evokes tumultuous struggles within the self and the external world” (p.
199) that may appear like neurosis to an outside observer.
These ideas have become so prevalent in both the popular and the
scientific press that most people take it for granted that around age 40there is a marked increase in such events as divorce and separation, sui -
cide, job change, and admission to psychiatric hospitals. But epidemi -
ologists who have scrutinized the figures on this issue find very little
support for a period of crisis (M. Kramer & Rednick, 1976). Divorce ismost common in the 20s; suicide is most common among the youngand the old. Admissions to psychiatric hospitals show no peak at age40. Still, these are all very rough markers of crisis; perhaps the midlifetransition leads to more subtle manifestations.
When Levinson, Gould, and others were first presenting their
views on adult development in the early and middle 1970s, the case forstability in personality had not yet been made. The midlife crisis hadbeen pointed out so often that we, like most other psychologists, as-sumed that it occurred. The major question, we thought, was to deter-mine its exact timing. Was it between 37 and 40 or between 40 and 45?Was the time different for working-class and middle-class men? Weused our usual questionnaire methods to try to find an answer. Drawingon the literature describing the characteristics and concerns of men atmidlife and the items that Gould (1972) had reported to differentiatepatients of different ages, with Madeline Cooper we created a MidlifeCrisis Scale and administered it to about 350 men aged 30 to 60 (Coo-per, 1977). The scale had items covering sense of meaninglessness, dis -
satisfaction with job and family , inner turmoil and confusion, and sense
of impending physical decline and death.
When we contrasted midlife groups with pre- and postmidlife
groups, using various age cutoffs to define the midlife, we were sur -
prised to find no evidence at all of a peaking of midlife concerns at any
age in our range. We had also asked our men to describe in their ownwords how their lives were going just then. Only seven men (about 2%)seemed to fit the category of crisis, and these ranged in age from 34 to56, distributed randomly over the age range we studied. Our conclu -
sion: At any given time, only a small percentage of men are in a crisis,
and they are not likely to cluster at any particular age.
Since this conclusion flew in the face of the rest of the literature,
our first concern was to replicate it. With a different group of about 300men, we used a shortened version of the Midlife Crisis Scale. The re -The Personal Interview 179