Midlife Crisis

Midlife: transition, crisis, and the Jungian perspective

The midlife crisis has a reputation as a cliche, the sports car, the affair, the sudden reinvention. The cliche is there because the phenomenon is real: something genuinely difficult tends to happen in the middle of life, a disruption of the self-concept and the life structure that can produce symptoms ranging from mild dissatisfaction to severe depression. Jung wrote extensively about this period and described it as one of the most psychologically significant transitions in adult development.

It is worth being accurate about where the idea comes from, because almost nothing written about it is. The phrase midlife crisis was coined in 1965 by the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, in a paper called Death and the Mid-Life Crisis. The thinking underneath it is older and it is Jung’s: in The Stages of Life, written around 1930, he argued that the afternoon of life cannot be lived on the programme of the morning, and that the second half has a different task from the first. Jaques named it. Jung explained it.

The Jungian understanding of midlife is not about crisis for its own sake. It is about the fact that the identity constructed in the first half of life (the persona, the professional role, the external scaffolding of who one appears to be) is necessarily partial. It was built from available materials, which inevitably meant excluding much of the actual self. The pressure that builds in midlife is the pressure of the excluded self attempting to be heard: the life unlived, the capacities undeveloped, the questions deferred.

Not, first of all, a question of age

In the common imagination, the midlife crisis is the man who buys a big motorbike and leaves his family for a younger woman. The clinical reality is quite different, and it is not, first of all, a matter of age. What sets itself in motion is the meeting of the self with its own mortality. It can strike someone young, brutally confronted with death: the loss of someone close, an illness, an accident that passes close by. Suddenly the illusion of being eternal cracks, and the crisis opens. When life has run without too much drama, the same realisation comes later, towards the end of the thirties or the start of the forties. You wake one morning with a pain in your back, a few grey hairs, and understand, for the first time truly, that you are ageing and that one day you will die. That is where the crisis begins.

The bereavement nobody names

Here is the part that is almost always missed, and it is why this passage gets handled so badly so often.

A midlife crisis is a bereavement. Not as a figure of speech.

Something really does die, and it is not youth, or not only youth. What dies is a version of yourself: the one who was still going to do the other things. The man who might yet have played music seriously, moved abroad, started the company rather than run a department. The woman who might still have had another child, or the first one. These were not fantasies. They were live possibilities, a self was quietly organised around them, and somewhere between forty and fifty they stop being available.

Nobody holds a funeral for that person. There is no ritual, no acknowledgement and no permission to mourn, because from the outside nothing has happened. The job is fine. The marriage is fine. Nobody has died.

But it is real grief and it behaves like grief. It produces the flatness, the irritability, the tears at something trivial, the loss of interest in what used to work, and the strong sense of being a stranger inside your own life. Those are not evidence of a defect of character. That is mourning, presenting without an object anyone will recognise — including the person doing it.

And because it is not recognised as grief, it does not get grieved. It gets acted on. The affair, the resignation, the motorbike, the sudden departure: these are almost always attempts to reverse the loss rather than mourn it. Which is precisely why they work so briefly, and why the relief tends to have a shelf life of about eighteen months.

The rebirth, which will not start first

The other half of this is real, and it is genuinely good. People do come out of this more themselves than they have ever been. That is Jung’s entire argument about the second half of life: the task changes, and the new task is better than the one it replaces. Not building an identity but inhabiting one. Not proving, but choosing. Not the hero, but something quieter and considerably more useful to everyone around him.

But it does not start until the first part has been done.

That is the single most important sentence on this page. The rebirth is on the far side of the bereavement, not instead of it. Every attempt to skip straight to the new life without mourning the old one produces the same outcome: a person who has changed everything on the outside and finds the identical emptiness waiting for them in the new arrangement, now with a divorce and a smaller pension attached to it.

Which is why the passage is worth taking seriously, and usually worth taking with help. Not because it is an illness. It is not — it is a normal developmental transition and very probably a necessary one. It is because people reliably mishandle it in one specific way: they act at the exact moment they should be feeling, and the decisions taken in the middle of it are frequently irreversible.

