Research Department
Chapter 11, The Power of Time, Birthdays
In childhood every birthday is a joyous occasion signifying the urgent wish to be older, more capable, more mature. Then as childhood passes into adolescence, certain birthdays become more significant, but still signify the attainment of privilege and status. Sixteen - "and never been kissed". Eighteen - "I made it. I can vote and go to war" and twenty-one - "No more fake ID's, I can drink legally."
As the twenties - "Twenty-five, my God, that's a quarter of a century!" - pass into the thirties - "Is it true you can't trust people over thirty?" - birthdays are accompanied by mild apprehension because they no longer signify growth and freedom. Instead they demarcate aging and the gradual loss of the endless summer of youth.
And then comes forty, crossing the Rubicon, the unequivocal indicator of middle age. "I never thought I'd be forty, but here I am!" Freud noted that we show an unmistakable tendency to put death to one side, to eliminate it from life. There is nothing instinctive in us, he said, which accepts the idea of death. In the timelessness of the unconscious we reign, immortal.
The first half of life is characterized by a tendency to ignore the inevitability of death. In childhood and adolescence the denial is bolstered by limited awareness and understanding of the concept of time and absorption in the progressive physical and psychological forces that characterize early development. There is little in the anabolic thrust of growth and maturation to indicate a personal end.
The first crack in the armor appears in late adolescence as the physical and emotional ties to parents and childhood are painfully severed. Past (childhood), present (young adulthood), and future (midlife) are sharply delineated. The painful notion that time is limited begins to creep into awareness but is warded off by exciting new beginnings in work and relationships and by the god-like ability to create new life - and thus new quantities of time.
Then as midlife approaches and grabs the normal adult by the throat, he or she comes face to face with mortality, indicated by the unmistakable signs of physical aging, the death of parents, the maturation of children toward physiological adulthood, and the jarring realization that not all of life's ambitions and goals will be realized. The race against time has truly begun.
The adult at midlife is at a critical juncture on the developmental path to maturity. As at all such junctures there is the potential for emotional growth or regression. Some degree of regression is a normal response to the stress of everyday living, regardless of age or developmental challenge. In midlife that may include excessive exercise or no exertion whatsoever; competitiveness and envy of adolescent and young-adult offspring; neglect of aging parents; or sexual adventurism with younger partners.
Pathological responses to the anticipation of death can take the form of suddenly fractured marriages and careers in a frenzied attempt to reverse the passage of time - the infamous midlife crisis. For example, Mr. D, a productive, athletic man of forty, developed acute anxiety when a recommendation was made for arthroscopic knee surgery because of an injury sustained while playing tennis. He came for an evaluation, stating that his youth was gone and his life over. Despite my best efforts, he refused to analyze his reaction and in a short period of time moved out of his home, began an affair with a much younger woman, lost interest in his bewildered children, and abandoned a highly successful career.
Death Awareness: The Quintessential Midlife Experience
Despite the obvious pain involved in confronting time limitation and one's own mortality, this developmental task can have far-reaching, growth-promoting consequences, producing the most profound awareness of what it means to be human.
In a series of fascinating books, the eminent psychiatrist Robert Lifton has described the impact of death awareness on the human psyche. (1-5) He describes a shift in perspective from Victorian preoccupations with sex and morality to a current-day preoccupation with absurd death and annihilation. Confronted with death and violence at every turn, on our street corners and television screens, we have lost the ability to recognize the psychological connection between the phenomenon of death and the flow of life.
Lifton contends:
The broken connection exists in the tissues of our mental life. It has to do with a very new historical - one could also say evolutionary - relationship to death. We are haunted by the image of exterminating ourselves as a species by means of our own technology". In addition man is unique because he knows he will die. This awareness is a major stimulus to the creation of culture, which is a reflection of the symbolizing imagination to explore the idea of death and relate it to the principle of life - continuity. That is the capacity for culture.(6)
The poet Wallace Stevens said it succinctly: "Death is the mother of beauty".
