Life begins at 40: the biological and cultural roots of the midlife crisis | 91TV
Transcript
- Mark Jackson: Thank you, John, for those very kind words. It's an absolute pleasure to be
- here tonight. It's an honour to be speaking at the Royal Society. So thank you very much
- for inviting me. I have to say that I had not expected so many people to be here,
- so thank you very much for coming as well. We know, particularly at the Royal Society, that in
- terms of knowledge production we always stand on the shoulders of giants. There are always people
- who have gone before us, but there are people who walk beside us on whom we depend as well.
- Before I start, I want to thank three institutions. The first is the Wellcome
- Trust. The Wellcome Trust has funded a large proportion of my research and my research career
- from the very early stages, converting from a doctor into an early career researcher throughout
- various larger program grants, strategic awards and more recently the trust has supported the
- creation of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. In many ways,
- for me this was the fulfilment of a dream, although at times the responsibilities and demands
- seem more like a nightmare. It's a fantastic opportunity and I'm deeply grateful for the Trust,
- for the funding and it's nice that Simon Chaplin is here as well, so thank you for coming.
- I'm also deeply fortunate that I have worked at the University of Exeter for over 20 years. We
- know from the tagline that Exeter is probably the best university in the world, and for me it has
- been fantastic. A place to grow as an academic, a place to develop, to try out new ideas. The
- senior management at the university, Steve Smith, the vice chancellor, Janice Kay, the provost,
- Nick Talbot before he left, and now Neil Gow, that senior group leading the university have been
- fantastic. They have supported and encouraged me and been prepared to take a risk or two to support
- one or two of my more grandiose ideas. I also want to thank Andrew Thorpe, who's the dean of
- the College of Humanities who's been fantastic scholar and friend for many, many years.
- The final institution that I want to thank is the institution that is my family. I didn't
- get where I am today without my wife, Siobhan, wonderfully loyal, faithful,
- tolerant of my own crises throughout our marriage ,our three children Kiera, Regan and Connell,
- the best children. These together are the why and the how, of my life. So thank you.
- It may seem strange to be standing in the Royal Society giving a lecture about a subject like the
- midlife crisis. This is an institution renowned for its world-leading scientific research. I hope
- that what I have to say will do justice to the three figures after whom this lecture is named,
- John Wilkins, of course, a natural philosopher of polymath, one of the founders of the Society. John
- Desmond Bernal, an Irish scientist renowned for his work in x-ray crystallography in
- molecular biology, but also a very committed and prolific historian of science interested
- in the relationship between science and society. Peter Medawar, really most famous for his work
- on immunological tolerance, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1960. What is less well known
- about Medawar's work. He was also interested in ageing. Ageing as an unsolved biological problem,
- as he put it in his inaugural lecture in 1951, and one of the terms that Medawar used
- to describe the ageing process was senescence, and that concept of senescence had been popularised
- by an American psychologist, Granville Stanley Hall, in the early 20th century,
- and it came to be one of the key ways in which midlife and middle age was defined.
- During the early 20th century, middle age came to represent the period between adolescence and
- senescence, and that's why many people refer to it as middlescence, middle age as middlescence.
- So although it's a strange subject to be talking about at the Royal Society,
- I hope that it will do justice to these three figures hereafter whom the lecture is named.
- Let me take you back and some of you will remember this. Let me take you back to the late 1970s to
- an iconic sitcom, television series on BBC, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, starring Leonard
- Rossiter, and the television series was based on a novel by the English comic writer David Nobbs.
- Reggie Perrin Reginald Iolanthe Perrin RIP, was 46 years old, married to his wife Elizabeth,
- living in a neo-Georgian house in the Surrey suburbs. They had two children, both grown-up,
- leaving their parents living in a house that was perhaps not quite, no longer a home, Reggie
- commuted every weekday up to Waterloo Station, walked across the bridge, went to work at Sunshine
- Desserts as a middle manager, as a bureaucrat, and at the start of the novel, Reggie is depressed.
- He's disillusioned and distressed, disaffected, disillusioned with his life, disillusioned with
- his wife, disillusioned with his work, and he begins to behave rather randomly.
