Self-Identity, Self-Growth,
Self-Actualization

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out"-so says the Book of Common Prayer, quoting from Paul in one of those enormous half-truths that have done so much to promote and destroy the Christian faith. In fact, we bring a great deal into this world: our genetic equipment, which is crucial, the famous "nature" of the nature-and-nurture duality out of which our lives are fashioned (the mysterious "I" completes the trinity); and our shares in the folk unconscious, from which Jung evolved most of his concepts of creativity.

And we do carry something out of the world; certainly not material possessions which, when the chips are down, matter least, but our personal "self," the great work of art upon which we have been engaged all the years of our life.

Sooner or later, from perhaps the mid-40s on, men and women become critical assessors of the validity and relevance of their lives. Disguise it as we will, we are "no longer young," we are in "our prime," then our "later -prime"-the euphemisms change as the years pass. The first cool winds of the evening that is at hand begin to blow, even though the summer sun is still burning vividly in the afternoon sky.

Anne Simon writes of a new middle age that is a kind of superb central span connecting two lesser spans, young adulthood and aged adulthood, in the great bridge of the human life journey. The people of this central span are not only heavily engaged in many productive activities of their own, but are also assisting with the problems of those younger and older. Simon's book, The New Years, has a happy ending:

For the first time in history and for the first time in his life, the man of middle age can comprehend the great sweep of the life span as it now stands revealed. He can order his life to suit the new facts about getting older which it has brought to light, seize its options, pioneer. . . Independence is his passport to loving, to being loved, to being useful and needed.

The governing word throughout is "can." Simon's book is splendid because of its belief in the potentiality of adult human beings, even though she labels the twentieth century "this savage century," and sees the present multitudes of middle-agers in North America as being victims in, many ways of a universal cult of youth. In short, the adult in his middle years becomes the secret watcher of the implacable clock of the life drama which measures and demythologizes his younger dreams and carries him onward to the dark outlands of a youth-dominated society.

Time Magazine, in an article still surprisingly valid after 15 years, places the happy ending at the beginning. America, we are told, has a ruling class, a "command generation": one-fifth of the whole population of the United States, or nearly 43 million people between the ages of 40 and 60: the middle-aged Americans. The first half of the article glitters with dozens of names of middle-aged celebrities; the actress Lauren Bacall adorns the cover of Time and supplies the glamorous central theme of the discussion. A compelling case is made for the undoubted power and glory of the middle years, and for the colorful and fascinating maturity that separates adult men and women from adolescents and early adults.

This euphoric presentation of middle age in our era may have contributed a new zest and confidence to many North Americans passing through the period that one Bfitish psychologist describes as that of 6(menopausal man."

Yet the article gives almost as much attention to the panic and melancholy that descend on great numbers of middle-agers. It is Eric Berne's "balance sheet" time, a period of agonizing reappraisal, and not only for the individual. Many marriages that were once flooded .with youthful passion, or anchored in family cares and joys, suddenly seem drab and empty; it is the age of the second affair; the peak of alcoholism, of pregeriatrical drugs, of escalating cardiovascular attacks, often the result of being strait-jacketed by fate.

This conception of the middle-age crisis crosses cultural frontiers in the Western world. Thus, Dr. Martin Herbert, writing in Strip Jack Naked about middle-aged men in Great Britain, describes the purposelessness and grayness which many middle-agers feel during their so called "prime" years. Some feel suffocated, like one man who felt his life comparable to that of a dying fish lunging about at the bottom of his rowboat; his possessions and commitments had stifled him-the real him. Others feel that they have become old fogies prematurely; still others feel that life somehow has passed them by. As Herbert puts it: "For a large part of fife, we are looking ahead, looking forward to various new experiences, fresh and exciting goals. And then, one day, the individual realizes that he has completed most of his tasks ... there is nothing really new to look forward to, no particularly exciting goal to attain."

The malaise of middle age is a favorite topic of the literatures of Western society. The critic Frederick Losey identifies the fascination of Antony and Cleopatra, a drama of Shakespeare's mature years, with the theme of "the tragedy of middle life":

Idealism and inexperience will ever protect youth from a similar tragedy, and age is exempted by coldness of blood; but middle life, with the dimming of its idealism, its awakening sense of the worthlessness of earthly honour, and its consciousness of abundant physical powers, will always be peculiarly susceptible to mistaking a new and strong sexual appeal for the "nobility of life."

A different aspect of passion is portrayed in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: Gustave Aschenbach, a novelist in late middle age, enmeshes himself in a strange silent infatuation for a handsome boy, and forsakes the dignity and discipline of 30 years to assume the dyes and other tricks for disguising age.

Simone de Beauvoir was barely 60 when she wrote her massive La Vieillesse for which she herself hardly qualified as a subject. Besides, since her youth she had had a brilliant, productive life. Still, she writes with melancholy of the "vast miscomprehension" that exists between what people conceive a successful man to be and what he experiences himself to be. And she refers to an earlier judgment of hers in La Force des Choses, with which she still concurs: "The promises of my youth have been kept-nevertheless, I have been swindled." In Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman, on the other hand, the promises have not been kept, and the sense of time running out on a life unable to identify with its dreams produces a tragedy of middle age unbearably poignant.

In the film, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Peter Finch plays the role of a middle-aged physician, an admirable doctor and human being, himself engaged in a dual love affair with a girl and a youth that he is unable to resolve. At the same time, he sees among his patients an executive in his 50s who has developed into a hypochondriac, and who can no longer compete with the youth cult, which has at last penetrated his sphere of business. In fact, the executive explains bitterly to the young personnel officer who is going to try to get him a job: "They gave me the golden handshake." And he adds, "How can I tell my wife?"

These situations are the stuff of excellent drama, but the middle-age malaise for most men and women is closer to the experience of Herman Hesse's character, Harry Haller, in Steppenwolf and Louis Bromfield's Mr. Smith.

Haller lives on a plateau of mediocre and toneless existence: the lukewarm days of discontented middle life pass, unchallenged, purposeless, unswept by great devotions or emotions, beyond dreams. There is safety in this "normal and sterile" life, and a kind ~ of contentment, but "it is just this contentment that I cannot endure., After a short time it fills me with irrespressible loathing and nausea. Then, in desperation, I have to escape into other regions, if possible on the road to pleasure, or if that cannot be, on the road to pain."

The same was true of Haller's contemporary in North America, in Bromfield's novel, written when Bromfield himself was in middle age. Mr. Smith is a successful middle-aged executive, a charming man who finds that he is drowning in business and social roles, commitments, committees, engagements, obligations to his wife and his wife's friends-he has lost his self. His wife is obsessed with "togetherness," a favorite clich6 of the 1950s, and delights in the thought that she and her husband are always together. If Smith goes to the bottom of the garden to read a book by himself, she comes flying down to be with him so that they will be "together." He is a man of peace who has no peace. Among his business circle is an older executive in his early 60s whose special form of the malaise is to indulge in a bacchanal once a year when away from home at a convention-a fact well known to and lovingly accepted by his wife, who actually understands his needs. When, however, he dies in the excess of emotion of one of these escapades, and when Smith's wife refers caustically to "that dirty old man," this is the breaking point for Smith, who deeply respected his associate. Smith seeks escape to one of the war fronts of the Far East, and achieves freedom-and death.

Mr. Smith was a later phenomenon of middle age. At an earlier age, during perhaps the vigorous decade of his 30s, when he built up his array of roles and activities, he undoubtedly assumed that they were himself. In modem North American society as well as other Western cultures where failure in vocational achievement and material ownership is the unforgivable sin, men and women of the middle and later years condition themselves to believe that their personal self can be identified by the labels, titles, functions, and participations that present them to others in various social and business roles.

In fact, there can be so extreme a misidentification of self with a vocational or social role that a man or woman can literally die within a few weeks or months after the severance of a job or of the death of a spouse. However, all this does not mean that there is some kind of pure and idealistic "I" wholly divorceable from the self s many different social roles. We are "a part of all that we have met," and usually we are the richer for it.

Adults in early and later middle age are likely to feel a malaise, which for many will intensify as they move into the late years of the adult drama, but it is important to note that maturity also usually brings its own repertoire of compensating skills and resources. Bernice Neugarten writes about what she calls "the executive processes of personality in middle age: self-awareness, selectivity, manipulation and control of the environment, mastery, competence, the wide array of cognitive strategies." As one British authority of motivation notes, people in middle and late adulthood usually have some conception of how to cope with failure and ' frustration: after all, they have met these conditions many times. Mostly, adults in the age range 40-60 have learned such simple strategies as when to postpone decisions; how to be patient and wait out a personal dispute; and how to relate things seen and read to the experience of one's fife-like the man of 50 who understands Antony and Cleopatra with a depth his adolescent children cannot.

Neugarten sought her data from a special group of college graduates and Who's Who individuals who also had the alleged advantages of money, prestige, and power. However, anyone who has seen enough of life to have met many older adults of limited means and education, from small towns, farming areas, and working-class areas in great cities can testify that many of them have acquired mature resources with which to confront the frequent stresses of middle and later adulthood: courage, wisdom, and love deepened by time, and strategies of coping and winning.

It is also true that there is a large group of adults in late maturitywho feel that they have successfully completed their life's work and are content to rest and relax. Some may have set their own life goals, and

felt --- or at least declared-that they had met them; some may have accepted goals directed by others, and have acquiesced also in their termination and the approval of this action by others. Amongst these seemingly contented finishers are the people who declaim somewhere in full course that "I have found my niche"-a chilling phrase to the Ulysseans within earshot.

Whether content and passive, discontented but passive, or still seeking (the Ulysseans), all adults in their middle and later years are exposed to some degree of self-discovery-small or large. The motor of our lives is the self-image, and it is the self-image that essentially differentiates the Ulyssean adult from those adults who, at the opposite extreme, are immobilized by disgust and despair.

The wonderful phrase, "Yes, I can," which Sammy Davis Jr., uses as the title of his autobiography, contains a response to life that is not just a jolly-jump-up attempt to meet its often formidable problems with a momentary show of spurious self-confidence. Rather, it grows out of a self-image that unbinds and liberates the self that must do business with the world, and generates creativity. The reverse is summarized in the short and moving memoir of an anonymous British writer describing the deluge of misfortunes he feels he cannot handle: The Answer to Life Is No. For some adult people the answer to life may indeed be No. We are not engaged here in making judgments about the morality or validity of the choices people make in their response to life-nor are we capable of doing so-but the role of the self-image in arriving at these Yes, I Can's and No's is clearly, a powerful one. Consider the symbolic suicide of a young man who shot himself on top of a garbage dump. The deed described and underlined the self-concept.

Soaked in crimes and stupidity though man undoubtedly is, as Stephen Spender says, he is still the "beautiful creature" with his extraordinary brain, hands, and language systems. These, and the domains of thought and creativity they make possible, give the human species an unmatched magnitude of self-awareness: a Promethean gift that carries its own torments with it.

Popular speech uses the word "self' millions of times daily without defining it, in compounds that are like signs pointing the way but never really going there: "self-centred," "self-inflicted," "self-pitying," and so on. In fact, the "self' has never yielded its ultimate mystery, although enough light has been shed on it by contemporary and earlier seekers to make discussion of one's own self possible. The most striking thing about it is its personal uniqueness. It appears in the individual vocabulary as "I," and as such enjoys a designation that cannot be confused-as terms like "star," "king," or even "you" can be confused.

Yet the self is also the product of human interaction. If a solitary child were born into a dead atomic world from the womb of the last mother and by some miracle survived and grew physically, it would have or be a kind of self, but one so different from the selfhoods we think we know as to be grotesque. The emerging self of the child in a so-called normal world-which is to say a world filled with human transactions both good and evil-achieves much of its identity by innumerable relationships with other human beings-parents, peers, strangers-and from many seemingly less important human interactions and events. He or she "encodes and decodes" thousands of messages about moral systems, social roles, folklores, political and legal habitats, and other influences of organized society and what might be called the "hidden" society (the officially rejected sub-cultures). He or she is also the inheritor of the historical memory of the world.

Thus, it is possible to speak of the self under different titles: the environmental self, the psychological self, the mythological self, the physical self, the mysterious quintessential self, or "core self," and which has connotations with Kant's "pure self." In Man and His Symbols Carl Jung wrote about this self as seeking to speak to us and guide us by means of our dreams. Jung's "self' is a "regulating centre that brings about a constant extension and maturing of the personality. . . . It may emerge very slightly, or it may develop relatively completely during one's lifetime. How far it develops depends on whether or not the ego is willing to listen to the messages of the self ~-the messages from dreams.

Perhaps the reverse of the solitary child born into a dead world is that of the individual fully equipped by the world and the many contributions of social and psychological interaction who finds himself in the position of having these brutally and systematically stripped from him. The writings of Viktor Frankl and others indicate how men and women under sadistic treatment in concentration camps have had almost every level of existence taken from them short of death and still maintained their selfhood. These cases help illustrate how far or not there is quintessential self and how it is formed or appears. Certainly, nothing removes the strange enchantment for many thoughtful adults of the venerable phrase: "I know that I know."

In very late adulthood there sometimes occurs the terrible phenomenon of open self-hatred-that revulsion against the self which has wasted or destroyed many lives. Chilling reports exist of an old man or woman found standing before a door-length mirror in a nursing home bitterly cursing his or her own image. This is one dramatic and pathetic form of the rejection of the self-as-seen, which can assume psychoneurotic forms as in cases where once-confident elderly adults are intimidated and almost destroyed by their subjugation in a youth-obsessed society. In the case of the elderly self-hater, it is curious and sad that the sense of loss and alienation is so overpowering that the individual wholly rejects or ignores the astonishing number of good choices and actions made and good knowledges and skills acquired: the attempts also to love and be loved which in themselves form part of the art of the self-in-growth.

In advanced years, in hostile environments like bad nursing homes, this same terrifying rejection or alienation of self may, of course, derive from conditions all too close to Viktor Frankl's prison camp experience. Consider what it means for old men and women to find themselves stripped of all possessions, all friends, all contacts, all respect, all authority, all love.

Karen Homey underlined the importance of the self-image as a dynamic force by noting the presence in therapy of two forms of the image: the way each of her patients regarded his (or her) present roles, status, and abilities; and the way he regarded his potentialities specifically, his aspirations for himself-the idealized self-image, as Homey called it. The idealized self-image provides much of the generating power of human adult life. At its best it supplies what Gordon Allport has called "an insightful cognitive map"; at its worst it can be both so unrealisticand so obsessive that it maims and destroys much of the life action.

Erik Erikson, who is loath to let go the Freudian term "ego" in discussions of the self, ultimately abandons what seems to him to be the seemingly irresolvable debate on the roles and relevance of the "ego" and the "self," a pronouncement that shows the dynamics he clearly conceives to be part of any individual's existence: "The ego, then, as a central organizing agency, is during the course of life faced with a changing self which, in turn, demands to be synthesized with aband6ned and anticipated selves." And this leads him to the concepts of self-identity and self-diffusion as powerful generators and inhibitors of wholeness and creative action.

Many of us, in moments of seemingly unbearable stress, at all ages, have felt a temporary slackening or dimming of our ordinarily strong feeling of self-identity. In Franz Werfel's novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the hero-leader of the.besieged city, although he successfully brings his people through their long trial, is occasionally overcome by the experience of what Werfel describes as a "whirling" of the little world about him. This occurs at periods of extreme stress, and may well be the novelist's shorthand for a form of identity crisis.

At times the anxiety of the self to escape from the unbearable challenges to its identity results in a marked dimming of the photographic plate. Or it may lead to an attempt at self-diffusion: to project oneself onto other identities, which in extreme cases may lead to the attempt to assume other roles and backgrounds altogether, for better or for worse. At all events, the anthology in which Erikson's paper appears bears the significant title, Identity and Anxiety. And Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, writing in the same anthology, speaks of anxiety as "the most unpleasant and at the same time the most universal experience, except loneliness. We observe both healthy and mentally disturbed people doing everything possible to ward off anxiety or to keep it from awareness." She quotes Poulson, Berdyaev, Riesman, and other social psychologists as finding "the source of man's anxiety in his psychological isolation, his alienation from his own self and from his fellow men." (My italics.) And she notes Rollo May's definition of anxiety as "the apprehension set off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality. "

All adults are need-bearers, including the hilariously titled "man who has everything" (everything except the consciousness of his enormous need to become a fully actualized human being?) and the often grotesquely misnamed "beautiful people." The supreme need for each individual adult is surely to achieve identification and fulfillment of self, not to be the echo or carbon copy of others, or to merge oneself totally with giant thought systems whether political, economic, or religious, so that one can never be exposed as a divergent being or scrutinized as an agent of change. Yet the paradox is that our selfhood also grows from interaction, from love for others and love for oneself

In Franz Kafka's terrifying story Metamorphosis, the central character is a young salesman who in the course of his routine and empty life has lost any love for himself and any real love for others. His life has become so much a matter of routine and his rejection of the claims of growing self-identity so complete that he awakens one morning to find himself a cockroach. The story is a parable: to be a human being is to develop a unique and growing individuality. To be a cockroach is to exist by living from the refuse of others.

"The essence of neurosis," remarks Rollo May, "[is] the person's unusual potentialities, blocked by hostile conditions in the environment (past or present) and by his own internalized conflicts, turning inward and causing morbidity." And May aptly quotes from William Blake, whose own life demonstrated his constant nourishment of his selfhood and the fertility of his self-concept: "Energy is Eternal Delight: he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence."

We are the product of the days of our years, of 20,000 days by the time we are age 55. The adult in his later years has lived a very long time with himself, with his self. Is it possible over so long a period to avoid in all possible ways confrontations with the inner voices of the self, or to flee from the invitations to more vivid and fertile selfhood, which the small mobile cosmos of our personal life successively opens to us?

It is indeed possible, and very common, just as it is possible to actualize the experiences of the life drama to help bring into being a self open to all the potentialities, at least, of creativity. Those who do so will become the Ulyssean adults. Yet so complex is the life journey, and so varied the network of experiences that occur even in the apparently most commonplace lives, that Ulysseans and non-Ulysseans cannot be finally classified and divided at the gateway of the mid-50s.

If the human adult is subject to a high degree of rigidity and passivity in the course of life experiences, he is also a being who is never wholly programmed. Far more, he is capable of some degree of virtuosity, however small, to the end of his life. Thus, it is wiser not to speak in absolute terms of Ulyssean and non-Ulyssean adults whenever one is speaking of potentiality. In this sphere of discussion, it is better to speak of comparative degrees of the Ulyssean life, spirit, and performance.

There is an important piece of good news about the human life drama which, if one could only get it distributed widely enough and listened to carefully enough, might surprise by joy a great number of adults in their later years.

The good news is that the human adult can continue to grow, to learn, and to create up to and through the very late years. Traditional folklore, which likes to believe that it can reduce life to certain huge sentimental generalities, likes to conceive of the life drama as a simple curve, the arc of a semi-circle, rising from childhood to the full prime of manhood and womanhood and descending to second childhood. Jaques's familiar description in As You Like It of the "seven ages of man," in which the sixth age is that of the "lean and slipper'd pantaloon" and the last age is that of the individual "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything," is widely quoted as the epitome of folk wisdom, but in fact it is murderously naive and misleading.

The human life journey cannot be intelligently charted by a single curving line. Such a line is perhaps a fair approximation of an adult's physical progress, since there is a certain decline in the power of the various physical senses. Even here, however, there are instances galore of men and women who survived a sickly childhood and early adulthood, or who emerged vigorously from a period of flabbiness in their 30s and 40s, to enter and maintain glowing health and strength in their later and even very late years. Single-line curves ignore the incredible complexity of the life drama, the varying domains in which adults live out their lives, and the kaleidoscope of individualities, as numerous as the sands of the seas, that have to be taken into account.

Adult individuals do indeed play many parts, but of a complexity far surpassing Shakespeare's wildwood philosopher.

An important denial of the concept of the single declining curve was developed by the University of Chicago sociologist Robert Havighurst in the 1950s, partly as a result of his work with "the Chicago group," which studied the nature of the later-life profiles of aging and aged adults in Kansas City. Havighurst writes about three facets of the life journey that had been virtually neglected in earlier years. One was to examine any life from early to late adulthood in the fight of ten-year "cohort" groups-that is, that people whether, say, in the 30s or 60s, would share the notable characteristics of their age group. A second was to describe progress on the life journey for men and women as being made up of a series of "developmental tasks"-a good phrase because its name indicates quite clearly that throughout adult life we are all presented with one task or challenge after another, and if we handle the task reasonably well or meet the challenge, we develop and move on as maturing adults. If we do not, then in that respect and to that extent, we fall back into immaturity. A third was to look at these tasks as emanating from certain "roles" we all play. Thus, any of us in our time plays simultaneously a number of roles: parent, spouse (or single adult by choice), employer or employee, citizen, union or club member, church member perhaps, friend, son or daughter, relative, personal learner or teacher, seeker or creator (and others). I

Havighurst's first major statement tied together the multiple tasks we all simultaneously perform (even when much of the time we never think about it) with the special features of the decade we might be passing through at any particular year: these are the typical tasks and responses of the 20s or the 50s, say, to which Havighurst gave descriptive titles 20 years before most other commentators on the life journey began to do likewise. Thus, -for him, the 20s were the decade of Focusing One's Life; the 30s, those of Collecting One's Energies, especially with continuing thrust toward career and personal development and advancement; the 40s, called, not very convincingly, Exerting and Asserting Oneself.- a kind of peak period as many adults see it, a time of heavily investing energy in the "outer world" of affairs-still in careers or in civic and cultural activity.

The years 50-60 in Havighurst's scenario are a period of Maintaining Position and Changing Roles. Many adults reach a plateau in their world of work. For women the "empty nest" phenomenon appears. "Libidinal fires die down, producing a threat to the ego." The self sees the world as complex in ways not perceived before, and doubts its ability to master it. Many adults begin the secret process of "disengagement" (a concept made popular in the 1950s by Elaine Cumming and W. E. Henry); that is, the adult disengages from certain earlier affairs and attachments while, on its part, society begins to withdraw certain responsibilities or opportunities from men and women in this later decade. The parent becomes the grandparent, and a sense of constricted time leads to an urgent feeling (among many) of priorities.

In the decade 60-70, to which Havighurst gives the title Deciding to Disengage, and How, disengagement continues as an important process. Most men lose their jobs by retirement, as do many women. Many women also lose their husbands and need to cope with widowhood.

Not surprisingly, the life journey closes with the designation for ages 70-90, Making the Most of Disengagement. Havighurst's tone, here as elsewhere, is hopeful and humane, and he wisely quotes Charlotte Buhler on the role of "seeking self-fulfillment" in these late years. This sounds, although Buhler did not mean it as such, as though the self were the least of our possessions, and when life may have stripped us of everything else-power, money, sex gratification, prestige, and most of our friends-we can turn to the fulfillment of self!

Havighurst's scenario of the life journey is valuable for its emphasis on developmental tasks, richness of social roles, and its reminder of the disengagement phenomenon as a factor to be handled (and handled well) in later adult life. However, this schema is dominated by the disengagement concept, and lacks the important qualities of later adulthood in our time portrayed recently by Bernice Neugarten in her identification of thousands of older men and women as "young-old" adults. These are people 55-75 whom Neugarten has recognized in her studies as heralding the arrival of a new type of older adult in our society who lives with marked vitality, grace, and self-growth. (See also page 68.)

The Ulyssean concept, however, goes beyond Neugarten's "youngold" premises, and differs sharply from certain assumptions that may arise from the disengagement theory. For example, the Ulyssean would warmly endorse James E. Birren's definition of a human being as "a biological, psychological, and social constellation moving forward in time" (the word 'constellation" is particularly apt). But the Ulyssean indicates by his or her life performances that the splendid dynamism inherent in Birren's definition need not disappear. Disengagement can be a positive, dynamic, creative process, not a dreary slowing-down, turning-off, opting-out, giving-up retreat from life. In fact, the term "disengagement" is too negative a term for Ulysseans. It carries with it the false assumption that somehow the real business of a human life is to be totally engaged in career and socialt obligations and expectations. On the contrary, the real business of a human life is to fulfill itself, partly no doubt with the aid of societal dynamics, but in any event on its own terms in many, many ways. 2

The Ulyssean has a revolutionary concept about the middle and later years: that for many they are years of beginnings, not conclusions. He or she would quote C. G. Jung's dictum that it takes a human being about 50 years simply to assemble and truly identify the self; or the challenging assertion of Frank Underhill, the Canadian political scientist, when in his late Ulyssean 70s, that "nobody knows anything until he is 50"; or the statement of Professor (later Sir) Fred Clarke at McGill University that used to send me and my undergraduate classmates into bewildered fury: "Really, no one is fit to begin teaching until he is 50."

Even when we accept the fact that adulthood is a lifelong developmental process, it is often difficult to translate the theory to the particular individual we happen to be contending with in some bleak hour of a routine day. Is it possible to believe that, for example, this self-promoter with the wide cold smile; this jolly nonstop trouble-maker, busy poisoning her wells; this cynical derogator of all great plans and sweet hopes; this arrogant intellectual, lost in his own petrified forest of unrevised views; this square-voiced traveler, proclaiming as loudly as ever the superiorities of his own environment over other cultures; this ferocious junior official, busy demonstrating her equality with the worst of masculine qualities-is it possible to believe that these individual human adults, in so many ways not adult, in too many cases seemingly unloving, unlovable, and unloved, bear any relationship to the good news that adults can grow and increase their creative powers to the very end of the very latest years?

Yes, it is possible. To put the matter succinctly: not merely youth, but the whole of life, is potentiality for all types of adults.

Herbert L. Klemme, head of the Industrial Mental Health Division of the Menninger Foundation of Topeka, Kansas, offered an important insight on this during a lengthy interview in the New York Times in July, 1971. What Klemme found absorbing and often tragic was the number of times that people could not successfully negotiate a major period of life transition, and the effect this had on them. He describes how adult people "may spend the rest of their lives making futile attempts to work through" an unsuccessful negotiation, and how others who after early success are suddenly overwhelmed by disenchantment:

Those who weather the crisis, according to Dr. Klemme, often do it by finding new meaning in their work or by switching to a more satisfying career. On the other hand, persons who have endured the financially unrewarding aspects of such a job through young adulthood may suddenly find meaning in their work and a sense of newfound purpose in life. No wonder that a rich new emphasis in life-planning for the 1980s is on alternative lifestyles and radical career changes. Richard Bolles in The Three Boxes of Life foresees a society in the comparatively near future in which adults will study, work, and take extended recreation or renewal periods in "flexible life scheduling." If study, work, and play are good things, Bolles asks, why do we not flexibly interschedule them in our lives from childhood through the very late years, instead of confining ourselves to the "three boxes of life"-the study box up to age 20, the work box from 20 to 60 or 65, and the often unproductive or unfulfilling "play box" after "retirement"?

Two powerful factors are at work that make it probable that for many people Ulyssean options remain, in spite of perhaps a former anti-Ulyssean lifestyle. One of these factors is that most people are not totally classifiable in absolute categories. Few adults, for example, can be described as totally adventureless. With everyone in life the questions have to be put: "At what place and time?" "In what circumstances and conditions?" Surely the mature phrase in all adult assessments and controversies is, "It all depends."

