions
they made, and regret that (unlike some in the previous stage) they really
don't have the time or energy to reverse them. We find some older people become
depressed, spiteful, paranoid, hypochondriacal, or developing the patterns of
senility with or without physical bases.
Ego integrity means coming to terms
with your life, and thereby coming to terms with the end of life. If you are
able to look back and accept the course of events, the choices made, your life
as you lived it, as being necessary, then you needn't fear death. Although most
of you are not at this point in life, perhaps you can still sympathize by
considering your life up to now. We've all made mistakes, some of them pretty
nasty ones; Yet, if you hadn't made these mistakes, you wouldn't be who you
are.
If you had been very fortunate, or
if you had played it safe and made very few mistakes, your life would not have
been as rich as is.
The maladaptive tendency in stage
eight is called presumption. This is what happens when a person
"presumes" ego integrity without actually facing the difficulties of
old age. The malignant tendency is called disdain, by which Erikson
meant contempt of life - one's own, or anyone's.
Someone who approaches death
without fear has the strength Erikson calls wisdom. He called it a gift
to children, because "healthy children will not fear life if their elders
have integrity enough not to fear death."
The Seven Stages of Human Life (Talmud)
Seven times in one verse did the author of Ecclesiastes make
use of the word vanity, in allusion to the seven stages of human life.
The first commences in the first year of human existence,
when the infant lies like a king on a soft couch, with numerous
attendants about him, all ready to serve him, and eager to testify their love
and attachment by kisses and embraces.
The second commences about the age of two or three years,
when the darling child is permitted to crawl on the ground, and, like an
unclean animal, delights in dirt and filth.
Then at the age of ten, the thoughtless boy, without
reflecting on the past or caring for the future, jumps and skips about like a
young kid on the enameled green, contented to enjoy the present moment.
The fourth stage begins about the age of twenty, when the young
man, full of vanity and pride, begins to set off his person by dress; and,
like a young unbroken horse, prances and gallops about in search of a wife.
Then comes the matrimonial state, when the poor man,
like a patient ass, is obliged, however reluctantly, to toil and labor for a
living.
Behold him now in the parental state, when surrounded
by helpless children craving his support and looking to him for bread. He is as
bold, as vigilant, and as fawning, too, as the faithful dog; guarding his
little flock, and snatching at everything that comes in his way, in order to
provide for his offspring.
At last comes the final stage, when the decrepit old man,
like the unwieldy though most sagacious elephant, becomes grave, sedate, and
distrustful. He then begins to hang down his head towards the ground, as if
surveying the place where all his vast schemes must terminate, and where
ambition and vanity are finally humbled to the dust.
Sources and Additional Information:
