THE MALE MIDLIFE CRISIS IN THE GROWN UP RESILIENT CHILD
SHIRLEY BRAVERMAN AND JOEL PARIS 1993
Clinical experience with a group of successful men suggests that one source of a mid-life crisis can be neglectful parenting during childhood. When resilient children grow up, they retain a deficit in the self. At mid-life, the use of work as a defense against emotional needs tends to break down, and the problems of childhood can re-emerge.
Is a mid-life crisis one of the consequences for the resilient child of a difficult childhood? Since Anthony (1974, 1987) described and coined the term "die invulnerable child," clinicians have been intrigued by the observation that some children who come from families with a mentally ill parent seem to be immune from the disorganizing effects of such an experience on their development. They do not develop symptoms themselves and they seem to be unimpaired in their capacity to concentrate and perform at school, as well as in their social skills. This is in marked contrast to the usual pattern found by researchers, in which children of schizophrenic and depressed mothers were found to have difficulty in focusing thenattention (Cohler et al., 1977) had conduct disorders (Rutter & Quintan, 1984), or accident-proneness (Weissman, 1979).
Werner & Smith (1982) concluded that although negative constitutional and environmental factors play an important role in the development of children, the availability in the family of other caring adults is important for later development. There seem to be some fortunate children who can weather a chaotic and depriving family atmosphere without becoming symptomatic, owing to a combination of positive constitutional factors and the capacity to make use of other attachment figures in the environment (Kauffman et al.,1979; Rutter, 1983; Cohler, 1987).
The long-term outcome for resilient children may also vary with gender. Men are particularly likely to make a major emotional investment in competence and success. The work world offers them an environment with reliable rewards which can be used to compensate for interpersonal deprivation. However, as pointed out by Pollack (1990), longitudinal research on adult development shows that adaptation to family life is best predicted by a healthy balance between autonomous functioning and affiliative relatedness. It therefore seems likely that the use of competence and autonomous functioning as compensation for deficits in affiliation could be unstable in the long run. Such issues frequently become apparent at mid-life.
We have encountered a number of male patients in our clinical experience who seem to have weathered their childhoods and young adulthoods well, despite a difficult family background, but who developed what is commonly called a "midlife crisis." They presented at mid-life with profound dissatisfaction in their marriages, reduced interest and energy in their work, and a general mood of anhedonia. Nothing seemed to give them pleasure, their sex lives were disturbed and, in some cases, there was an increase in alcohol consumption. Since these patients bore so much resemblance to the invulnerable children described by Anthony in their description of their childhoods, we were intrigued by the fact that they seemed to "come undone" in mid-life.
We believe that the delayed consequences of an early pathological environment for resilient children have not been adequately taken into account by clinicians. This is especially so in families with a preoccupied or depressed rather than a borderline or psychotic primary caretaker (usually the mother), because that pathology is more masked. Such parenting is not as obviously disorganizing, depressing, or fraught with anxiety as is the latter. Nevertheless, the consequences may be just as severe, if not more damaging. In fact, empirical evidence from an important longitudinal study of children at risk (Sameroff & Seifer, 1990) shows that maternal depression carries a much higher risk for pathology in children than does maternal psychosis.
One possible explanation is that the other parent, extended family members, or neighbors may come to the children's rescue more readily when they see more blatant pathology. However, the preoccupied parent does not look pathological: everything appears normal, except that she is psychologically absent and has, thus, "abandoned" the children. For the children, it is also easier to recognize (and perhaps escape from) "crazy" or violent behavior as being frightening: it is much more difficult to pinpoint the psychologically absent, but physically present, parent as being disturbing. The child of the preoccupied mother is much more likely to hover around the parent, to feel guilty at wanting to be taken care of, and to suffer in silence. Others are not as aware of the deficits in parenting the children are experiencing; hence they are less likely to try to be helpful. The paradigm of the successful man who finds achievement empty at mid-life is well-known to the public (Levinson, 1973), and to psychotherapists in particular (Jacques, 1965). The thesis of this article is that some of the roots of the mid-life crisis can lie in a childhood deprived of essential nutrients for healthy development. Clinical material will be presented to support the hypothesis that achievement can be used by men as a defense against feelings of deprivation, and that such defenses are likely to break down in the face of aging. Aspects of Kohut's self-psychology will be used to illustrate the defects in the self with which these men were struggling. The phenomenology of the mid-life crisis can be seen not just as a search for lost youth, but also as a desperate cry of an abandoned child.
The clinical data come from the practice of the senior author (SB), and consist of a cohort of 10 middle-aged men who presented for psychotherapy. All of these men were highly successful in life, and all of them presented with major difficulties in intimate relationships. Seven of the ten, in fact, presented initially for couple or family therapy, and three were already separated or divorced at the time of presentation. There was little overt family disruption: one patient had a parent who died before age 16, and only one was not actually reared by his parents.