These ideas have particular relevance for development in midlife because of the beginning intrusion of thoughts about death into consciousness during the late thirties and forties, producing what Erikson called "an ego chill", a shutter attending the growing awareness of eventual nonexistence. According to researchers such as psychologist Daniel Levinson, psychiatrist Roger Gould, sociologist Bernice Neugarten, and Robert Nemiroff and me, the engagement of this developmental task is a ubiquitous experience in Western culture, sometimes occurring behind a wall of deceptive, external calm, at other times erupting with extreme intensity. Lifton suggested that the internal drama can take the form of low-key, self questioning, or be filled with pain and suffering. But he saved his most eloquent prose for the growth-promoting, sublimatory results of the successful, midlife engagement of this most unfathomable mystery of human existence:
There is a special quality of life-power available only to those seasoned by struggles of four or more decades. That seasoning includes extensive cultivation of images and forms having to do with love and caring, with experienced parenthood, with teaching and mentorship, with work combinations and professional creativity, with responses to intellectual and artistic images around one, and above all with humor and a sense of the absurd. The seasoned psychic forms are by no means devoid of death imagery. Rather they are characterized by ingenious combinations of death equivalents and immediate affirmations, or melancholic recognition of the fragmentation and threat surrounding all ultimate involvements, along with dogged insistence upon one's own connections beyond the self - one`s own relationship to collective modes of symbolic immortality. Like the despair, the life-power of this stage can be especially profound.(7)
Driven by death imagery and mature midlife power, the healthy adult personality reorganizes along positive lines. Increased acceptance of physical aging produces a redefinition of the body image, caring attention to the body and its health, and the development of new physical and nonphysical means of gratification appropriate to a realistic level of physical competence. The recognition of time limitation stimulates a redefinition of goals and channels energies and resources into obtainable objectives that enrich the levels of oneself and loved ones. The quest for gratification now, before times runs out, if moderated by mature reason, can breach outmoded superego barriers and stretch the ability to explore inner and outer worlds of love, play, and ambition which were formerly considered taboo.
And what of the narcissistic investment in the self, a self no longer seen as omnipotent and everlasting?. According to Erikson the midlife acceptance of the notion of personal death paves the way for a mystic union with the cosmos and wards off despair in old age.
It is a post-narcissistic love of the human ego - not of the self - as an experience which conveys some world order and spiritual sense... the acceptance of one's one and only life cycle as something that has to be... it is a comradeship with the ordering ways of distant times and different pursuits.(8)
Death and the Midlife Crisis
The title for this section is taken from an article by British psychiatrist Eliot Jacques, who was one of the first to describe the impact of the midlife preoccupation with time limitation and personal death on normal and pathological development in adulthood.(8) He proposed that death awareness could shatter existing psyche equilibrium and precipitate the now familiar midlife crisis or propel the individual to new heights of understanding and awareness of the human condition. What are the myths and realities surrounding the seemingly sudden, inexplicable behavior of those individuals who are unable to tolerate the stress of midlife development and in a furious frenzy destroy life structures and relationships that took many years to build?
The Gauguin Syndrome
In attempting to understand and describe this phenomenon, my colleague and coauthor Robert Nemiroff coined the term the Gauguin Syndrome (9). The popular myth swirling around the famous painter suggests that suddenly, at midlife, he abandoned his family and career and escaped to the tropics, there to bask in the sun free from responsibility, to sleep with exotic bare-breasted native women, and to thumb his nose at conventional, European society by memorializing it all on canvas.