Done properly, the second half is the better half. That is not a consolation offered to make anyone feel better; it is what I have watched happen for twenty-five years. But it sits on the other side of a grief that nobody tells you is a grief.

What people actually bring

It is very rare for someone to come through my door saying, “I am going through a midlife crisis.” That is not how it presents. People come, in their late thirties or forties, with the sense that a big decision is waiting, to leave a partner, to leave a job, or with a duller unease: nothing dramatic, life going on as usual, yet strangely hard to carry, without their knowing why. The life they patiently built no longer seems to fit. Often the right word is dissatisfaction: not a collapse, but an existence “as usual” that has become heavy. They have passed all the milestones, the house, the car, the position, the marriage, the children, and a question remains: is this all?

The twenties, lived or unlived

There is also the question of the twenties. Those years are often a car crash: lived intensely, sometimes to excess, sometimes in things one will later have to go back over and understand. Those who did not live that intensity often meet it again, more violently, in their forties, and it is in them that the clichés resurface: the big car, the motorbike, the younger woman, the sudden wish to begin everything again. Unlived intensity always ends by demanding its due.

The midlife crisis in men

In men the crisis rarely announces itself. It arrives disguised as something else, and the disguise is usually a behaviour rather than a feeling.

The drinking that was social becomes structural. The training becomes compulsory. The work that was demanding becomes a place to be rather than a thing to do. An affair begins, which is very often less about the other person than about wanting to feel alive in a body that has started reporting its age. Almost none of this is experienced as a crisis of meaning. It is experienced as being tired, or bored, or as somebody else’s fault.

There is a reason for the disguise. A man in his forties has usually spent twenty years building an identity out of competence, provision and self-sufficiency, and that construction had to exclude a great deal: the emotional life, the need for other people, the parts of him that were not useful for the task. The midlife pressure is largely those excluded parts arriving at once, and they have no acceptable language. So they present as a symptom instead, because a symptom is something a man is allowed to have.

This is why the useful question is rarely the one being asked. Not should I leave, but what is this asking me to face. Where drinking has become part of the picture, that is worth addressing directly rather than waiting, and the alcohol work sits alongside rather than instead of the larger question. Where the pressure is concentrated in the role itself, the territory is work with senior professionals, where the function and the man both have to be held. Where it has landed in the marriage, couples work is often what makes the individual work possible.

The men who come through this well are generally not the ones who acted fastest. They are the ones who managed to sit with it long enough to find out what it was about before deciding anything irreversible.

Women, and the menopause

For many women, this passage forms around the menopause. An immense chapter closes, that of fertility and of possible motherhood, and with it comes an acute awareness of passing time. Here too it is mortality that surfaces, and the question of what really matters now. One figure recurs often in my consulting room: the very high-level woman, in banking, in business, the partner, the great decision-maker, who arrives in her forties without having had a child. The realisation strikes her with particular force, because that possibility is now closed. Behind the success surfaces a bare question: what, now, is my role? What will carry the meaning that the career, on its own, did not suffice to give?

A crisis of meaning

The midlife crisis is, at bottom, a crisis of meaning. We live by a succession of meanings: at one time the meaning of life was to earn a diploma, to pass the driving test, to learn a language, to start a family, small meanings, right for their season. Midlife comes to say that these no longer suffice, and that a larger one has to be found: a way of living, and of experiencing life, that has more meaning. This is why spirituality so often invites itself at precisely this moment.

What midlife disturbance can look like

The phenomenology is various. Depression that appears without obvious external cause. A sudden dissatisfaction with a career or relationship that has been satisfying until now. Increased preoccupation with mortality. A sense of fraudulence, that the identity one has constructed is not actually who one is. Physical restlessness. A pull toward something that cannot be named. In men in particular, this often involves a confrontation with dimensions of the inner life (emotional vulnerability, relatedness, the world of feeling) that have been systematically excluded in the construction of a professionally successful masculine identity.

Why do I feel nothing any more

This is the single most common way people describe it, and it frightens them more than sadness would.

Not misery. Absence. No feeling for a partner who has done nothing wrong, none for work that used to matter, none for things that reliably produced pleasure for twenty years. People assume it means the marriage is over, or that something has broken permanently in them.

It rarely means either. Emotional flatness of this kind is almost never an absence of feeling. It is the cost of holding a large quantity of feeling out of awareness — the mourning described above, and usually a good deal that was set aside decades earlier because there was no room for it. Suppression is not selective. A person who has spent twenty years not feeling the difficult things has generally lost access to the pleasant ones as well, and midlife is when the bill for that arrives.

It comes back, in my experience fairly reliably, and often faster than people expect. But it comes back in the order it went away, which means the first thing to return is usually not joy. It is grief, or anger. That is not a sign the work is going badly. It is the sign it has started.

The stages of a midlife crisis

There is no official set of stages, and any page presenting a tidy numbered sequence is inventing it. What there is, is a recognisable shape, and most people can locate themselves on it.

Disquiet. Nothing is wrong and something is wrong. Usually dismissed as tiredness, or stress, or a bad patch, for anywhere between one and five years.

The intrusion of mortality. A death, a diagnosis, a birthday, a parent needing care, a body that has begun reporting its age. The abstract fact of dying becomes a personal one.

Questioning. The structures come under review — work, marriage, where you live, what any of it was for. This is where the sense of fraudulence tends to appear.

Acting, or feeling. The fork, and the whole outcome turns on it. Some people act: the affair, the resignation, the sudden reinvention. Some manage to stay with it long enough to find out what it is about. The first route is much more comfortable for about eighteen months and much worse afterwards.

Grief. Only if the fork went the right way. This is the part nobody warns you about and the part that does the actual work.

Reconstruction. A life rebuilt around what actually matters now rather than what mattered at twenty-five. Frequently the most creative period of a person’s life.

The stages are not clean and people move backwards through them. But the fork is real, and it is the point at which help makes the largest difference.

Am I having a midlife crisis, or am I depressed?

They overlap, they can produce one another, and the distinction matters clinically.

Depression is a condition with recognised diagnostic features, and where it is present it should be treated as such. A midlife crisis is a developmental transition — it is not in any diagnostic manual and it is not an illness.

The useful clinical question is what the low mood is carrying. Depression arriving in midlife without an obvious external cause very often carries a question about meaning rather than being a purely biochemical event. Treating the mood and leaving the question untouched tends not to hold, which is one reason people in this age group so often report that antidepressants helped and did not quite work.

Where both are present, both are addressed. Where there is risk, that comes first. If you are struggling to function, or having thoughts of harming yourself, that is a reason to speak to your GP as well as to a therapist, and there is no version of this where waiting is the better option.

The marriage, and the affair

A great many midlife crises arrive in a consulting room disguised as a relationship problem, and a good number of them genuinely become one.

The affair, when it happens, is usually less about the other person than people assume, and less about sex than the participants say. It is most often an attempt to feel alive inside a body that has started reporting its age, and to be seen by somebody who does not know the diminished version. It is, in other words, an attempt to reverse the bereavement rather than to feel it — which is why it so seldom survives contact with ordinary life, and why leaving for the affair partner is one of the most reliably disappointing decisions available at this age.

None of which means the marriage is necessarily right. Some marriages genuinely have ended, and midlife is when that becomes undeniable. The distinction between a marriage that is over and a marriage that is carrying the weight of an unmourned life is not always obvious from inside it, and it is very difficult to make while an affair is running.

What can be said with some confidence: almost nobody regrets having waited six months before making an irreversible decision, and a great many people regret not having done.

How long does a midlife crisis last?

There is no fixed duration and anyone offering a number is guessing.

What the duration depends on is not severity but whether the grief gets done. Crossed alone and in avoidance, this can run for years and in some cases becomes a permanent settlement — a person who never quite re-engages with their own life. Worked with, it is usually a passage of one to three years, of which the acute part is considerably shorter.

The variable is not how bad it is. It is whether anybody is holding the other end.

As difficult as adolescence, and with far less help

The most useful comparison for this passage is the one almost nobody makes: adolescence.

Structurally they are the same event. An identity that worked stops working. The body changes and stops being reliable. Mood becomes volatile and out of proportion. Everything previously settled — what you believe, what you want, who you are for — comes back up for review at once. And there is a powerful pull towards decisions that are dramatic, urgent and irreversible.

The difference is not the difficulty. It is the scaffolding.

An adolescent has a great deal of it. Everyone around them is going through the same thing at the same time. Parents, schools and an entire culture expect the turbulence, have a name for it, and make allowances. Nobody is surprised. And most of the mistakes are recoverable, because at seventeen there is time.

A man or woman of forty-seven has none of that. Everyone around them depends on their being the stable one — that is the role, and it is held up by a mortgage, a marriage, a team at work, ageing parents and children who need them not to be doing this. There is no cultural permission and no expectation of turbulence. There is a joke about sports cars. So it is gone through alone, largely in secret, and usually in the belief that nobody else has ever felt like this.

And the decisions are not recoverable in the way a seventeen-year-old’s are. Marriages end. Businesses are sold. Twenty-year careers are resigned from in an afternoon. At this age the cost of getting it wrong is counted in decades.

Which is the honest argument for not doing it alone. Nobody seriously suggests an adolescent should navigate adolescence with no adults anywhere near them. This is the same order of transition, with higher stakes, less time and far less support — and in my experience the people who come through it well are almost never the ones who moved fastest. They are the ones who had somewhere to think out loud before they did anything irreversible.

From the hero to the wise old man

This is where the crisis, well crossed, becomes a passage. The first half of life is a heroic quest: to build, to conquer, to assert. The second can be something else, no longer the hero but the wise old man, the one who, having made his way, puts himself at the service of the generation to come. The energy a young man must master in the first half of life becomes, in the second, the question of meaning, the two halves of one arc. On the first, see the Kronos energy.

The crisis of the fifties

The same passage often returns, differently, a decade later. At fifty the drivers sharpen: hormonal change and waning energy, the professional peak from which the only visible direction is down, children leaving, parents ageing, and a new preoccupation with legacy and with what remains of the dreams. Many arrive nostalgic for their youth, having, as they themselves come to feel, spent their life accumulating money and now wishing to spend it buying their youth back; it is the age of the great career fantasy, the banker who wants to become a yoga teacher.

A large part of the work at this stage is grief: grieving the dreams, the goals and the expectations, whether one is proud of what was achieved or disappointed by it, in order to become able to do something with what is, and then to come back home within oneself and find a different meaning, purpose and energy for the rest of the life.

Therapy for midlife transition

Jungian analytic work is well suited to midlife precisely because it takes this kind of questioning seriously rather than treating it as a symptom to be resolved. The work is not to muzzle the moment, nor to give in to its clichés, which sometimes run against everything one has built. It is to accompany the passage: to cross the anxiety, hear what it asks, and help find the project, often more inward, of this new phase of life. What one discovers, on the other side, is not lost youth. It is a life finally inhabited by what, for oneself, truly has meaning. This is often the most creatively and psychologically productive work a person undertakes.

You can also read more about how Jungian analysis works at The Jungian Confrerie, or about Jungian analysis at this practice.

Working through midlife, in London or online

Dr Philippe Jacquet has worked with midlife transition for over twenty-five years, in person at Harley Street and online by secure video, in English and French, so this work is open to you wherever you live.

Most people who come do not arrive saying they are having a midlife crisis. They arrive because something has become hard to carry and a decision is waiting. That is the right moment to talk — before the decision, rather than in the wreckage afterwards.

Further reading

Themes that often sit alongside a midlife crisis: male depression, which frequently presents as irritability and withdrawal rather than sadness; burnout in men; and the male loneliness epidemic, which is usually the quiet condition underneath the rest.

On the behaviour that so often carries it: the affair as symptom, and the functioning alcoholic, for when the drinking has become the way the question is being managed.

Part of the series One Energy, a Whole Life - masculine development across a lifespan.

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