An absorbing study published in 1976 by Florine Livson on midlife transition for women partly reinforces this point. Livson's project studied two groups of women aged 50 who were earlier members of a longitudinal survey of personality which the women had voluntarily entered in adolescence. Livson was able to select women at 50 who, clearly seemed to have a high measure of psychological health. One group she termed "traditionals" -women whose past years clearly indicated that they had performed ably the traditional female roles of wife and mother. They seemed to have had few crises during their 40s, and arrived at 50 rich in what Erikson calls Generativity: a fine, nurturing, human capacity. The other group of women Livson called "independents." They had early been "skeptical, unconventional, more in touch with their inner life." During their 40s these women evidenced psychological depression, irritation, unproductive daydreaming. Yet by age 50, these "independents," though not showing the same strength in Generativity, showed to the perhaps rather astonished researchers, strong morale, emotional health, and a high capacity to be open, sympathetic, and trusting. Thus, any confident and despondent forecasts about them during their 40s, in their quite different individual lives, would have been wide of the mark. "You never can tell.

The second powerful factor mitigating seemingly irreversible life processes is the influence of psychological intersections-branches where men and women can choose between life-giving and life-corroding alternatives. In spite of a number of informative reports on the nature of 'adult life stages" appearing during the last half of the 1970s,4 and which deal with early adult and mid-adult (to about 50) turbulence (what I have long called "white-water passages"), the case is still unproved that easily categorized crises and branchings or intersections can be shown to arrive at sharply definable times. What is clear enough is that all men and women are subject to a multiplex of changes and branches in their fife progress, including turbulent intersections, which can harm or heal them depending upon the circumstances and the choices. Consider in this connection the stimulating and liberating conception of the later life journey by the American psychologist, Robert C. Peck, who developed a theory of life investments and alternatives. Peck's career involved him in the psychological analysis of personalities and life processes of several thousand people, mostly men, in business. However, his findings transfer easily to women also. From these studies, he became convinced that to try to sum people up in various time capsules (the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, and so on), was too categorical and fixating. Neither does he describe precisely identified years as major stress times for all adults.

Peck asks the sensible question: Is there not a great variability in adult life in the years of arrival at situations of psychic crisis? For example: young fathers and old fathers-how can their lifestyles possibly match, or how compare the effects upon them, therefore, of children growing up and moving out? We do not grow across adult life as students move from one grade to another; but rather, we progress vertically in different masteries and skills. Therefore, Peck discards much of the chronological and imprisoning classifications. He accepts two giant classifications by Age: Middle Age and Old Age-but he is driven to this by the sheer semantics of the whole life-journey controversy. The tacks upon which he hangs his concepts of adult people-in-process are not ages but stages: the female climacteric, for example, regardless of age; or the retirement point for men, which now is beginning to vary enormously.

Furthermore, Peck tackles the needs and potentials of adults age 50plus as no one except Bernice Neugarten (see pages 68 - 69) has done-almost uncharted territory compared to the recent exploration of the age arenas 20-50.

I was sufficiently fascinated by the potentialities in Peck's schema of "dynamic" alternatives to attempt to illustrate what they might mean in a simple pictorial chart (Chart 1). In designing, and designating it, as "The Major Game Adults Play," I have tried to convey the movement and flow of alternatives that present themselves innumerable times in continuing daily fife. The circles representing arenas of behavior I have shown as intersecting, because which of us is ever totally and at all times in one circle or the other? I have drawn the circles equal, but in fact-complex and interesting creatures that we are--each of us has a larger circle in which we participate more than in the smaller. Readers may find it an interesting exercise to consider what their own life graphs would look like if projected on a screen.

"What does it mean to age successfully?"

Peck found that a critical point seems to be reached somewhere between the late 30s and the late 40s. This is a turbulent period for many middle-agers because it confronts them with the waning of certain physical powers, either of strength and sports prowess, in the case of men, or of physical beauty if defined as "young-looking" in the case of women. Many adults have invested themselves heavily in these powers, and the confrontation with loss forces upon them a major traumatic alternative of choice: valuing wisdom or valuing physical powers. Peck naturally distinguishes "wisdom" from "intellectual capacity." Wisdom is the ability to make the most effective choices among the alternatives that the wide repertoire of middle-aged adulthood provides in compensation. Some people cling to physical powers as their chief tool for coping with life; as the powers decline, so does the individual's competence to take on successfully life's inevitable frustrations and disappointments. They become more and more depressed, disillusioned, and bitter; and this affects and infects their reactions and relationships. On the other hand, in Peck's words, the successful "agers calmly invert their previous value hierarchy, now putting the use of their 'heads' above the use of their 'hands', both as their standard for self-evaluation and as their chief resource for solving life's problems."

The second of four major alternatives that Peck sees as confronting adults in the middle years is a choice between socializing vs. sexualizing in human relationships. When I first introduced Peck's concepts into my own seminars on the adult life drama, I found some students very hostile to what they felt to be his moralistic antagonism to sexual activity and play, perhaps because Peck uses terms such as "egocentric sex-drive" and "sex-objects" in describing the negative "sexualizing" alternative. However, Peck is really saying that in negotiating the turbulence of middle-life "climateric" and anxiety, adults must try to view other men and women as companions and friends in increasing depth, and less and less as objects of mere sexual play. Sexual play as such need not, of course, be derogated.

    Middle life also brings the periodic loss of the nearness of people, young or old, who were or are beloved. Elderly parents die; children grow up and leave home; long-cherished friends die. At the same time, the bridge position of middle age, stretching between young adulthood and late adulthood, carries with it access to a wide traffic of human types and relationships. Thus a new and major alternative arises: the middle adult who is drawing steadily from whatever capital he has left in the bank (these analogies are all mine, not Peck's) can allow the passing years to become increasingly impoverished; or he can reinvest his emotional sympathies in new relationships. In addition, he can redefine and imaginatively deepen or extend or adapt his "cathexes" or emotional investments within family and friendship circles. (Consider, for example, how successfully or not many parents in middle and late middle age adapt their cathectic relationships to sons and daughters now grown-up and married td persons new to the circle; or to single grown up children, themselves struggling to adapt to the assets and deficits of not being married.) This third major alternative of middle age, Peck calls choosing between cathectic flexibility and cathectic impoverishment.

Finally, and crucially, people in the great middle span of the life journey can, again by countless choices at branch alternatives on the route, choose mental flexibility vs. mental rigidity. Here Peck deals trenchantly with one of the most seductive temptations of the middleagers: to seek continuous warmth and security in reflecting comfortably upon the value of one's experience after 40 or 50 years of life, or more. Experience is indeed one of the best advertisements for middle age-but only if well used. It must be reinvested, retested, used to build new perspectives. Peck is dealing here with a phenomenon supposedly most typical of old age: the rigid mental set, harping upon experience, testing and rejecting liberating ideas by measuring them wholly against one's own unswerving attitudes drawn from "life." However, midadulthood may present us with a false security where past experience alone seems to provide ready answers to significant life problems.