Deeper investigation suggests a very different scenario, one of lengthy struggle with career ambitions and personal relationships. Gauguin had gradually become bored with the banking business and had slowly gravitated toward the art world, first as a patron of the early Impressionists and then as an amateur painter. Gauguin's marital problems did not occur suddenly either. He and his wife, Mette, had been marching to different drummers for years - he into the bohemian world of art, she into the straightlaced confines of middle class society. Before leaving for Tahiti he had spent years imploring her to accompany him, but she would have none of it. Gauguin's midlife metamorphosis becomes even more understandable when his family background and childhood are taken into account. His maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was a fiery revolutionary who regarded herself as a pariah and a missionary of social change. Gauguin seems to have identified with this aspect of his grandmother's character. Nor was his thirst for foreign soil inexplicable. His father died when the young Gauguin was en route with his family to Peru to join the household of the Peruvian viceroy, Gauguin's maternal uncle. Part of Gauguin's childhood was spent in the materially abundant, sparkling aristocratic environment in which his mother flourished. Apparently he was strongly influenced by her presence in that exotic setting because he later painted her many times as "Eve" in a tropical paradise. When the family was forced abruptly to return to France by political upheaval when Paul was seven, the boy's shimmering, golden world vanished, to be replaced by the gray and pallid environment of Orleans. As if to capture his early Peruvian experience, Gauguin went to sea during his adolescence. While he was away his mother died. The loss of both parents during childhood and the influence of extraordinary experiences within a powerful, iconoclastic family are the likely reasons that Gauguin went to Tahiti, there to attempt to relive and master his early adventures and traumas, while there was still time.
The Gauguin myth has compelling appeal for those individuals who are more oriented toward action than introspection, toward those who would rather change their environment than change themselves. In fact, suggests writer Nathan Mayer, there was nothing noble about Gauguin's life. He was actually a driven, self-destructive man whose flight into fantasy ended in despair. Instead of being reborn in his tropical paradise, he actually spent his last years as an embittered exile who never abandoned his desperate desire to be acclaimed by the society he supposedly despised.
A comparison of the myth and reality of Gauguin's life exposes the tendency to romanticize and oversimplify midlife crisis and transition in an attempt to avoid the painful confrontations with past and present which are the critical test of midlife stability and integrity.
Crisis, Transition, and Change
The term midlife crisis has become a cliché, the subject of movies, Oprah and Geraldo television shows, backyard gossip, and dinner-table conversation. But it is also a term used by serious professionals to describe a dramatic, relatively uncommon form of midlife psychopathology probably experienced by less than 10 percent of the population. A true midlife crisis is a revolutionary event which, like a Class V hurricane, utterly destroys everything in its path, leaving behind a trail of broken marriages, shattered careers, distraught children, and bewildered friends.
A person in the midst of a true crisis acts suddenly and impulsively, throwing away relationships and careers which often took many years to build in a frantic attempt to escape what has become unbearable. Reason is abandoned and advice from spouses, relatives, friends, and therapists to stop and think before making major decisions and burning bridges falls on deaf ears - so intense is the urge to escape from the intolerable present.
In the late 1970s, researcher Daniel Levinson and his leagues describes the midlife transition - a profound, sometimes agonizing, reappraisal of al aspects of life which affects everyone who approaches and traverses the early forties (10). For a few the searing examination of success, disappointments and failures is not particularly painful, but for many the questioning of assumptions, illusions, and vested interests is difficult in the extreme.
The basic developmental conflict underlying both the midlife transition and crisis is the same - the dawning realization that time is running out and major changes, if they are ever to occur, must be made now! Those in the midst of transition conduct their agonizing reappraisal at the level of thought. If they do decide to abandon a marriage or a career they do so carefully, after considerable assessment of the consequences. Those in the midst of a true midlife crisis act - abruptly and precipitously - so as not to think about their past choices, present responsibilities, and narrowing future opportunities. The grim reaper can be cheated, a lost youth recaptured, the brass ring snatched the second time around in a different city with a younger partner and a new career.
"Is That All There Is?"
