Quadrant: The Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation

Seasoned Reflections on Midlife Transition: A Quadrant Interview with Aryeh Maidenbaum and Daniel Levinson — Lenore Thomson Bentz

This October, the C. G. Jung Foundation will open the Center for Midlife Development, a continuing education project designed to help people grapple with the changes and issues that come into play in the middle years of adult life. Several years have gone into the development of this project, with preliminary footwork on structure and curriculum done by a team of educators, psychologists, career counselors and group therapists under the guidance of Dr. Aryeh Maidenbaum, executive director of the Foundation. Dr. Daniel Levinson, psychologist and author of the best-selling The Seasons of a Man's Life was one of the consultants on this project. Quadrant recently spoke with Drs. Maidenbaum and Levinson about the concept of midlife and the aims and structure of the Center for Midlife Development. …

Aching in the Places Where We Used to Play: A Jungian Approach to Midlife Change — Jeffrey Burke Satinover and Lenore Thomson Bentz

For the last forty years, our cultural vocabulary has been dominated by the concerns and sentiments of the so-called baby-boomer generation. Rather predictably, as this unusually large cohort approaches middle age, the concept of “midlife crisis” has become a media cliché. From “The Wonder Years” to City Slickers and Grand Canyon, our films, plays, novels, and TV programs are veering somewhere between idealized nostalgia and the impassioned self-analysis of their fortysomething creators, but resolution, if any, is hard-won and offers little satisfaction. …

Midlife and the Spirituality of the Child — Janice Brewi and Anne Brennan

“I fee adrift,” she said, “I feel like my life has been cancelled. Everything to which I ever gave myself was a lie and a deception. How could I have been such a fool and for so long?” She is a composite of innumerable women and men in the passageway from the light of the first half of life, with its meanings, values, and goals, into the dark wood, the dark night of the soul that so often initiates a person into midlife. This is the crisis of negative feelings that so often marks the beginning of midlife transition. …

The Demon-Lover at Midlife — John R. Haule

In my practice of analysis I have been struck by the extent to which the issues of midlife transition cluster around anima or animus figures that manifest significant pathology. Usually the individual undergoing transition has demonstrated no small degree of stability and achievement in the first half of life, not that problems haven't been swept under the rug or seemingly outgrown. I am reminded, for example, of two fortyish men, each of whom, upon the failure of an erotic involvement that had meant a great deal, began to dream of having to do battle with gangs of young boys. … Further investigation revealed that the foolishness, immaturity, and fear they had felt as youngsters had recently — after two or three decades of dormancy — reappeared both in their erotic relationships and their professional lives. …

Desperation — Timothy Butler

There is a tale that is told sometimes during sesshin, the intensive retreat that forms the core of Zen training. The story involves a monk who has practiced zazen ardently for years but has failed to come to a kensho, or initial opening experience. He is desperate. The young man conceals a knife in his robe and lights a stick of incense. If he does not gain insight by the time the stick burns out, he vows to kill himself. He assumes the lotus position and the intensity of his sitting soaks him in perspiration as he loses himself in samhadi, holding the incense in hand. The burn to his fingers as the stick is extinguished brings a realization that allows him to live. …

Midlife, Gay Men, and the AIDS Epidemic — Robert H. Hopcke

For those familiar with Jung's psychology, it seems a bit strange to think there ever was a time when “developmental psychology” referred mostly to youth and adolescence and only a nodding glance was given to “adult development.” That the scope of psychological interest has since been widened in the field as a whole to include the entire life's course can be attributed in large measure to Jung's ongoing investigations into the psychology of what he came to call “the second half of life.” In Jung's view, the first half of life is concerned mostly with the building up of the ego's adaptation to the external world, usually via the persona, whereas the second half is a more typically introverted time of life, when the focus of the ego turns to matters more transcendent, more archetypal, more spiritual in some instances. …

The Death and Rebirth of Values at Midlife — Larry Gates

Jack Lucas, a character in the recent movie, The Fisher King, is a big-city disk jockey at the peak of his career. He is one day away from a deal that will put both his face and voice before the public. Full of himself, he rehearses the line that he will speak: “Forgive me! Forgive me!” Then a newscast changes everything. …

Aniela Jaffé (1903–1991): In Memoriam — Robert Hinshaw

The gentle and unobtrusive nature of Aniela Jaffé, who died last October at the age of eighty-eight, was perhaps her most prominent characteristic, and yet this fragile, modest, and shy woman probably had a greater influence on the development of Jungian psychology than any other individual, short of its originator. …

Jole Cappiello McCurdy: In Recollection — Beverly D. Zabriskie

Jole died in May, but she had known of her pancreatic cancer since the fall of 1989. For eighteen months she faced it, withstood it, and outlasted its usual course with the same all-embracing ferocity that had marked her life.

Jole did not want to die. Her illness came as an astonishing, unsynchronous invasion at a moment of fullness in her life. The only sense in this most senseless occurrence was that the relentless fierceness of her illness matched the acute passion with which Jole first created and then transcended the circumstances of her life. …

Book Reviews

Sisyphus – The Old Stone a New Way: A Jungian Approach to Midlife Crisis — Verena Kast. Daimon Verlag. 1991. Reviewed by Dolores Elise Brien.

Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity — Guy Corneau. Shambhala Publications, Inc. 1991. Reviewed by James Hollis.

Woman's Mysteries and The Way of All Women: Ancient and Modern — Esther Harding. C. G. Jung Foundation / Shambhala Publications, Inc. 1990. Reviewed by Jay Sherry.

The Child and Depth Psychology and a New Ethic — Erich Neumann. C. G. Jung Foundation / Shambhala Publications, Inc. 1990. Reviewed by Jay Sherry.

The Still Good Hand of God: The Magic and Mystery of the Unconscious Mind — Michael Gellert. Nicholas-Hays, Inc. 1991. Reviewed by Malcolm Spicer.

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