Chapter 3 - The Midlife Crisis Revisited

Abstract

This chapter focuses on midlife crisis. It reexamines the concept, particularly as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the social science literature. It also revisits a group of men and their families who were first studied in the early 1970s in an attempt to assess the impact of the midlife transition. Terms like “midlife crisis” and “male menopause” has been used by the so called “baby-boomers”, but they used to describe rather different narratives. Understanding midlife crises is most congruent with the specific narrative psychology perspective articulated by Gergen and Gergen. They argued that people must draw on basic narrative forms such as tragedy, romantic epic, or comedy to understand and represent their lives and, concomitantly, to reflect their identity or moral character. Midlife crisis contains a time-specific plot alteration that would characterize as a precipitant to a regressive movement—that is, movement toward a negative state.