"Is that all there is?" asked pop vocalist Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?! Have I squeezed every ounce of pleasure out of life? Seen all there is to see? Had it all? For each of us the answer is the same, a resounding no! But the disappointing realization is tempered by pleasant memories and a valued present. I haven't had it all but I've had my share and there's more to come. I think I'll just keep on dancing. These are not only the thoughts of the sick or selfish, they emanate from responsible, caring people as well, generated by a confluence of universal midlife concerns which fuel the midlife transition. For example:
Bodily changes such as wrinkles, gray hair, cellulite, near-sightedness, and occasional impotence generate anxiety because they symbolize the rush of sand in the hour glass, an increased awareness that time is running out.
This change in time perception is experienced as the remaining hours of life being rapidly used up. "Total time left" is another preoccupation, suggests Bernice Neugarten, as thinking shifts from time lived to time left to live.(11) Those in transition react to this awareness with dignified pain, those in crisis with frenzied panic.
The distance between career aspirations and achievement is another indicator that time is running out. As they feel the heat from hungry younger rivals eager to replace them, middle-aged workers double their efforts to cover their backsides. This is particularly true, says psychologist Judith Bardwick, for those with limited educations or redundant jobs who have plateaued and been shunted aside or pushed out the door into the sometimes desperate world of middle-aged unemployment.(12) Particularly in poor economic times job insecurity may puncture the complacent illusion that life will remain the same forever and force a serious questioning of all aspects of relationships, values, and goals.
As children leave home and expose marital relationships to an intense dose of sometimes unwanted togetherness, commitment to marriage and family are put to the test. Each partner must assess his or her relationship to determine whether it has the necessary ingredients to justify continuing. Have the partners developed similarly? Do they have enough in common? If estranged, can they reestablish their relationship?
The churning concern that time is running out may reignite the youthful quest for the ideal love. The yearning for the thrilling satiation of adolescent infatuation drives many into preoccupation with first loves and others into extramarital affairs or divorce. The realization that one cannot go back in time, cannot magically restore youth or reexperience perfection, drives many to distraction. A fifty-nine-year-old, recently divorced man became incensed when I questioned whether he could, at his age, reexperience "you know that total feeling of love, when you walk around in a daze all day long and nothing else matters but your lover."
When children break through the biological barriers of latency and undergo the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde metamorphosis from infantile innocence to raucous physical maturity, they shatter the parents'sense of calm and continuity and become the harbingers of uncontrollable change and uncertainty. In her novel The War Between the Tates, Allison Lurie captured the parental predicament perfectly.
They were a happy family once, she thinks, Jeffrey and Matilda were beautiful, healthy babies; charming toddlers; intelligent, lively, affectionate children... Then, last year, when Jeffrey turned fourteen and Matilda twelve, they had begun to change; to grow rude, coarse, selfish, insolent, nasty, brutish, and tall. It was as if she were keeping a boarding house in a bad dream and the children she had loved were turning into awful lodgers - lodgers who paid no rent, whose leases could not be terminated. They were awful at home and abroad; in company and alone, in the morning, the afternoon and the evening.(13)
Middle age, in the middle, between two generations, often responsible for both - both serve as constant reminders of the passage of time, one by maturing, the other by aging and dying. Mother and Father Time, those guarantors of an endless future, of immortality, themselves wither and die, exposing their children to a similar fate as they become the oldest generation, the first in line, closest to the grave. Freud described the death of his father as a profound experience which stimulated a profound internal reorganization. The same is true for all of us as parental death forces us to shed some of the last illusions of immortality and accept a limited life span and a lesser position in the cosmos.
A True Midlife Crisis
The same experiences which bring on the midlife transition also precipitate midlife crisis in susceptible individuals. The following description of an actual midlife crisis is presented to give the large majority of adults, who (fortunately) will never have such an experience, a standard against which to compare their own situations.
Dr. R came to therapy "to pick up the pieces of my life and start over". Aged forty-four, he had recently come to San Diego from an East Coast city "to get away from everything and everybody who ever meant anything to me".
"I just got up one morning and said this is it. I took $100,000 out of my pension plan, drove to the airport and threw a dart at a map of the West Coast. It landed on San Diego, so I bought a ticket and here I am."
After a couple of weeks of walking on the beach, Dr. R called his frantic family and told them he wasn't coming back. He told his wife to forget about him and to keep everything. He refused to talk to his children but agreed to contact them later.
Dr. R went on to explain that although he couldn't put into words, his life had become unbearable. "You're going to laugh like everyone else," he said. "They thought I had it all. A nice wife, big home, three kids, and a great practice. I used to think so too, but it all began to smother me. I couldn't do what I wanted."
What he wanted only became clear to both of us as therapy progressed. Foremost was to actualize the search for his first love. After she rejected him he married his wife on the rebound. "My wife's a great lady," he said. "Don't get me wrong. It's not her. It's me. I want to feel that overwhelming rush in my crotch again. I want to really care. She'll never make me feel that way."
And he was sick of his patients. "They claw at me. They never got enough. There's always another me. I want time to myself. If I don't take it now, I'm going to wake up one day and discover I'm sixty-five and haven't done anything."
"My kids weren't any better. They kept needing more and more. I couldn't stand the thought of working for ten more years to put them through college. There's enough left in the pension plan to see them through. They'll be all right."
Although the underlying causes of his midlife crisis were clear to me- a paternal death at age five, a neurotically inhibited sexuality, and the death of his devoted mother on his forty-fifth birthday - Dr. R had little interest in exploring causes and refused to even consider returning home. What of his new life, which consisted of living alone in a rented apartment, daily surfing, and occasional ventures into bars. Despite my best efforts, Dr R left therapy after a year of stubbornly refusing to examine what had happened to him. "Thanks for your help," he said. "I feel a lot better." "I'm glad you do," I thought, as I pictured his wife and children and visualized his uncertain future.
And Then What?
This book has, hopefully, made the reader more aware of his or her mortality and its effect on development, but hasn't addressed the ultimate question- What happens after death?
At this point science and developmental theory exit and religion enters. Atheist or agnostic, monk or minister-all ponder the same question and arrive at different answers. The true believer who is at one with the notion of a higher being feels a special kind off fulfillment, enriched by an answer to the mystery of death. The non believer at midlife ponders the unponderable and accepts the realization that he or she will never know, but finds fulfillment by reveling in the beauty and wonders that life in the here and now has to offer.
CASE REPORT: Turning Forty in Analysis
In this abbreviated, amended chapter from The Race Against Time, physician and psychoanalyst John Hassler studies his patient's reaction to that watershed birthday, forty, and provides us with a rare, detailed insight into the power of time.(14)
Birthdays have a special meaning for everyone. For the American middle-class child, birthdays are occasions for expanding the sense of personal worth through peer acceptance and family love. Gifts, cakes, and other expressions of love are offered and received as proof of worth. For happy children, the present joys and affirmations matter more than reflections on past or future anticipations. However, for adults, birthdays are occasions for introspection. Beyond the celebration of worth, adults use them to review achievements and frustrations of the past and define hops for the future.
A fortieth birthday often has very special significance as one reviews what has happened in life and anticipates all that is to come. The halfway point- thirty-five, half he biblical threescore and ten - was viewed in the same way prior to the extension of longevity by good nutrition and medical care in the last few decades. The lifting of the denial of death is the central and crucial feature of the midlife phase. Both Arthur Schopenhauer and Albert Camus vividly described the awareness that struck them in their late thirties - that they had already lived half their lives and that death was inevitable.
Each of us faces this reality in our own way. Bach accepted his cantorship at Leipzig at thirty-eight and began to compose. Albert Schweitzer chose midlife as the time to retire form his career as a concert organist in Europe and become a physician in Africa. Major shifts in self-image, love relationships, and career directions frequently are provoked or facilitated by the lifting of the denial of aging and the realization that the halfway point of his life has been reached. Suddenly, it is clear that life is half over and that the "race against me" cannot be stopped.