- He starts sending off aggressive memos to his colleagues. He tries to have an affair
- with his secretary. He begins to get more irascible and one day, while his wife is out,
- he decides that he's going to collect all his childhood mementos, the memories of his youth,
- and burn them as if he's trying to eradicate his past, eradicate his identity. Reggie decides that
- he can no longer live like this. He decides there's only two ways he can either disappear
- in some way or he can kill himself. So he drives a van down to a Dorset beach, takes off his clothes,
- leaves them on the beach and walks out into the sea naked. He doesn't drown himself. He
- walks back up, puts another set of clothes on so that he leaves his old clothes on the beach
- so people think that he's drowned himself, puts on a new set of clothes, puts on a wig and takes
- on a new identity and he becomes eventually Martin Wellborn. Now, I don't want to tell you for those
- of you, some of you will remember the television series. The book is fantastic in many, many ways.
- It takes place only over a week or two. I don't want to give away the ending. What I want to say
- is that what Reggie Perrin was suffering from ,at the age of 40 something was what we would now call
- and was indeed called then a mid-life crisis. A man, usually a man, not exclusively,
- but in this period largely understood to be a male problem, a man between the age of about 35 and 45.
- In that deadline decade, realising that his life was going nowhere. Disaffected and disillusioned,
- would go off the rails. The mid-life crisis. Now the term had been first introduced about a
- decade earlier by a Canadian social scientist and psychoanalyst, Elliott Jaques. Jaques had come
- over from Toronto in the Second World War, had stayed. He was one of the founding members of the
- Tavistock Institute for Human Relations. He was a social scientist but also a psychoanalyst. He'd
- been analysed himself by Melanie Klein and had a practice as a psychoanalyst, and what he described
- was pretty much what Reggie Perrin experienced and his point in Death in the Midlife Crisis,
- a short article published in 1965. He pointed out that 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. So the picture that Jaques created was of this this man usually at
- the peak of a binomial curve of life, and when you get to that peak, all you can see is the
- downward curve to death. That's the moment when anxiety, a depressive crisis was triggered.
- He then went on to explain what happened to middle-aged men or what kind of behaviour
- they began to exhibit, and what he said was that in order to cover up this crisis,
- they developed a set of manic behaviours to try and convince themselves that they
- were still young. So the compulsive attempt to remain young. The hypochondriacal concern over
- health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency,
- the hollowness, lack of genuine enjoyment of life. These, he said, are familiar patterns and
- they are all attempts at a race against time. So the midlife man, the man in the deadline decade,
- sees death accelerating towards him, and he tries to deny that or cover it up by
- claiming or pretending that he's younger than he is, leading to these kinds of behaviours.
- At the time, both in the '60s and when Reggie Perrin was having his crisis in the '70s, there
- were two principal explanations for the midlife crisis. The first was psychological, the kind of
- analysis, an explanation that Elliott Jaques put forward and that is that the midlife crisis was an
- identity crisis, a crisis, a depressive identity crisis very similar to the adolescent crisis,
- the adolescent crisis he thought was a schizoid crisis, the midlife crisis, a depressive crisis.
- Elliott Jaques was not the only person or certainly not the first person to think about
- the stages, the critical phases of life in this way. Carl Jung in the 1930s had written about his
- own crisis at the age of 37, and particularly Erik Erikson, an American developmental psychologist,
- had talked about life, particularly in terms of the ages or the stages of life. He described life
- in terms of eight stages, each of which had its own particular conflict. The stage that correlated
- with the period that Jaques was talking about, he thought was focussed on a conflict between
- creativity on the one hand and stagnation on the other, and it was that that created the crisis.
- So there were others as well, thinking largely from a psychoanalytical point of view about how
- we understood middle age and midlife. One of the important points to make about this kind of
- approach to middle age and midlife was that it was not just theoretical, this wasn't just a theory
- of how we developed. It was also incorporated into practice, and psychoanalytical models of
- ageing became absolutely key to the work of marriage guidance counsellors. For example,
- working for the National Marriage Guidance Council or couples therapists working at the
- Tavistock Clinic, for example. Most of that was built on an understanding of individual
- development across the life course, through the stages, through middle age and through the
- various crisis points that they could produce. So the first explanation for Reggie Perrin's
- crisis is that he was suffering from some identity crisis around the age of 40, 45.
- There were another set of explanations, and these were biological. The first biological explanation
- really revolved around some of the work that Peter Medawar was interested in, old age, natural death
- and the unsolved problem of biology. He was interested particularly in the evolutionary and
- biological dimensions of ageing. In that sense, the downward curve of life was not necessarily
- only an awareness of approaching death. It was something else. It was an awareness that as we
- get older, we get greyer or balder or we develop middle-aged spread or our muscle mass declines,
- our vigour, our vitality deteriorates. It was that sense of deteriorating vigour that fuelled the
- crisis in some kind of way. Now it's not unrelated to the fear of death that Jaques described,
- but very much linked to that declining biological vitality that people wanted.
- There was, of course, another way, and there has been another way in which midlife crises have been
- linked to biology, and that is particularly in women in relation to reproductive life. Here the
- argument was, and most of the literature certainly in this period was on men, but there was some
- literature on women. In these cases women were understood to go through a crisis at, through,
- during, after menopause, as their reproductive functions supposedly disappeared or in some
- ways through the emptiness process. So a woman's midlife crisis was tied very, very clearly to her
- reproductive capacity. The term biological clock, or the clock is ticking, in fact,
- was used by an American journalist, Richard Cohen, in 1978. The notion that in women, their
- transitions and their crises might be governed by their biology or reduced to their biology was very
- commonplace. It perhaps won't surprise you to know that some men blamed their own midlife crises on
- the menopause, their wife's menopause as well. So let me go back to Reginald Perrin and reflect
- for a moment. Reggie Perrin in the late '70s, having a crisis, trying to change his
- life in key ways, recognising that he perhaps hadn't achieved what he wanted and that he was
- disaffected and disillusioned. We can see that, Perrin, we could explain that in terms of his own
- psychological angst. He's got to a stage, an age in his life where everything looks as if
- it's going downhill and only death awaits. We can also get a sense from his book that physically,
- he's declining physically, he no longer feels himself to be the man that he was. So we could
- see it very much as an individual story of a man with psychological and biological problems.
- What I want to suggest for the rest of the talk is that this is not the only way in which we
- can understand the midlife crisis. In fact, I want to zoom out to take it away from the
- individual and think about the social and cultural conditions that made the midlife crisis possible,
- not only as a concept in the '60s, '70s and '80s, but also as a set of experience. What happened to
- enable the midlife crisis to emerge? Not in an individual case, but much more widely in
- terms of the social, economic and the cultural conditions. I want to do that in two ways.
- In the first instance, I want to think about the standardised life course that emerged in
- the middle decades of the 20th century that created particular stresses on people at
- middle age. Secondly, I want to reflect on the meaning and the history of the phrase,
- life begins at 40 and at the end I want to argue that it's those two components that played a key
- role in the emergence of the midlife crisis not just Reggie Perrin's, but ours as well.
- So let me start reflecting for a moment on the standardised life course. There's no doubt,
- of course, that our life cycles, individually and collectively are governed by our biology. Bernice
- Neugarten was a very prominent psychologist in America who wrote extensively on middle age
- and midlife and the transitions between various life stages. She pointed out, of course, that the
- timetable, the milestones of life were not merely biological, they were also socially prescribed.
- So there was a socially prescribed timetable, she said, for the ordering of major life events a time
- in the lifespan when men and women are expected to marry, a time to raise children, a time to retire.
- So the rhythm of our life, the stages of our life, the ages of our life, the transitions of our life
- were socially prescribed, not just biological. Of course, if they're socially prescribed,
- it means that they can change, our understandings and experience can change our expectations,
- can change our expectations of the life course. The life course, the life cycle did change
- dramatically across the early decades of the 20th century. By the 1950s and 1960s,
- couples were living longer. If you were born at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century
- in this country, we might expect to live until we were 40, 50, 60. By the 1950s, '40s, '50s,
- we might expect to live until we're into our 70s or perhaps 80s. So life expectancy had increased,
- giving us that longer life cycle and in principle also a longer period of adulthood or middle age.
- At the same time we were marrying earlier, in 1911, only about 24 per cent of women
- were married by the age of 24. By the early '50s, that had risen to 52 per cent. In fact,
- if you look at some of the surveys of men and women's attitudes about marriage during
- this period, most women would say that the ideal age to marry is between 20 and 24. Men ideal age
- slightly later, but not that much different. At the same time, during the early decades of
- the 20th century, it became more commonplace to have fewer children and to cluster them together
- earlier in the marriage. So let's say a couple were married at the age of 20 or 21, by 24 or 25,
- they would have had their two or three children and they would be then bringing up those children,
- the children would leave home. So there was a much longer period of life after the
- childbearing period. In a sense in this period still, that was more important for women who
- tended to be in the workplace less by and large, and looking after the children more. Men's rhythm,
- the rhythm of men's life was slightly different, dictated not so much by the rhythms of the family,
- but by the rhythms of occupational patterns. By the 1950s and '60s, men tended to work for
- a fixed number of years, often in the same job until retirement, so you can see the male life
- course in some ways also socially prescribed from the moment of starting work to the moment
- of retirement set by the government, by the state, or by private industries.
- One of the consequences of this, this teasing out of the life course. The clustering of major life
- events in very similar ways across populations meant that people began to experience much more
- clearly defined stages and transitions in the life course. So you could begin to identify
- a period of middle age between 30 and 50, 40 and 60, and we could begin to identify those
- critical stages of transition between those life phases. Now the point I want to make from this
- is that there are a number of consequences that emerged from this modern, standardised,
- homogenised life course and they link directly to the emergence of the midlife crisis.
- The first impact was the growth of age anxiety or age consciousness. If there were standard life
- courses, standard milestones against which we could measure ourselves. We became much
- more conscious or anxious about whether we were succeeding or failing against those milestones.
- So a much greater sense of where we should be at certain points in our life. Of course, that
- expectation that we would leave home, get married, have children, get a job, retire. Our expectations
- were raised, but at the same time, if we didn't match up to those expectations, if we didn't
- meet those milestones, follow that timetable, we could be dissatisfied with our achievements.
- This led, the notion, the phrase keeping up with the Joneses started in a comic strip in
- America in about 1913, but it became in those early decades of the 20th century
- through the '30s and '40s a key way of us measuring ourselves against others, a driver
- in some ways of envy and jealousy, a driver of emulation, a driver to increase our consumption
- to keep up with the Joneses. The Joneses we were much more aware of our place in the
- world and particularly where we were failing. While we were becoming more aware, we were also
- becoming subject in this period to very different stresses. This is the generation in the '50s and
- '60s, '70s Reggie Perrin's generation that could perhaps describe themselves as the first sandwich
- generation. If we think about the patterns of marriage and child rearing and ageing,
- if you imagine that we have that couple ideally marrying at 20, have their children by 25,
- by the time they're 40, 45, Reggie Perrin's age, their children will be going through the troubled
- years of adolescence. Their parents would be ageing through retirement, needing more care. You
- find in this period, the middle-aged between the age of 30 and 50, 40 and 60, becoming sandwiched
- between the troubles of their adolescent children and the troubles of their parents. So you hit the
- midlife crisis exactly when your children are going through an adolescent crisis.
- Middle age was also challenged for many people by financial pressures at this time, and again, this
- was a feature of the changing life cycle. In 1891, we could expect to inherit at the age of about 37.
- Now I have to say that this is a middle-class Western story. This is not true of everybody.
- Although the longer history of the midlife crisis suggests that the crisis has been democratised in
- many ways. If you were lucky enough to inherit in the late 19th century, you could expect to inherit
- at the age of 37. By the 1940s you would expect to inherit not until you were 56. That meant that you
- inherited, it's always nice to get money, don't get me wrong. But if you inherited, you inherited
- after you'd had children, after those children had grown up and after they left home, at times when
- you might not need it as much as you had when you were middle-aged aged bringing up children,
- that created a set of financial pressures on couples trying to bring up children.
