Chapter 2: Burying the Dead
The author here talks about how we all know about MLC happening, but just think it won’t happen to us. The theme of this chapter is separation.
Quoting: “As the midlife transition begins, whether it begins gradually or abruptly, persons generally feel gripped by a sense of loss and all of its emotional attendants: moody and nostalgic periods of grieving for some vaguely felt absence, a keen and growing sense of life’s limits, attacks of panic about one’s own death, and exercises in rationalization and denial.” He goes on to say sometimes the cause is obvious but sometimes it is not. Or even if a cause seems to be obvious, they keep looking for another cause, something deeper.
He mentions that typically the midlife falls between the ages of 35-50 and usually is at age 40. There are some features of it that are the same for all: “persistent moods of lassitude and depression, or feelings of disillusionment and disappointment either in life generally or in specific persons who have been formerly idealized; youth’s dreams of happiness and fulfillment melt away or are rudely shattered; death anxiety steals in, and a sense that time will run out before one can get down to ‘really living’ is frequently reported…” He then mentions physical aging and aging of children, who have more independence now.
During this period there is a lot of what he terms “restructuring” of the person and personality underneath them. He describes here how there is a breakdown of the “persona, a psychological structure that is the approximate equivalent of what Erik Erikson calls the psychosocial identity, accompanied by the release of two hitherto repressed and otherwise unconscious elements of the personality: the rejected and inferior person one has always fought becoming (the shadow), and behind that the contrasexual ‘other,’ whose power one has always, for good reasons, denied and evaded (the animus for a woman and the anima for a man)
Jung believed that a prolonged journey could lead one to finding themselves. He himself reinvented himself during his MLC. During this time, they make a shift from a “persona-orientation to a Self-orientation.” In other words, they become individuals for the first time ever, and are not just a reflection of their family, upbringing and societal roles.
He divides this transition into three stages: separation, liminality and reintegration.
He then spends a good deal of time talking about Hektor from the Iliad which is fascinating, but I’ll spare you the details. Basically, he’s a hero that goes into battle and dies, knowing ahead of time that he will, despite his wife begging him not to leave her a widow, because he can’t get away from the role that his people have put him in. He’s a hero because they say he is and he can’t not be a hero. He is essentially stuck in the first half of his life, never having attained individuation.
He states that a crack must appear in order for the crisis to begin, a moment of “conscious realization” to begin the separation that occurs in the beginning of the crisis. He goes on to say that a person may experience a crisis or critical defeat at midlife and not go into crisis, they may maintain the illusion that nothing is wrong, thereby propping up the corpse of their identity. He claims that if this happens, a certain “stench” can be detected and it becomes obvious to those around them. This is an incomplete separation from the earlier persona identification.
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