In psychoanalysis, birthdays may be used to elaborate a variety of neurotic or development conflicts. Beyond the special meaning of specific time events, the passage of time itself is often a major implicit or explicit theme in therapy. Review of past development, the examination of present realities, and the preview of future hopes are a part of many individual sessions. It is as if there were a compression of time, a time warp, allowing the patient to look at his or her whole lifer course from one vantage point. This compression gradually brings adult aging realities into sharp focus.
Detailed clinical material from the psychoanalysis of Mr. B. highlights the importance of time and the conflicts of aging in midlife.
The Analysis of Mr. B.
Mr. B entered analysis when he was thirty-six and turned forty twelve months before termination. A review of this hours during the few weeks on either side of his fortieth birthday revealed how time and aging perceptions colored his thoughts and his use of his fortieth birthday to focus on and move beyond the problems confronting him in the analysis. Mr. B.'s adaptation to aging provides another example of an individual, this time at mid-life, who traveled a rocky road on the way to adult fulfillment.
Presenting Symptoms and Background
An intelligent, articulate architect, Mr. B. sought help after a year of depression, self-doubt, and intermittent resentment toward his adolescent daughter. The onset of his depression coincided with her pubescence.
The patient was the oldest of two children. A sister has been born when he was two years old. His mother was loving but hot tempered and would occasionally "knock heads together." His father a successful builder was caring and available in early childhood. At three, Mr. B. recalled, he happily helped his father build the house they lived in during his childhood. When he was ten his parents divorced. From that point onward, he viewed both mother and father as angry, aloof, and emotionally unavailable.
Mr. B. was a wanted child, the product of an uncomplicated pregnancy. He was breast-fed and within the norm of all early maturational and developmental guidelines. There were no childhood surgeries or major illnesses. He did not recall weaning or toilet-training experience, or later problems with eating or bowel and bladder control. "My mother ran the place... she insisted on dinner manners and clean rooms".
At five, while roughhousing with him in a treehouse, Mr. B.'s three-year-old sister fell and was nearly killed. This event shaped the family destiny ("my mother always said that that's why father left") and was so elaborated by the patient that he forever after felt like "a rotten kid... a potential killer." Soon after the accident; the father began working some distance from home. At six his mother also went off to work and during many evenings the patient was left in the care of baby-sitters "who would leave us in the attic to discipline us." Despite these problems, the boy "did OK until my parents divorced... I got real depressed... all my fiends still had fathers." He rarely saw his father after puberty.
The patient always did well in school, although from the second grade on he was in trouble for taunting teachers and provoking fights. After high school he joined the army. "I believed the ads about making a man out of you."
After the service Mr. B. returned home, entered college, married in his sophomore year, and was content for the next three years. "I made the dean's list and felt comfortable with my wife and her family." Marital discord began when a daughter was born and when undesirable job changes occurred. However, basic compatibility persisted until a year or two before the analysis - until his daughter reached puberty.
Mr. B.'s Fortieth Birthday
The following propositions are helpful in conceptualizing the clinical material about the birthday.
Turning forty prompted a significant, although partial and temporary, lifting of denials of the aging process.
After many analytic hours of introspection and psychological reflection, Mr. B. could look more easily at the adaptive choices of a forty-year-old and accept the considerable pleasures available to him at midlife.
Clinical Data
Three Weeks Prior to the Birthday. Twenty prior to his birthday, Mr. B. presented the following material, which was typical of the preceding few months. He came back from a vacation weekend and began to complain.
Mr. B.: I drove back in a hurry, I wanted to see my wife... but I was in a bad mood as soon as I got home... all we did was argue, she makes me so mad... over trivia.
Dr. H.: What feelings are beneath the anger? As you mentioned, you were angry over trivia.