Review of the childhood histories of these men suggested that all ten had experienced significant emotional neglect in their families. Only 3 reported parental alcoholism, and 4 reported that one of their parents suffered from a chronic physical illness. Five reported parental psychiatric illness, primarily depression; however, there may also have been untreated or sub-clinical depression in many of these parents. Nine out of ten described experiences of parentification, i.e., having to assume major caretaking responsibility toward either siblings or the parents themselves. Of the seven married men, only one separated during the course of therapy, and at the time of writing, nine out often were living in a permanent relationship with a woman, attesting to their desire for an intimate relationship. None of these men felt it was preferable to live alone. They had not given up on their wish for closeness. This is a group of successful men who only sought help for psychological difficulties at midlife. Up to then they had adequately compensated for their deprivation by activity and by work. They were hard-working, ambitious men, and their intimate relationships tended to be limited to their immediate families. Although they were by no means socially isolated, their friendships were activity-related, and even in their families they were somewhat emotionally isolated from their wives and children. At mid-life they had begun to lose the taste for the race for success, or, having won it, they felt that it was no longer enough. The defense of activity had stopped working, and they longed for the unconditional love they had never experienced.
Kohut's self-psychology (1970, 1977) provides a theoretical framework which is helpful in understanding the quality of these needs. It would appear that during the process of development, these men had not adequately experienced the idealizing, mirroring, and merging with a stable parent-figure, so necessary to ensure the development of a secure sense of self. Self-depletion is a concept of Kohut's describing one of the deficits of the self. It is an apt description of the self defect in these men. "Self-depletion reflects insufficiency of the self-object's response to the need for affirmation, merger and idealization leading to that guiltless depression resulting from lowered self-esteem" (Morrison, 1984). Kohut (1977) stated that guiltless despair results from the self s failure to realize its ambitions and ideals. Our point of view differs from Kohut's in this regard. We believe, rather, that this despair comes from a failure in their closest interpersonal relationships, i.e., with their spouses and children. This article focuses on the spousal relationship only.
During their marriages, these men developed the equivalent of a self-object transference with their wives, in which they re-experienced earlier, unsatisfied developmental needs such as the need for mirroring, merging, and holding (tension regulating). All marriages have aspects of these need requirements within the couple, but where the self is defective, these needs are greater and there is a greater hunger to have them met. These men used work to cover up this primary defect in the self. They attempted to realize their ambitions and compensate for the defect in this way. The spouses were not up to the almost impossible task of empathic attunement required by these men, to provide the reparative experience they needed. In the earlier years of their marriage and careers, these men were able to gain much narcissistic gratification from their work. They often found idealizable father figures there, who helped them integrate positive self-representations. These two factors helped them be less demanding of their wives. However, as the men grew older and became more successful themselves, they either lost, or turned away from their idealizable father figures. At that point they began consistently to experience their disappointment in their spouses in the same way that a patient might experience a profound disappointment in his therapist after an unempathic response during a self—object transference. Repeated experiences of disappointment, leading to either hostility or withdrawal, caused the cohesion of the marriage to deteriorate as the man's sense of inner cohesion began to break down. The spouse could not serve as the source of narcissistic supplies nor as buffer for the man's feeling of emptiness. In these marriages, the man's needs were often covert, and not directly communicated to the spouse, who might only experience a bewildering withdrawal. Disengagement in response to empathic failure is again a familiar phenomenon in the psychotherapeutic situation, but is not readily manageable in a marriage.
Because these men had such a poorly integrated sense of self, masked though it was, marital therapy could not be effective even though it did focus on the self-object transference between the couple. These men needed an exclusive relationship with the therapist to permit the development of a self-object transference in the context of a professional relationship. There it could be contained, examined, and handled therapeutically, a situation not possible in a cohabiting daily relationship. These cases were treated, therefore, in a psychoanalytically oriented, individual psychotherapy, although some started off in couple or family therapy. Although the spouses had a role to play in the quality of the marital relationship, we shall focus on the deficits in the self of the men rather than on the interpersonal relationship within the marriage.
It would be interesting to speculate on why these men were able to maintain an "invulnerable" posture for so long. They may have had talents which were unusual on which they learned to capitalize. They all seemed to have an unusual level of energy, a factor which may have given them an advantage, since those who are constitutionally active are more likely to have worldly success. In fact, since the histories we have described are not widely variant from what is seen in more disabled patients attending psychiatric clinics, our cohort must have either had some inborn advantage, benefited from a greater security of attachment to their primary objects, or have found compensatory attachments outside their nuclear families.
It appears that the interactional effect of their high level of energy, good health and intelligence put these children in the position of fulfilling many family tasks for the parents. In addition, they were able to attain high achievement at school, which did provide some narcissistic gratification to the parents. By performing these family tasks and achieving at school, these children received some mirroring from either one or both parents: thus they learned that the performance of tasks could be a powerful external supplier of self-esteem. The objective became a substitute for the object. When these children reached adulthood and married, all the denied longing for mirroring and soothing nurturance emerged. Inevitably, they were disappointed, but their success at work masked their disappointments and they were usually able to maintain equilibrium in their family lives by remaining relatively distant and preoccupied with work.
In middle age a change seems to occur in that the awareness of life as being finite emerges (Jacques, 1965). It is sometimes triggered by the changes one feels in one's body, an illness, the death of a parent, sibling, or friend, and sometimes by the psychological or physical separation of one's children (Braverman, 1981). The aforementioned changes test one's capacity to accept what one is and what one has.
Resources: About MLC
Author
Topic: