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.

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.

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.

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 25 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. If what you have read here feels familiar, a first consultation is simply a confidential, no-obligation conversation to understand what is happening and whether this is the right approach for you. You can arrange an initial consultation to talk it through.

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.