When the late years are at hand in a society where too many men have identified their "self' with their career or work role; where it has set their clocks, governed their style of life, produced whatever prestige they have --- can they accept the shock of loss when this all-absorbing working self disappears? With most older women the problem is different and has perhaps chiefly occurred at the menopause; however, increasing numbers of women with careers will now know the men's experience. Peck calls the problem presented here that of ego Simply and briefly, he is saying this: in the later years we have to learn how to differentiate our selves among different roles-to find self-worth in varying ways of love, service, and creativity. One invests one's self in various fields where the harvests continue on through later and later seasons.

A second life-giving or life-dimming choice opens before us in the very late years where by the clock of life we are indeed old. This is the period when we are often beset by feelings of debility, loss of recuperative powers, bodily aches and pains. We can, Peck suggests, become preoccupied with our physical deficits: become querulously self-centred, full of complaints, a late sad state of egocentricity. Or we have an alternative: we can transcend the physical unease of the body, finding continuing joy in human relationships, in the wonder of the world, in mental activities. We are presented with this choice: body transcendence vs. body preoccupation.

Inevitably, especially in the very late years, death is a presence that becomes a reality, not a philosophical question. To Peck, this raises the alternative that concludes his schema: ego transcendence vs. ego preoccupation. The imminence of death may immobilize many late adults as bringing into view the terminating of the "one and only life" (in Erikson's phrase), the night of the ego. Others, however, win transcend their fear of extinction, which is the natural human tendency, by investing their emotions and their energies, however weakened, in people around them. They might also, as Simone de Beauvoir suggests, conclude their life with an attachment to great social or cultural causes that will somehow better the condition of mankind. They may also find a special new strength in the reinforcement of faith or in new trails to the mysterious cosmos: frankly, to ongoing cosmic life. Thus they extend the arena of creative activity beyond egocentric fear and despair so that the self, in investing itself in other people and causes, affirms or reaffirms its own healing self-worth.

Thus, by conscious and life-enriching choices among the seven major alternatives, you may continue to fulfill your "best" self, so that you need not live at any age as though life were simply "happening to you," but that you are happening to life.

So far from moving "over the hill" and steadily down into an and valley, the proper comparison for the progress of older adults should be that of moving up the sides of a splendid mountain with the perspectives and strategies of the wise and experienced mountaineer. Like him, the older adult should have acquired dynamic wisdom-wisdom that is not simply dormant but used and constantly reinvested. And, like the mountaineer, the man or woman in later adulthood should have become equipped with enough self-knowledge and self-reliance to negotiate the difficult, often dangerous, places on the route not merely with fortitude (which is admirable though passive) but with creative thought and imaginative action-which are active and potential and, in the course of time, Ulyssean.

The verb forms "should be" and "should have," however, are conditional- they reflect the attitudes and the acts of individual men and women. In them lie both the opportunity and the tragedy of later adulthood. George Laughton, a noted British-bom preacher, once built a famous sermon upon the slogan of the Watchtower sect (now Jehovah's Witnesses) which was "Millions Now Living Will Never Die!" Laughton's sermon title was "Millions Now Living Are Already Dead!" He was talking about death-in-life, the conditions wherein men and women never risk looking fully into the eyes of fife. A recent book title (1976), Fully Human, Fully Alive (by John Powell, S.J.), makes the same point. The alternative is to be half-human, half-alive!

We have rich evidence that in middle and later adulthood we are not simply the hopeless prisoners of psychosexual neuroses dating from infancy and early childhood. Likewise, we have learned that the anxieties and inferiorities generated from psychosocial encounters can also find healing in the comradeships and assuagements of society. Institutional society, which many of us have criticized with burning anger, provides multitudes of supports, guides, healings, and stimuli for psychosocial man. "Do you realize," asks the old alcoholic Church of England priest, in John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy, of the wild naked youth running down the road, half-mad with the world's injustice, "do you realize how much effort it takes just to get the world up and moving every morning?" Much of the apparatus of routine life is itself a valuable safeguard for healthy living, or even for creative activity.

Yet the chief end of man is not to be found in safeguards, survival kits, and guaranteed highways-least of all Ulyssean man, that seeker to the end of life of the full state of what Abraham Maslow, using Kurt Goldstein's term, called "self-actualization." For Maslow there was something saddening about "the ease with which human potentiality can be destroyed or repressed" by what he called the lack of "good preconditions": in the family, in the physical body, in the chemistry of life, in the ecology, the culture, the interactions of people. Why should a "fully-human person," he asked, seem like a miracle-"so improbable a happening as to be awe-inspiring?" Yet Maslow became one of most optimistic of modem observers of the human scene. His optimism, which bears directly upon Ulyssean adulthood, arose from a view of man as need-bearer-Maslow called him "the wanting anitnal"---and from the plain evidence before all our eyes that remarkable human beings exist who have apparently somehow managed to 64actualize" all or nearly all of their potential.

For Maslow, self-actualization was an achievement of middle and later life. He agrees with Jung: that it takes much of a lifetime to assemble and integrate a personal self that is capable, not simply of many-sided self-activity, but of rich self-actualization, which is a very different thing. Neither Jung nor Maslow, of course, is saying that the steady addition of years and of "experience" bring self-actualization in and of themselves. Otherwise we would not have the phenomenon that the "fully-human" person seems "like a miracle." You typically look for self-actualized individuals among people well or long past youth, but even in these supposedly maturer phases, too few are embarked upon what Maslow calls "good-growth-toward-self-actualization," a process already found among a certain proportion of the young. (Maslow's term recalls John Dewey's lovely definition: "A good man is someone trying to be better.")

How far, in fact, is it possible for the self, contending with the many influences, incentives, and frustrations produced in the complex fife journey, able to continue the process of "becoming"? Is man, when the chips are down, simply a behavioral animal as perceived by a Pavlov or a Skinner? Does he merely react to powerful drives when stimulated so as to remove the feeling of tension, in order that the whole organism can then achieve a sense of homeostasis, or return to the normal state?

For anyone who believes in what I call "the Ulyssean concept" this point of view is untenable. It derives from certain excesses of what critics have recently and unkindly called "rat-oriented psychology'~--the conviction that there are overpowering analogies between rats and man. "If only," Maslow once asked innocently, "we could really know what is going on in the rat's mind." The being, Man, soaked in cruelty and ignorance though he is, is much too versatile and elusive a creature to be trapped in the box of the Stimulus-Response mechanism.

Researchers have, of course, learned much about functioning by experimenting with rats, monkeys, and pigeons. Still, human beings are not simply classifiable as animals, and experiments seeking analogies fall ludicrously short of the mark. Maya Pines puts the matter trenchantly when she writes:

Maslow turns a flood of light not only upon what motivates human adults but also specifically on what motivates men and women to become Ulyssean or not.