- The final point I want to make in terms of midlife pressures and it applies the empty nest is, as
- it was first introduced, the empty nest in about 1913. It was applied largely to women in a rather
- derogatory way that their only function in society was to have children, and once those children had
- left they were of no value. In some ways it describes a very key feature of the extended
- life course that by the 1950s, given the fact that women and men are marrying earlier, having their
- children earlier, a woman could live for a further 52 years after the birth of their last child and
- many years after menopause. One of the things that created in people's minds was the question is this
- all there is? Do I really want to live like this with this person for the next 40 or 50 years?
- A number of psychologists in this period pointed out that the extended life course, the continued
- pressures at middle age, through middle age, meant that many people, when they got to the age of 40,
- 45, began what Robert Lee and Marjorie Casebier referred to in The Spouse Gap. I don't know if you
- can see, Weathering the Marriage Crisis during Middlescence is the subtitle of the book. What
- they pointed out that the multiple stresses during middle age, that sense of recognising that you are
- not achieving what you should have according to the standardised timetable of the life course,
- meant that people began to reappraise their lives, to reckon the achievements against the goals,
- the satisfactions versus values, the kind of evaluation of his life that Reggie Perrin went
- through. They began to realise, of course, that they hadn't achieved that, they were disappointed,
- and as a result hit Crisis Point. Margaret Mead, I've quoted here as an
- anthropologist and a in a in a very interesting book, Male and Female published in 1949,
- pointed out that in a world in which people may reorient their whole lives at 40 or 50,
- that's a world in which marriage for life becomes much more difficult. Margaret Mead solution,
- and the solution of some science fiction writers was that we should introduce the possibility of
- multiple serial marriages. She suggested two, but many writers at the time suggested possibly three,
- one for youthful passion, one for parenthood, and one for companionship in later life that
- there were very different demands across that extended life course at different stages of
- your life. There was no reason why it shouldn't be the same person who fulfilled those sequentially,
- but there was no reason why it should, is what Margaret Mead was saying. Margaret Mead also
- appeared in a lot of BBC television programmes on marriage and divorce in this period.
- Now one of the consequences, one of the reasons why this was important socially and culturally was
- because people were concerned in this period about the levels of divorce and they linked marriage
- midlife crisis to a marriage crisis, claiming that partly it was the behaviour of middle aged men
- that was threatening marriages, leading to family breakdown, separation and divorce, and this was
- regarded as problematic for social stability in the post-war period. Before the Second World War,
- fewer than 7000 couples were divorced. There was a big boost after the Second World War
- during the late '40s to '50, linked largely to, well explained in terms of hasty marriages during
- the war, the difficulties that soldiers had readjusting to civilian life. The fact that
- during separation both husbands and wives, for example, had had affairs. Those challenges led to
- a high level of breakdown. After the Second World War, there was a little bit of a plateau and then
- a rise through the late '60s, '70s and '80s. Now, I don't want to say that the midlife crisis,
- the challenges that people faced in middle age were the only reasons for that. One of the reasons
- for the big rise after 1970 is a change in the divorce law. The Divorce Reform Act was introduced
- in 1969, removed the marital offence and replaced it with the notion of irretrievable breakdown,
- making it much easier for some people to get a divorce. Debates about the midlife
- crisis in this period and still, I think, link it very closely to concerns about the
- stability of marriage, which was regarded by many as essential for social stability.
- Let me pause for a moment then, and think again about Reggie. Yes, distraught. Yes,
- going through a period of psychological angst. Yes, fading biologically. Also in some ways a
- victim of very striking demographic changes across the 20th century. Of very different expectations,
- of the milestones of life, the expectations about when people would get married, have children,
- get a job, retire and so forth created a set of pressures on Reggie Perrin and his wife and his
- children that proved for him too much. In some ways, what I've sketched out is what
- Reggie Perrin was escaping from, the stick that pushed him to behave in these ways was the social
- pressures created by the extended standardised life course. What did he hope to achieve by it?
- If that was what he wanted to escape from, where was he expecting to go? What were the benefits of
- changing his life in this kind of way? I want to reflect on that, not just the push out of the mess
- that he felt he was in, but the pull towards a better life. I want to explore that just
- by thinking about the phrase life begins at 40 and where that came from, and how that played in
- to the expectations and the aspirations not just of Reggie Perrin, but also many of us as well.
- The phrase life begins at 40 was first used well, as far as we know in 1917 by Mrs Theodore Parsons.
- Matilda Parsons, who was the widow of an army officer but had already had her career as well,
- teaching particularly young women and girls, and young women, and older women how to keep
- fit. Scientific bodybuilding is what she referred to it as, and partly it was keeping physically fit
- in order to keep the mind fit. This phrase I love. She was interviewed in 1917 for the
- newspaper. It was four days after America entered the First World War, and in the interview she
- said and very similar set of ideas to what Elliott Jaques introduced much later in the '60s. It's a
- paradox of life, she said, that, 'We do not begin to live until we begin to die, death begins at 30,
- that is deterioration of the muscle cells set in, most old age is premature, and attention to
- diet and exercise would enable men and women to live a great deal longer than they do today. The
- best part of a woman's life begins at 40.' That was her phrase. Now there's a particular context
- to what Mrs. Parsons was saying. Again, this is part of the argument. Unless we understand
- the social and cultural context, we don't fully recognise the meaning of that kind of term.
- Theodore Parsons, Mrs Parsons directed her comments at what she referred to as the adipose
- woman of 40. She was addressing middle-aged women who she felt had let themselves go. The reason
- why this was important to Mrs Parsons was because of the war effort. Men were away fighting. Women
- were needed to bring up children to do the work to support the communities economically while their
- men were away. So it became crucial to her that women retain their fitness physically and mentally
- as they aged. That notion, it's really interesting that as the notion life begins at 40 became
- popular, the first part of that sentence, the best part of a woman's life begins at 40, got lost in
- some kind of translation. It became simply life begins at 40 and it was popularised in a whole
- variety of ways during the 1920s and 1930s. The most common way in or the most popular book
- was Walter Pitkin's book entitled Life Begins at 40. Pitkin was an American journalist working
- at Columbia University and had taken this notion that life begins at 40 to write a self-help book,
- and you can see from the cover of the book, 'Through this book's inspiring and helpful advice,
- thousands of men and women fearful of middle age have lost their anxieties and found new
- ways to make life richer, happier and more worth living.' This was the blurb on the book to try
- and sell it and the notion both Pitkin's book and that phrase life begins at 40 were used
- in other areas. Life Begins at 40 was a film in 1935 starring Will Rogers that was based on the
- book and there were some skits. There were some satires as well of this, great film in
- the late 1930s entitled Life Begins at 8:30. So the idea that life could begin rather than
- end at midlife, at middle age, became a key part of self-help literature and advice to middle-aged
- couples during the '30s, '40s and '50s. So what did Pitkin advise people in order to find these
- new ways of being happy? In fact, it was pretty bland and mundane. He pointed out that happiness
- comes most easily after 40, firstly by realising that a great many years lie between 40 and 70.
- Now that might seem fairly banal and I think it probably is, but it's a twisting on its head of
- the concerns of midlife, midlife Reggie Perrin is looking back and saying, I haven't achieved
- anything. I've got nothing left to look forward to. What Pitkin is saying is yes, you have. Even
- at the age of 40, you're going to have 20, 30, 40 years of your life still make the most of
- it. The way you made the most of it, according to Pitkin, was that you pursue self-fulfilment
- through material improvement, leisure and what he called the art of living, much less work,
- more leisure, more pleasure. This process of self-fulfilment would make those last 30 or 40
- years worthwhile no longer the downward curve, no longer the acceleration towards death, but in fact
- to fulfilling middle age and older age. This notion became widely adopted in two
- particular ways. One is that it was taken as a strategy for personal renewal. This is a way in
- which we could refresh and renew ourselves when we were getting jaded and faded in middle age,
- begin to realise that there were things to look forward to, that it was possible to reshape,
- to remould a life in more positive ways. The key part of this and again thinking about this in
- social and cultural historical terms, the key part of this is this story that Pitkin was telling was
- not just about individuals discovering themselves. It was also a lesson, a message for populations,
- certainly in America and Britain during a period of economic depression, during a period
- of recession, increasingly concerned about the spectre of a Second World War, during a period
- of doom and gloom that if we reinvigorated ourselves there was hope for optimism.
- Pitkin's argument was that if people as they got older, the middle-aged and the elderly work less
- and had more leisure. There would be more job opportunities for younger people which would
- boost the economy. Equally, if people in middle age and older age spent their money buying things,
- enjoying themselves, purchasing leisure for example, and pleasure, that would also boost
- the economy. So part of the appeal of Pitkin's work was that it struck a chord in individuals
- like Reggie Perrin, who was struggling with their own problems. It also meant something to a Western
- world struggling with the effects of economic recession because it promised a way out of them.
- In some ways Pitkin, writing in the '30s, the 1930s were a strangely paradoxical period. A
- period of morbid gloom in some kind of ways because of the recession and because of the
- fear of another global war. It was also a period of incredible optimism. It was the period when
- the American Dream was conceived, and the American Dream first appeared in the work of James Truslow
- Adams in 1931, the year before Pitkin published Life Begins at 40, and it's in the epilogue to
- this fantastic overview, The Epic of America. In that epilogue, he tries to sketch out the future
- to move away from some of the doom and gloom of the interwar period. To say life globally as well
- as individually doesn't have to go down towards death and destruction. It can go the other way.
- For Adams, the American Dream was not a dream simply of motorcars and high wages. So it's not
- just a material dream, but, 'A dream of a social order in which each man and woman shall be able
- to attain to the fullest statue of which they are innately capable and be recognised by others for
- what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.' So this
- was Adam's dream, and it was a dream in a sense that resonated very clearly with what Pitkin was
- saying. We didn't have to be depressed at midlife at the middle of the 20th century either. We could
- look forward with some hope. For this to happen Adams argued we needed to develop a new scale and
- basis for values. For Adams, looking forward to the to achieving the American Dream. That meant
- collectivity, trust, love. Working together to make a better world. So here was this period of
- economic recession. Pitkin saying yes, life can begin at 40. Adams saying, in fact, there is an
- American Dream that we should work towards. In some ways, of course, what happened was the
- opposite. Those hopes and those dreams were dashed. They were dashed by the Second World
- War. They were dashed by the catastrophe of global conflict. They were dashed in
- many ways by what happened afterwards in terms of the Cold War. That sense of optimism that
- could create security or the sense of security that could create optimism. They were dashed
- during the Second World War and afterwards. What was left of Pitkin's mantra and Adams'
- dream was simply a dream of material plenty, the values, the scale, the basis of values,
- that dream of social order that was democratic and egalitarian, equal opportunities occupationally
- and educationally that was shattered by experiences in the Second World War.
- What was left was the dream of motor cars and high wages. People were left feeling
- that they could not achieve those other grandiose aspirations that Pitkin and
- Adams had set out. Instead, what they tended to do was search for happiness in a hurry.
- This is a wonderful book by Edmund Bergler The Revolt of the Middle Aged Man. Published
- in in 1958 that Edmund Bergler was an American psychoanalyst who had a very extensive clinic,
- and he drew on his clinical experience to write about a whole variety of challenges relating to
- marriage, middle age and midlife, in particular in relation to men. He has a lovely book published in
- 1948 saying Divorce Won't Help. If anybody is interested. His argument in fact, in that book
- and in this book is that before a couple run to the divorce lawyer, they should go and see
- a psychiatrist, that this is about the challenges within themselves and their relationships. So what
- he says is that is that during the '40s and '50s, the collapse of the American Dream in many ways,
- and you can trace this through American post-war literature as well in particular. The collapse
- of the dream left people struggling, and they translated those struggles or those
- aspirations into a dream of material plenty into consumption, seduced by the pleasure of
- consuming material goods but also the pleasure, the anticipation of consuming other people.
