New Light on Adult Life Cycles

Freud, Spock and Piaget have charted almost every inch of childhood. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson put the final touches on a convincing map of adolescence. Yet until very recently, most of the charting stopped near the age of 21 --as if adults escape any sequence of further development. Now a growing number of researchers are surveying the adult life cycle.

The research so far has been narrow, concentrating largely on white, middleclass American males. But in "separate studies, three of the most important life-cycle scholars--Psychiatrist Roger Gould of U.C.L.A., Yale Psychologist Daniel Levinson and Harvard Psychiatrist George Vaillant--have reached some remarkably similar conclusions that add new dimensions to the topography of postadolescent life. The main features:

16-22: LEAVING THE FAMILY. In this period, youthful fantasies about adulthood slowly give way. Young people begin to find their peers useful allies in an effort to break the hold of the family. Peer groups, in turn, tend to impose group beliefs. Emotions are kept under wraps, and friendships are brittle; any disagreement by a friend tends to be viewed as betrayal.

23-28: REACHING OUT. Following Erik Erikson, who found the dominant feature of the 20s to be a search for personal identity and an ability to develop intimacy, Gould, Levinson and Vaillant see this period as an age of reaching toward others. The growing adult is expansive, devoted to mastering the world; he avoids emotional extremes, rarely bothers to analyze commitments. To Levinson, this is a time for "togetherness" in marriage. It is also a time when a man is likely to acquire a mentor--a patron and supporter some eight to 15 years older.

29-34: QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS. All the researchers agree that a crisis generally develops around age 30. Assurance wavers, life begins to look more difficult and painful, and self-reflection churns up new questions: "What is life all about? Why can't I be accepted for what I am, not what others (boss, society, spouse) expect me to be?" An active social life tends to decline during this period. So does marital satisfaction, and the spouse is often viewed as an obstacle instead of an asset. Marriage becomes particularly vulnerable to infidelity and divorce. Vaillant sees a crassness, callowness and materialism at this stage. Levinson detects a wrenching struggle among incompatible drives: for order and stability, for freedom from all restraints, for upward mobility at work.

Says he: "If a man doesn't start to settle down by age 34, his chances of forming a reasonably satisfying life structure are quite small."

35-43: MID-LIFE EXPLOSION. Somewhere in this period comes the first emotional awareness that death will come and time is running out. The researchers see this stage as an unstable, explosive time resembling a second adolescence. All values are open to question, and the mid-lifer wonders, is there time to change? The mentor acquired in the mid-20s is cast aside, and the emphasis is on what Levinson calls BOOM--becoming one's own man. Parents are blamed for unresolved personality problems. There is "one last chance to make it big" in one's career. Does all this add up to disaster? Not necessarily. "Midlife crisis does not appear to portend decay," says Vaillant. "It often heralds a new stage of man." The way out of this turbulent stage, say the researchers, is through what Erikson calls "generativity"--nurturing, teaching and serving others. The successful mid-lifer emerges ready to be a mentor to a younger man.

44-50: SETTLING DOWN. A Stable time: the die is cast, decisions must be lived with, and life settles down. There is increasing attention to a few old values and a few friends. Money is less important. Gould sees married people turning to their spouses for sympathy as they once did to their parents. Levinson notes that men tend to have fantasies of young, erotic girls as well as of older, nurturing women--all part of a final attempt to solve childhood problems and cut free from the mother.

AFTER 50: THE MELLOWING. These years are marked by a softening of feelings and relationships, a tendency to avoid emotion-laden issues, a preoccupation with everyday joys, triumphs, irritations. Parents are no longer blamed for personal problems. There is little concern for either past or future.

Like Freud and Erikson, the life-cycle researchers argue that personality disorders arise when, for one reason or another, the orderly march of life stages is disrupted. Vaillant's studies suggest, for instance, that men who fail to achieve an identity in adolescence sometimes sail through life with a happy-go-lucky air, but never achieve intimacy, BOOM or generativity. "They live out their lives like latency boys," he says, not mentally ill, but developmentally retarded at the childhood level.

The researchers' findings are tentative. So far, few minority group members or working class men have been studied, and the data on women is limited. Vaillant believes, however, that the female life pattern is much the same as the male, except that the drive for generativity that appears in men in their late 30s or early 40s may show up a decade earlier in women.

In any event, a thoroughly detailed portrait of adult life is still "many years away," as Gould concedes, and there is much skepticism in the academic world that one will ever appear. Yet the life-cycle researchers are confident that the threatening 30s and the mellowing 50s will some day become as universally accepted as, say, the terrible twos and the noisy nines of childhood.

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