Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis

Medical historian Jackson (The Age of Stress) examines in this thought-provoking scholarly study the social and cultural factors that made the midlife crisis “a key feature of private lives and public debate” in the mid-20th century. Though Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques coined the term in a 1965 research paper, Jackson identifies antecedents in Carl Jung’s theories on the stages of life and in “Gauguin syndrome,” which referred to the French artist’s abandonment of his wife, children, and career in his mid-30s. But in the post-WWII era, Jackson argues, longer life expectancies, changing gender roles, the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, and economic liberalism’s “insistence on self-realization and self-fulfilment regardless of the impact on others,” among other factors, gave rise to the idea that middle age was a period of crisis. He examines the phenomenon in medicine, psychology, literature (the Rabbit novels by John Updike), and film (The Seven Year Itch), and documents how Gail Sheehy’s 1974 book Passages “challeng[ed] men’s ownership of the midlife crisis.” The scholarly prose can be slow-going, but Jackson’s expansive range and nuanced readings of popular culture more than make his case. This is a pinpoint dissection of an influential if slippery concept. (June)