1996], claimed to find similar patterns of development). In cooperation
with these subjects, the researchers wrote a biography for each man thatfocused on changes in what Levinson called the life structure . The life
structure includes personality , but it also includes career, marriage,other relationships, values, and so on. According to the scheme workedout by these writers, adult life is divided into fixed and age-relatedstages. After the early career beginnings comes a period of reassessmentat the age-30 transition. A much more searching reassessment comes atthe midlife transition at age 40. In this period, often characterized as amidlife crisis, there is a period of inner turmoil that, according toLevinson, often seems to resemble neurosis. Dreams and aspirationsthat the young man had repressed in dealing with the realities of start -
ing a career now come to the fore, and often a new career is launched
that better addresses the long-denied needs.
Gould, whose version of adult development is more closely tied to
personality , devised a version of psychoanalytic thought to explain thechanges he thought he saw in adults. At the heart of the theory is thebasic insecurity of the child, faced with the uncertainties and dangers ofthe world. To cope with these fears, the child adopts a set of beliefs thatGould called illusions of safety. Thus, children believe that their parents
will always be there to take care of them; that there is no real evil ordeath in the world; that life is simple and controllable. Each of these il-lusions is comforting to the child, but each leads the adult to a distortedview of the world. Over the course of early adulthood, individuals mustcome to terms with these beliefs and abandon them to find a more real -
istic view of the world.
Gould considers that these illusions of safety , like psychodynamic
defenses, are unconscious. Young adults are unaware that they assumethat parents will always be there to help—in fact, they may explicitlydeny such a belief. But, says Gould, they will act as if they harboredthese delusions, and that is the key to the action of unconscious forces.Becoming an adult, attaining full adult consciousness, depends on out -
growing these illusions: a painful but salutary process. There is, accord -
ing to Gould, a regular sequence in which the illusions are tackled and
thus a rough correspondence to age, but there are fewer chronologicalabsolutes in his system than in Levinson’s.
Perhaps the most ambitious new theory of lifespan development is
called SOC, for selection, optimization, and compensation (P . B. Baltes,
1997). This theory describes how individuals react to the opportunitiesFacts and Theories of Adult Development 17