Broken Dreams
An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
The midlife crisis has become a cliché in modern society. Since the mid-twentieth century, the term has been used to explain infidelity in middle-aged men, disillusionment with personal achievements, the pain and sadness associated with separation and divorce, and the fear of approaching death. This book provides a meticulously researched account of the social and cultural conditions in which middle-aged men and women began to reevaluate their hopes and dreams, reassess their relationships, and seek new forms of identity and fresh pathways to self-satisfaction. Drawing on a rich seam of literary, medical, media, and cinematic sources, as well as personal accounts, Broken Dreams explores how the crises of middle-aged men and women were shaped by increased life expectancy, changing family structures, shifting patterns of work, and the rise of individualism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Medical historian Jackson (The Age of Stress) examines in this thought-provoking scholarly study the social and cultural factors that made the midlife crisis "a key feature of private lives and public debate" in the mid-20th century. Though Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques coined the term in a 1965 research paper, Jackson identifies antecedents in Carl Jung's theories on the stages of life and in "Gauguin syndrome," which referred to the French artist's abandonment of his wife, children, and career in his mid-30s. But in the post-WWII era, Jackson argues, longer life expectancies, changing gender roles, the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, and economic liberalism's "insistence on self-realization and self-fulfilment regardless of the impact on others," among other factors, gave rise to the idea that middle age was a period of crisis. He examines the phenomenon in medicine, psychology, literature (the Rabbit novels by John Updike), and film (The Seven Year Itch), and documents how Gail Sheehy's 1974 book Passages "challeng men's ownership of the midlife crisis." The scholarly prose can be slow-going, but Jackson's expansive range and nuanced readings of popular culture more than make his case. This is a pinpoint dissection of an influential if slippery concept.