The title --- even the order of the words--of Maslow's chief work on the subject is itself significant: Motivation and Personality. In it, Maslow introduces his conception of a "hierarchy of basic needs." So far as man is an animal, he is a wanting animal: no one satisfied desire keeps him satisfied for very long. He is not so much governed by drives (although of course they have a role) as pulled by fundamental goals or needs-and these needs arrange themselves in what Maslow calls "a sort of hierarchy of prepotency." Thus the needs at the base of the hierarchy or ladder are physiological; and although while he is satisfying them the human being already has the potential for higher needs, these physiological wants must usually be satisfied before the man or woman can get on to less body-centred desires. For example, intense hunger normally monopolizes the whole attention of the "wanting animal," who otherwise with his restless, never-satisfied desire system would be moving on to yet new domains of needs and goals.

Next are the safety needs (for example, security, protection, freedom from fear, good order, and so on). Maslow, concerned as he is with adults, notes also how crucial safety needs must be in childhood. Consider the case of the child threatened by parental break-up, by assault, by the name-calling of his fellows, by a hundred seemingly uncontrollable threats. Some of the roots of adult neuroses are here. For Maslow, a neurotic adult is

Hence arises the "basic anxiety" of many adult people that Karen Horney wrote about in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. Likewise "the whole complicated structure of neurosis," which Andras Angyal described'as being "founded on the secret feeling of worthlessness, that is, on the belief that one is inadequate to master the situations that confront him and that he is undeserving of love." Maslow's self-actualized adult, and just as much so the Ulyssean adult, are individuals who have either found healthy surety in the safety needs, so that they can go on to the higher desires and challenges of the hierarchy, or have by various means surmounted the feelings of insatiable craving for safety that otherwise would make them cocoon-dwellers and Milquetoasts.

The third stage in Maslow's hierarchy of human needs includes what he calls the belongingness and love needs. Here is a new hunger-the hunger for affection, for inclusion: the longing not to be lonely, ostracized, rejected, friendless, rootless. The phenomenon of sex, with all its facets, is physiological; love, on the other hand, is a generator of deeper and more subtle motivations toward the final two major levels of the hierarchy. Maslow is at pains to stress that the love needs incorporate both the giving and the receiving of love.

Close to the summit of Maslow's hierarchy are the esteem needs: the need of the esteem of others, and far more, of self-esteem. At this point Maslow approaches the great sphere of the self-image. He rapidly diverts attention from needs for reputation and prestige, for fame, glory, dominance, and importance to needs for strength, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for independence, freedom, and "confidence in the face of the world."

To feel that one is useful, to feel that one's life has worth! Offstage one hears again the voice of Andras Angyal, deeply moved:

Perhaps as a young adult he shoots himself on a garbage dump, or as an old adult obscenely curses his image before a mirror in the antiseptic climate of a nursing home. Perhaps in the long process of "becoming," the child, grown to adulthood, and among good healings and companionships of the world, recovers his self-esteem. Perhaps he is one of the great armies of emotionally healthy people who Maslow insists exist, who carry self-esteem with them to such a degree that it actively promotes feelings of capability and self-confidence.

At all events (according to Maslow), here is another powerful growth need that can pull adult men and women upward in the long process of "becoming." It is one that must be based on deserved respect from self-recognized real accomplishment rather than simply the opinions of others. Thus we approach the summit territory of Maslow's hierarchy: the need for "self-actualization": that is the restlessness that develops in someone in whom the other great needs have been wholly or chiefly met, and who is looking for the creativity that he or she must actualize and fulfill.

No one is expected to pass as a human voyager through the various level of needs or goals wholly completing each level once and for all as one goes along. Life is rarely lived that way. On this Maslow himself remarks:

And Maslow suggests that new needs may appear when the current or "prepotent" need is largely, not wholly, satisfied.

It is important also to point out that Abraham Maslow did not construct his hierarchy simply sitting at a desk, pen in hand, but rather from years of clinical and semi-clinical observations, and from several thousand personal contacts. All of us have unrealized potentialities that would astonish and sadden us if we knew. For many people there is a kind of general malaise, a soul sickness, that overtakes them when they are frustrated (or frustrate themselves) from developing "the kingdom of the mind." An all too common phenomenon to practising psychiatrists and priests is the man or woman who is blocked from the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, the constant exercise of perhaps a once supple and lovely mind: to such an extent that the condition is beyond,malaise, it is neurotic, even pathological. Maslow writes angrily about the general depression of the body and the steady deterioration of the intellectual life of "intelligent people leading stupid lives in stupid jobs"; and tells of seeing Ctmany women, intelligent, prosperous, and unoccupied, slowly develop these same symptoms of intellectual inanition."

I recall a number of years ago mournfully watching the slow slide into wholly unnecessary senility of an elderly former schoolteacher in a London, Ontario, nursing home-the kind of nursing home where everything was clean, warm, safe, full of official smiles. This resident had, however, no visitors, no money, no books: the thought of books had never penetrated the acquisitive mind of the absentee owners. Here was a bright, normally curious woman only in her mid-70s, bravely trying to draw me or other visitors into conversation, in the room filled with bedridden (sometimes senile) old ladies. Her laughter, in this well-disposed prison, was nervous and uncertain even in the first days. Months later, in the terrible desert of her loneliness and the damming-up of her intelligence, she had become a taunting, increasingly senile shadow, not merely of the woman she might have been, but the woman she had been for years previously.

When Maslow set out to investigate what qualities mark the personality of the self-actualized adult,5 he and his associates studied the personality traits of hundreds of living and also "historical" persons who seemed to be, by their life activities, fully human, fully alive. What characteristics, then, seemed common among these people? (The following catalogue is my bwn prdcis of Maslow's list from Motivation and Personality.)

Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People:
a Study of Psychological Health

1. More efficient Perception of reality and more comfortable relations with it. Unusual.ability to detect the fake and the dishonest in personality. In all spheres can see concealed or confused realities more swiftly and more correctly than others. Good perception, much less tinged by wish, desire, prejudice, fear. They are comfortable with the unknown; actually seem to take a certain pleasure from dffficult decisions.

2. Acceptance (Self, Others, Nature). Not self-satisfied-but they accept their frailties without undue concern. They see human nature as it is, not as they would prefer it to be. They accept themselves and others at the healthy animal level, at higher levels also; they are the undisgusted. They're without pose and don't like pose in others (but accept it). They don't feel unnecessary guilt and shame. They feel badly about the discrepancies between what is and what may be.

3. Spontaneity. Keep up most of the conventions out of consideration for others; but are actually internally unconventional, spontaneous, natural. They make their issues over large matters, not the trivia of custom. They often feel like spies in a foreign land. Often they show their inner spontaneity; they're more truly "aware" than the weighted-down "adjusted."

4. Problem-Centring. They are problem-centred rather than ego-centred. They like compelling tasks that are not for small or petty and selfish ends. They seem to impart to colleagues a certain sense of larger horizons, sub specie aeternitatis, more serene, less fraught with worry.