Mr. B.: I just don't enjoy being with her... I don't know if she even has to say anything... it'd almost as if I am not supposed to be in love with anyone... I try and talk with my wife but get nowhere, constant arguing... I don't seem to be able to change... I wonder if I give my daughter enough.
In the second session of this week, Mr. B. started by looking further at this tendency to withdraw and withhold. He had been guiltily involved in an extramarital affair for some time; hence the reference and this material to his girlfriend.
Mr. B.: My daughter was out so my wife and I made love... but somehow there is much more emotional release with my girlfriend... yet rationally, I don't want her... it is almost as if I'm not supposed to show satisfaction, pleasure with my wife... guess I don't trust... don't see her as my friend, afraid to share my wish for warmth.
And then in the first reference to aging, he mentioned the following:
Mr. B.: I guess I can't be a kid fooling around with my wife; yet I can't be a kid with my girlfriend.
Dr. H.: Only kids are allowed to express warmth and passion with women, not men?
One week Prior to the Birthday. In the first session of the week: "I don't want a divorce, I used to... I get a lot of joy out of marriage".
At the beginning of the following session, he started with the following: "Heck of a day yesterday... I talked with a new junior associate who began working for me... she's only 25... a lot younger than I thought... I am feeling older and older, oh well".
In the final session of the week, the last before his birthday, he mentions the following for the first time: "My birthday is coming up... I don't want a cake... [later in the session he comments] I think I want to take a vacation for a day or two... the senior partner has been out all week; I wish there were more sunny days... I wish it were September and I could ride a bike around with the sun in my face".
First Week after Birthday. In the first session of the week: "I don't feel like letting people fawn over me as if I can't take care of myself". He then went on to describe his indifference to a surprise fortieth birthday party attended by six couples that his partner had organized for him.
Mr. B.: Forty candles on a cake are too many... but they were a nice group of people... one of the ladies was crying.
Dr. H.: Why do you feel she cried?
Mr. B.: A sad affair, birthdays... [after a long silence he added] ...I kind of think that the thing with my girlfriend is over; it is not a very satisfying relationship... [later in the session] I have been irritated with everyone... and myself since I have the feeling I don't do the things I want to with my life.
The following day he started by reviewing how sick and weak he felt. This was the only time in the analysis that he complained of a cold, although he has colds at other times.
He then went on: "I'm frosted at my parents for putting me in a school a year early... I was smart enough but I just wasn't ready emotionally... [later] ...my partner has been a real disappointment in life... maybe I put him in a role he didn't fit... [later still] ...maybe I have confused my girlfriend in the same way... she is a burden... I find it difficult to remember that she is only 26 and 40... the needs are different... I don't want to start all over again... [etc.] ...I don't seem to be getting anywhere... maybe tomorrow I'll feel better... [silence] ...I'm also irritated at turning forty... it beats the alternatives, but I'm tired all of the problems; I spend my whole life learning how to grow up.
In the third session of the week following his birthday, after complaining about his cold, Mr. B. presented this dream. (The analysis of dreams often provides considerable insight into an individual's inner world.)
Mr. B. (dream): At the stadium, quarterbacking a professional football team, crowded stands... I was on the better team but couldn't complete my passes; it was halftime and I was talking with Ed... he had a lot of many bet on the point spread, and I was going to try to increase the lead so he could win... I wasn't starting in the second half so I was walking over to the other side of the field... but then I had to get back to the game, and I threw a touchdown pass even though all the men in front of me were taller.
Mr. B. (thoughts about the dream): I am putting myself on the winning team... not the biggest but the best man... I'm about average height... even though I am bigger than my father now, of course, I wasn't as a boy... used to be self-conscious about being short as a kid... in fact, I still have difficulty seeing myself as big... inferiority complex, keeps me thinking small.
Dr. H.: I wonder if your dream doesn't help us understand your conflict over accepting height, prowess, success.
Mr. B.: And I can perform for others too... going to make Ed a winner... you may have met him, he runs the gas station around the corner... in reality, for him I don't need to be successful or a winner... just a hell of a nice guy... trying to repay a friendship.