- This was the emergence, if you like, of a form of narcissistic self-fulfilment that drove some
- of the behaviour that you see in Reggie Perrin. So for Bergler, people were looking for happiness
- in a hurry and he has this beautiful passage which describes very, very clearly the thought processes
- that he attributes to people like Reggie Perrin in this mindset stressed by life circumstances,
- feeling that they had failed, feeling that although they were looking down to death,
- everybody was telling them that life begins at 40 and things should be getting better. At
- that moment they were anxious and perhaps more depressed than they would have been
- otherwise. This is the mindset, if you like, of a Reggie Perrin. I want happiness, love,
- approval, admiration, sex, youth. All this is denied me in this stale marriage to an elderly,
- sickly, complaining, nagging wife. Let's get rid of her. Start life all over again with
- another woman. Sure. I'll provide for my first wife and children. Sure, I'm sorry the first
- marriage didn't work out, but self-defence comes first. I just have to save myself.
- So what is left of those aspirations in the midst of midlife middle-aged stress? The argument that
- life should be getting better, not worse. That optimism that we could achieve the American
- Dream as that was dashed. What was left was a sense of selfish, narcissistic belief that we
- were due something, some happiness ourselves. This Bergler suggested was why people like
- Reggie Perrin had crises pushed from their marriages, pushed from their relationships,
- disappointed in their lives, but seduced by a dream that was no longer achievable except
- through the selfish pursuit of pleasure. Let me reflect then. To finish on where we've
- been. Reggie Perrin in some ways spoke for a generation. He was an everyman if you like,
- and his wife and children every day victims of the kinds of pressures that people and families
- were under in the '50s, '60s and '70s. We can certainly understand his behaviour that random,
- impulsive, destructive behaviour as the product of psychological despair. I've hit my peak,
- I've reached my prime. It no longer means anything because all I look forward to is
- the downward curve of life and death. There's that sense of an identity crisis that is captured very,
- very neatly by David Nobbs. Also, you can see it in other literary and cinematic forms as well in
- the '50s, '60s and '70s. Or we can read it in biological terms. We can say that Perrin is
- ageing. He's losing his virility, he's losing his hair, he's losing muscle mass and energy,
- and that leads him into a crisis of despair as well. Linked to death, but not entirely
- the same. We can see this in individual terms. This is a man behaving strangely.
- What I want to suggest, though, is that we cannot understand Reggie unless we cast our
- lens wider than that, unless we zoom out to see the social and the cultural conditions in which
- Reggie Perrin was living and in which we continue to live in some ways. So there are perhaps two
- conclusions that I want to make. The first is that we are aged, Reggie, us, we are aged not
- just by our minds and bodies, but we are also aged by history, by the cultural values, the attitudes,
- the beliefs, the norms, the practices that we have inherited from the past. In some ways,
- Reggie Perrin in the late '70s went off the rails because of what had happened in the
- 1950s and '60s, both in terms of the life course and in terms of the seduction of materialism.
- The second point is this that in that context, when we're saying that we're aged by history and
- culture, within that context, the midlife crisis is no longer the biological, the
- natural phenomenon, the inevitable phenomenon of ageing. It is immediately a social and a cultural
- phenomenon. The midlife crisis that Reggie suffered from, that we perhaps continue to suffer
- from, is a set of experiences that is generated by historical change, shaped by cultural contexts
- and socioeconomic conditions, and determined also by political contingencies. Thank you.
During the 20th century, the midlife crisis became a fashionable means of describing feelings of disillusionment with work, disenchantment with relationships, detachment from family responsibilities, and the growing fear of personal death that began to haunt those beyond the age of forty. Subscribe to our channel for exciting science videos and live events, many hosted by Brian Cox, our Professor for Public Engagement:
Coined in 1965, the term 'midlife crisis' is often used as satire in popular culture, with numerous examples of stereotypical depictions of rebellion and infidelity. It has been a popular focus of research seeking to explain why and how middle age presents particular social, physiological and emotional challenges.
In this lecture, Professor Mark Jackson, winner of the 2018 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal, explores a rich range of historical sources to argue that the midlife crisis emerged as a result of demographic changes, new biological accounts of ageing, and deepening anxieties about economic decline, political instability, rising level of divorce, and the impact of family breakdown on social cohesion.
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