5. The Quality of Detachment. the Need for Privacy. They like solitude and privacy more than the average do. They know the quality of "detachment. " They have a certain intrinsic dignity in the midst of misfortune. Their "detachment" is often interpreted by others as "coldness." Actually, even in misfortune they see the problem of the situation beyond or above that of ego or people. They can concentrate to an unusual degree (seemingly absent-minded).

6. Autonomy, Independence of Culture and Environment. These people are growth-motivated, not deficiency-motivated. Hence they are more independent of environment, more self-contained. Real self-development and real inner growth are more important to them than honors and status. (They must in many cases have had a lot of love and respect in childhood.)

7. Continued Freshness of Appreciation. They experience over and over again the same euphoria or ecstasy from beautiful things, people, scenes, relationships.

8. Mystic Experience; Oceanic Feeling. They have the frequent experience (including during sexual encounters) of "horizons opening": feelings of awe; feelings of disorientation with time and space-the person then being transformed and strengthened in his daily life.

9. Gemeinschaftsgefuhl. They have feelings for mankind of identification, sympathy, affection--desire to help the human race: "they are my brothers." This often brings great frustration and exasperation. Still the self-actualizing person maintains what Adler called "the older-brotherly" attitude.

10. Interpersonal Relations of the Self-Actualized. They are less ego bound, have deeper interpersonal relations than others. More fusion, more love (but often among themselves!). Kind or patient to almost everyone, they have few close friends-close friendship takes and demands time. They understand pomp and pettiness and meanness; don't condone them, don't like them, but understand them. When hostile, their hostility is situational, not character-based. They attract disciples but try to discourage them.

11. Democratic Character Structure. They are friendly with anyone of suitable character regardless of class, education, political belief, race, or color. These individuals, themselves é1ite, select élite people for their friends-but an élite of character, capacity, and talent rather than of birth, race, fame, power.

12. Means and Ends. They put their stress on ends; have moral standards. They do right, not wrong, but their "right" may not be conventional.

13. Philosophical, Unhostile Sense of Humor. They are addicted, not to slapstick, hostile humor, superiority humor, authority-rebellion humor but rather to humor that is spontaneous and helps produce perspectives.

14. Creativeness. The creativeness of the self-actualized is different from the "special talent" creativeness of the genius. Rather it is a special way of looking at life all their life: a fresh, even nalve way, similar to that of children. It is a creative attitude not killed by acculturation, and which promotes creativity as a life-style. Thus they often become trailbreakers for all others.

What has this description of the "self-actualized adult" got to do with the Ulyssean man or woman-the adventurer of the later adult years? Both much and not much, depending upon the view from your bridge. "Much" because to be self-actualized, Maslow-style, is also to realize Ulyssean attributes: for example, openness to experience, realistic appraisal and acceptance of others, ability to be solitary without be

ing unsocial, capacity to generate your own growth, and to rely on your own self-evaluation, rather than the imposed values of the world. The more you become self-actualized during the first five decades of your

life, the more potentiality you have to become Ulyssean in the later years. I

"Not much," perhaps, to the extent that the pure equability of attitude, style, and seeming performance of the Maslovian self-actualized adult presents an idealized state very different from the chaotic, sinsoaked, guilt-ridden, and fear-bedeviled personal arena in which great numbers of adult people live out their lives and still, by personal heroisms, become Ulysseans. Even on a less dramatic scale, the experience of middle and later adulthood is often composed of periods of consecutive or sustained turbulence: especially, in the late twentieth century, the turbulence of change.

For example, in January, 1971, Thomas Holmes, professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle, reported a study on the hazards of change to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Holmes was fascinated by the question: "Up to what load point can adult people efficiently handle the stress of change without breaking down?" Over a period of two years he and his associates carefully observed and recorded the many events causing change in the lives of 80 Seattle adults, and then attempted to correlate their personal-change histories with whatever physical and mental illnesses had occurred. There was a certain level of accumulation of changes and stress in individual lives, Holmes found, beyond which the human adult self could not go without danger to physical or mental health.

Holmes allotted a score of 50 points to the act of getting married, and then established various allotments for 38 other stress-creating life changes. He took advice on his list of scores from people in several countries who rated the change-event against the basic 50-point event of marriage. (See Chart 2.) He cited 300 points as the level at which an adult could not safely take on any further load, "good" or "bad." His theory is a strong reminder of the need for adults to inventory their continuing stress loads (his chart is, in a way, symbolic).

To return to, and close with, Maslow, his valuable portrait of the fully self-actualized adult, nonetheless fails to match the late Ulyssean life in one important sense. Ulysseanism implies, not only that you may indeed have prepared for it through the 50 or more preceding years of your life drama, but that you may have to begin where you are in your anxiety-filled, guilt-ridden arena of the self to start the Ulyssean process-and that such a start is possible. Maslow has an infuriating habit of separating the population radically into healthy or "intact" people, on the one hand, and "sick, neurotic people" on the other: "sick neurotic people make the wrong choices; they do not know what they want, and even when they do, have not courage enough to choose correctly," and so on. Enormously human and liberating as he is, Maslow does not pay sufficient attention to the unbelievable complexity of people's open and hidden existences; their struggles with Holmes's 39 life-change stresses; confused and mysterious potentialities; and half aborted neurotic tendencies that make up many of the lives of middle aged and older adults who may yet choose the Ulyssean way.

In fact, what holds back great numbers of later adults from Ulyssean adventures has little to do with neurotic fear. It is rather a fundamental lack of confidence, based on a gigantic misconception: that one's powers must steadily decline and increasingly lose the ability to cope with the challenge of creativity in the later years. To choose between the Good Life and Dark Life -yes, that is different. In North American society where institutional religion is largely pass6 among the young, those of us in our 40s and older who were schooled in it and (whatever our faith) in the Puritan ethic, still have the feeling in our bones that ethical recoveries and "better lives" late in the day are always possible. We understand the situation of the large, middle-aged, mild-spoken Montreal taxi-driver who said to me in the course of a long ride in the summer twilight: "When I was a child of darkness, before I became a child of light. . . " He astonished and intrigued me with his appearance and style, but I had no problem accepting his premise and his situation- nor would many readers of this book.

But to actualize and continue the creativity of the self, to maintain the productivity of mind and hand- this for many is quite a different matter. As the self enters the later stages of its long journey through life, it does not have to lose heart. Although -we live at a time and in a society where powerful influences converge to undermine and often sweep away the confidence that is indispensable to people of all ages, adults in their later years must learn to reject the myth of loss of power to learn, to create, and to produce. They need not become bystanders and onlookers in the amphitheatre of active life.

[ Chapter 1 ] [ Chapter 2 ] [ Chapter 3 ] [ Chapter 4 ] [ Chapter 5 ] [ Chapter 6 ] [ Chapter 7 ] [ Chapter 8 ] [ Chapter 9 ] [ Chapter Notes ] [ Selected Bibliography ]