Dr. H.: Am I involved with this move toward success and friendship?
Mr. B.: You do care about my growth.
Although there are other sections of the dream that relate to working through a variety of conflicts, what is crucial for a review of analysis at the fortieth birthday is Mr. B.'s assumption of manly prerogative now that he is at "halftime" and his move toward a more loving image of adults males. In the last session of this first week following his birthday, Mr. B. reported a dream of success.
Mr. B. (dream): At work with the partners, around a table at the cafeteria... discussing applications for new men... I was advocating certain people... but the senior partner had only trivial cut downs and then I walked off for lunch with his wife.
Mr. B. (thoughts about the dream): Actually, it has occurred to me recently that I'll be a senior partner when he retires in three or four years... it is the part of me thatis still sorting out, manhood... [later in the session] ...I don't think I am looking to leave my wife... I enjoy life more with her.
Second Week After the Birthday. In the first session, Mr. B. mentioned for the first time that he was now handling the family finances (his wife always has before), and he reported a dream.
Mr. B. (dream): I was trying to comfort this old woman... I was hugging her, and she was crying on my shoulder... I wasn't sure why.
Mr. B. (thoughts on the dream): The closer I get to my wife, the happier she is, but the more she cries... we have gone through a lot... and I guess she really is still mourning over her parent's death... I can't change someone else's sorrow... but I love my family and home is fun again.
In the second session, Mr. B. mentioned for the first time that he was building an addition on his house. "As a family room... it's about time... why didn't I do it five years ago?"
In this material, concerns over age, stage of life, loss, and growth were everywhere. The patient accept his forty years with anguish and ambivalence- "Forty candles are too many". Although the new addition, the joys as husband and father, and a successful profession were some compensation for aging, his mood was more one of acceptance and resignation than joy.
Assignations, not resignations, are what we much prefer to hope for. Mr. B. was overtly gleeful earlier in the analysis while expressing grandiosity and acting on adolescent wishes. Childhood wishes, no matter how disguised or distorted, still carried the hope of great pleasure.
Objective adult pleasures pale next to childhood wishes in much the same ways that earthly joys pale next to anticipated heavenly delights, which include, of course, the promise of immortality. Nevertheless with the help of analysis, Mr. B. decided that he might as well enjoy "the nice group of people" that were with him at forty.On balance, the adult, was more pleasurable than his childhood fantasies and illusionary adult reenactments. References to the aging process largely disappeared over the eight months of further analysis prior to termination. He focused instead on his pride of family, success in career, and how he could do more for those around him than was done for him.
Theoretical Comments on Birthdays
If birthdays hurt so much, why do we celebrate them? Why celebrate aging? Why acknowledge death? Some past cultures and present subcultures have no birthday traditions. Among possible conjectures, this may relate to the relative absence of accurate calendars, a lack of relevance in human life as only the god-king has importance, or from a total belief in immortality or reincarnation. The American Witness Christian sects do not acknowledge birthdays or death partly for these latter reasons.
For Western cultures, where all human life is defined as precious and the hereafter is culturally doubted, birthdays may paradoxically mark success. Woody Allen is reputed to have said that to live forever is the only immortality he is interested in. Although birthday celebration also evoke reflections on aging and death, these are usually by-products and fleeting if adaptive processes are functional. Less consciously, birthdays help focus the development challenge of aging.
Mr. B.'s midlife analysis and birthday reflections also prompt a broader look at development theory. Erikson, in his eight stages of development, takes a positive view of aging. With considerable psychological effort, we develop the resources of intimacy, generativity, and wisdom. Yet, every expansion of psychological resource is also a posture for undervaluing or justifying the inevitable demise. We learn to give successfully so that some part of ourselves might survive, through the germ plasm, through the culture. Yet, all around is biological and archaeological evidence that nothing survives forever.