[The following is quoted from _Thinking_about_Thinking_
by Tom Glenn, 1983]


    Much work has been done during the past ten years to isolate
the effect of time as a factor in human growth.  Three writers
have achieved recognition for their work in this field:   Daniel
Levinson (l979), Roger Gould (l979), and George Vaillant (l977).

     The notion that adult life occurs in universal cycles of
growth and development is an ancient one, but modern attempts to
isolate and verify the cycles are in their infancy.  Consequently
it is not surprising that the cycles devised by these three men
differ from one another in detail--just as the growth hierarchies
of the developmental psychologists vary in numbers of levels and
their meanings.  But the study of the work of these men reveals
points of agreement as well as differences, and it is on these
agreements, as modified by my own thinking and experience and the
writings of other psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers,
that I base the general outline which follows.

     One disclaimer: none of the writers on this subject had
actually lived through late adulthood when they wrote their
texts.  Nor have I.  I am inclined to believe that the insight
each has brought to his work weakens when the discussion turns to
late adulthood simply because personal first-hand knowledge is
missing.  For this reason, I will not make any attempt in my
writing to deal with a period of life I have not yet lived and is
equally foreign territory to my sources.

     Nor will I describe in detail the models each of these men
devised.  Their viewpoints were radically different.  Levinson is
a humanistic sociologist, and his perspective is one of popula-
tions--an attempt to make generalizations about the likelihood
for all based on the actual experience of the few--some forty men
(pace Popper).  Gould, a clinical psychologist of decidedly
deterministic bent, bases his observations on the patients he has
treated and his insights into his own life.  Vaillant, an eclec-
tic psychologist with latent Freudian tendencies, studied a group
of men selected between l939 and l944 as the best and the bright-
est--the most likely to succeed, the healthiest--from the sopho-
more classes at an unnamed university.  Their careers and devel-
opment were followed for the next 35 years in a project called
The_Grant Study.  Vaillant studied closely 95 of the 268 origi-
nally chosen but used information on the entire population for
some of his findings.

   Pulling together the diverse thinking of these three men with
their three very different samples and blending in my own think-
ing and experience produces a hierarchy of growth shown below. 
The names for the various periods of the life cycle are taken
from Erikson (l950):

                          GENERATIVITY

                          CONSOLIDATION
                         career-personal

                            INTIMACY

                            IDENTITY

     Two features of this hierarchy make it similar to the
hierarchies of the developmental psychologists: (l) a person must
finish the work of one period before entering another (or be
prepared to deal with issues later in life in a more strenuous
way); and (2) the stages always occur in the same order.  The age
at which each of these stages begins is far from fixed.  All
three writers own that individuals vary greatly in their growth
patterns.  I have used Erikson's ages.

     The period of growth focussed on identity usually ends at
around 20.  It is concerned with pinning down to the person's
satisfaction his or her distinct and individual being, unique-
ness, and role.  Decisions made at this period of growth remain
with a person through most of his or her life, barring some
jarring experiences which force reappraisal.

     The period of intimacy, lasting roughly from 20 to 25, deals
with the establishment of bonds with other people--learning how
to love, at least at the lowest level.  Mating and the establish-
ment of long-term friends occur during this period, and again
decisions made here remain in effect through most of an indivi-
dual's life.

     Consolidation, the longest period, lasting from 25 to 40, is
the time for establishing one's niche in life, amassing one's
fortune, "becoming one's own man"--to use Levinson's description
(he and Vaillant dealt only with men).  This fifteen-or-so year
period is devoted to carrying out the promises one made to
oneself during the identity and intimacy periods.  Here one
establishes one's roots, one's family, one's career and builds
solid foundations for later life.

     The period of generativity begins at 40 with what Vaillant,
drawing on Jung (1981), describes as a second adolescence. 
Levinson refers to the period from about 40 to 45 as the mid-life
transition.  At this point, the human being becomes aware that
death is reality, still far enough away to be perceived as a
distant object but close enough to be in plain view.  During this
transition, a person looks seriously at decisions made during
earlier periods and may change some of them.  If the work normal-
ly finished during earlier periods has been postponed, it now
comes to the fore with a vengeance, no longer content to bide its
time.  A person comes to see his or her identity, intimacy, and
consolidation decisions in a new light, from a new perspective,
and realizes that this is, perhaps, the last chance to revise
them.

     The transition to the generativity stage is often painful
and confusing.  Marriages end and careers change frequently
during this period.  But for the person who weathers the transi-
tion successfully, the expanded insights available at the end of
the period are well worth the cost.  In phrases reminiscent of
humanist psychologists describing the arrival at high levels of
growth, Levinson says that men who succeed in passing through the
transition

     . . . have started a middle adulthood that will have its own
     special satisfactions and fulfillments.  For these men,
     middle adulthood is often the fullest and most creative
     season in the life cycle.  They are less tyrannized by the
     ambitions, passions, and illusions of youth.  They can be
     more deeply attached to others and yet more separate, more
     centered in the self.  For them, the season passes in its
     best and most satisfying rhythm.  (p. 62) (italics mine)

Gould's description of the same step is similar:

     By about 50 we complete the work of dismantling the last
     false assumption, "There is no evil or death in the world. 
     The sinister has been destroyed."  This is helped along
     because events are forcing us to accept that there never
     will be any magical powers with which we can bend the world
     to our will.  With that, we make the final passage from "I
     am theirs" to "I own myself."  With that momentous aware-
     ness, we are finally able to step out of the familiar world
     of struggle for status into a yet- to-be-developed frame of
     reference.  For the next few months or years, we're in a fog
     of awe.  Nothing is the same any more.  We are nowhere
     despite our being surrounded by the familiar.  If we will
     allow it room, our new perception will force us to transcend
     the pettiness inspired by our former feelings of possessive-
     ness and battles over control and competition--though the
     change is not completed easily.  It does not happen immedi-
     ately.  But the life of inner-directedness finally prevails.
     (p. 3l0)

   The period of generativity is characterized by two complement-
ary components: a sense of inward turning, self-reliance, and
completion, on the one hand; and a new ability to love others--to
want them to be--on the other.  These components are, I believe,
different aspects of the same turn of the human soul.  One is the
other seen from a different vantage point.

     There is a spiritual quality, a sense of rebirth, that
accompanies successful passage through the mid-life transition. 
Larry LeShan speaks of the mid-life turning away from "the many"-
-the realm of competition, assertiveness, making one's way--
toward "the One"--the realm of harmony and a sense of the whole-
ness or coalescence or kinship of all the pieces of life, includ-
ing the self.  He notes Jung's statement that he had never seen a
patient over 35 whose problem was not a religious one and his
observation that a second adolescence occurs somewhere between 35
and 50.  Those who go through this adolescence are the fortunate
ones.  It is through this period of growth that we gain vision,
create meaning:

     Without vision, without meaning, our lives decay, and we
     feel the possibility of ego and bodily disintegration and
     discoherence.  The large things--laughter, love, religious
     awe, beauty--can only be understood by accepting this part
     of our being. (l974, pp. l29-l3l)

     Failure to pass through the transition to generativity
leads, according to Erikson, to stagnation.  The failure seems to
result from an overload of unfinished business left over from
earlier periods--identity problems, an inability to love, an
inability to love oneself, perhaps.  The results are sad. 
Vaillant (pp. 228-229) describes the sense of confusion that
besets men who fail to make the change.  They continue to act as
aggressive self-starters, even though they have already estab-
lished their niches.  Often they become the conservers of the
establishment, unable to unleash their own creativity.  Some are
destroyed by the conflict.  "For most such men, however,"
Vaillant notes, "midlife stagnation did not lead to death, but
only to a sense of muted dissatisfaction"  (p. 229).

     Gould's description is more biting:

     . . . there are also mean and crotchety old folks.  They've
     not made contact with their inner core, and they cling to
     the childhood consciousness view that power and status are
     an index of human worth.  As reversals occur to such people
     with increasing frequency as they age, the perceive them-
     selves as losing the battle of life.  They begin to attack
     life itself as meaningless as they slide downhill.  Their
     envies and jealousies become larger, like warts on the nose,
     as their humanity shrinks.  (p. 318)


     LeShan notes Jung's compassion for those who have not made
the spiritual adjustment to the second half of their lives.  He
speaks of his own work:

            From my own experience as a psychologist in a hospi-
     tal with a very large percentage of dying patients, I can
     bear this [sense of compassion] out.  Those who had made the
     change could use me as a friend or as a liaison person with
     the rest of the hospital staff, but they did not need me as
     a psychotherapist.  They faced their deaths with strength
     and confidence.  Those who had not made the change were
     quite different.  They were full of fears and regrets.  One
     such patient told her physician, "You don't understand,
     Doctor.  I am not crying because I am going to die.  I am
     crying because I have never lived."  (l974, p. l29)


Copyright Tom Glenn, 1983